the Panopticon

       The Panopticon was a kind of prison designed by late eighteenth/early nineteenth
century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, which was never actually built.
      The arcitecture of Bentham's Panopticon was created to allow watchmen to look
at all his prisoners without the prisoners knowing whether or not they were being observed,
making them feel as if they were being constantly watched by an omniscient being.
      In other words, everyone in the Panopticon knew they could be watched at all times, so
in the end, only minimal watching actually needed to happen. The Panopticon would create a sense
of paranoia so pervasive that it's inhabitants became almost self-governing.
      In the book 'Discipline and Punish' Michael Foucault uses the idea of the Panopticon as a
metaphor for modern Western society and its emphasis on normalization and observation.
Meaning, we live our lives in places that operate like the Panopticon. Schools. Hospitals.

Factories. Office buildings. Even the streets of the city.

Someone is watching you.

Or, someone is probably watching you.

Or, you feel like someone is watching you.

So you follow the rules whether someone's watching you or not.

     You start to think that whomever is watching you is larger than life. That the watcher knows stuff about you that you've never told anyone. Even if the watcher is a total stranger on the street.

      It's a systematic paranoia. Like, when you double dip and you have that creepy sense that everyone knows you double dipped, even though you did it a week ago and there's no evidence whatsoever.

      Or when you're alone in your house, and you go to use the toilet and lock the door behind you anyway.

Another example: You're alone in your room and you pick your nose. And you can hear your grandmother telling your slimy, nose-picking self  to use a tissue.

And that horrible queen-bee popular girl--you can hear her nasty voice back in the 3rd grade when she caught you wiping a booger on the underside of your desk, caling you 'booger-eater' for the rest of the year, even though you obviously weren't eating your boogers if you were wiping them on the desk.

       So it's not that you either pick your nose because you want to pick it, or you don't pick your nose because it's germy. It's that you are having a mental conversation with all the forces that could be watching you and condemning you for your nose-picking (potential or actual)--even though rationally you know that noone can see you.

That's the Panopticon.