The Panopticon

I recently read a book that mentioned something called the panopticon. I don’t know if anyone knows what that is but basically it’s a type of building design that was created by the Jeremy Bentham. The layout of the building was designed so that a single watchman could observe the inmates of a prison without the inmates being able to tell if they were being watched. The idea that at any moment they could be watched would make the inmates behave constantly.

            Bentham created a design that could manipulate people into behaving because of the paranoia it set in that an authoritative figure would always be watching. As a result, only minimal watching needed to happen solely because of this idea that they could be watched at all times. The inmates would basically become self-governing, hardly needing any authority at all. In the book I read, the main character compared her boarding school to the panopticon, stating that everyone followed the rules because they felt like someone would somehow know if they didn’t, no matter how impossible. For example, the students were not allowed to leave campus, a rule that everyone followed despite the fact that the only thing stopping them from leaving was a low stonewall. This idea of always being watched also affected how they interacted socially with one another.

            “Someone is watching you. Or, someone is probably watching you. Or you feel like someone’s watching you. So you follow the rules whether someone is watching you or not” (Lockhart).

            This idea can definitely apply to many of my everyday thoughts and I think it can be applied to a lot of social situations. For example, maybe I don’t take that extra cookie from Commons after dinner because somehow someone will know that I already had one at lunch. Obviously that’s an extreme example and it wouldn’t be breaking any rules, but still I would be manipulated by the idea of someone seeing me.

            Basically this asks the question whether we follow rules (social or other) because we just think we should, or because we have this idea that someone would know if we didn’t.