The risks of a panopticon society

Judging is inevitable, we all tend to judge in our lives in order to make decisions. Every decision individuals take is based on judgements. But what would happen if the society becomes a panopticon society, a society where there is no distinction between public and private life, where the individuals are judged for every single private decision they take?

There are many tools in the world that risks to turn the society into a something that dangerous. The dictatorial regimes and distant close minded rural places have both the same thing in common: they tend to become panopticon societies. Places where there is no distinction between private and public life. Your outcome and career in such places can easily depend on anything you do. I mean ‘anything you do’ literally: how you behave with your friends, how much friends you have, what hobbies you have, how you behave in your family and even how you behave in your own home. Your results in work depend on anything you do, simply because the society would judge anything you do. In fact, in such places there wasn’t very much progress. Western civilization’s economy progressed through the concept of cities and especially the expansion of cities. This is true in every country: in cities people search for success and career. Something no one has considered is that one of the reasons why something like that happens is because the city would allow for a level of privacy that a small rural town cannot. In the city people work for their future and their career without being worried about what people think about everything they do in their private lives. Something like that is not possible in a small town. In a small town someone might be judged as too egoistic or a misfit, and this would destroy his future perspectives and potential. It is known to history that many important men who brought the enlightenment and progress to humanity weren’t perfect in their private lives. And it is known that many of such men suffered and were condemned because of some ‘irregular’ behavior. But society was enough open minded to allow for the progress that happened. If society had been even more open minded, there could had been even more progress. In fact, the progress of Western civilization is obviously linked with ‘open-mindness’: Western societies are more open minded than non-Western societies, and now they in generally are more open minded and tolerant than 200 years ago. Now we may even consider as a mistake to judge the career and work of a public figure by his private and personal issues.

But because of the Internet and surveillance this change might shift: we may turn into a reality where every city, even the most open minded and progressed, turns into a judgemental small town. That would mean that the entire society would look like a totalitarian country, where your future and career depends on anything you do, even on anything you do privately at home, like the way you eat, the way you talk, the way you relate to your family. In a society like that, progress is difficult to happen. All the bright philosophers and scientists who brought progress and enlightenment to humanity were somehow strange in their private life, and different from the norm. Fortunately, they didn’t have to abide to all the career rules and career concepts that today researchers have to abide.

In our society data and statistics are ruling everything. If statistics rules that means the median rules. Companies are Universities are obsessed with the concept of predicting the future of an individual based on the average results of all the people. We are all obsessed about finding a rule to success, a rule to progress, a rule to innovation, even a rule to something unexpectable like a new important idea or invention. If the majority of people who made a certain type of success are disciplined or have imagination, we search for people who are disciplined or have imagination. We do not fully understand that we ourselves are making that thing happen because of our beliefs in the rule. This may get even worse in many other cases: we might find out that people who have a head with a certain shape are smarter than average. Therefore, we will end up hiring such kind of people for high value jobs, therefore, those people will necessarily become smarter because of the responsibility that is required to them. At the end, this occurrence will reinforce the pattern even more, until only people with the head of a certain shape are allowed to that job. This phenomenon is a very common phenomenon that has always happened all the time in the history of humanity, it is a self-occurring prediction. The purpose of data is evaluation and judgement, and this sort of reminds me of bigoted communities. In a bigoted small town it is common for people to say things like “this guy is too strange and lonely, he is not going to achieve anything in life”. The way the community reasons is not that different from the way a big company human resources reason. In the case of human resources, they would say “this guy didn’t get good grades, therefore he won’t achieve fast learning”. It is well known that many people achieved success after they left their small hometown where nobody believed in them. Even though, that’s a pattern too. What if the truth is there is no rule to success, brilliance, progress? Because the Universe is an alive being and in this alive being anything could happen. We have become so obsessed about data and pattern findings that we are not even able to digest life anymore, maybe we are not even able to accept life anymore: to accept that life is just something unpredictable, and that’s why we live it. If it weren’t, we would be dead. Maybe this way of defining society and the future is not sane: maybe it is just a mental illness. Any psychologist from the last Century would define such view of reality as a pathological. Yet now it is the normality. Because even the concepts of what is sane and what is insane are defined by the median: they are based on a rule of the majority. I even read that some psychologists defined the desire of bringing progress to humanity as a pathology: the desire of doing something great and important as a mental illness. Because that’s not common for many people, who only think about surviving and their families, so if you don’t do the same, you are not ‘mentally sane’.

The phenomenon of self-occurring prediction might become even more common than it already is, and therefore it might decrease the level of progress of humanity. But the level of the progress might be decreased far more if the calculation of data insinuates inside our private lives. What if we end up being judged by every private thing we do, even in our private lives? What if a ruling elite ends up deciding our future based on everything we do as in a totalitarian society like North Korea? It is difficult to imagine a brilliant person or an unconventional thinker surviving a place like North Korea. What if we end up in a situation where the elites themselves are too judgemental? And all-deciding judgemental elite cannot easily allow for any important progress to happen. They would judge people for everything they do, even for what they do in their private lives, the way they eat, the way they behave with their friends. Imagine that one could become the new Newton or Immanuel Kant, but it doesn’t happen because he ends-up being judged for futile things he does in his life: maybe he wasn’t altruistic enough with his friends, maybe he behaved a bit rude with his parents. Imagine if such elite could have the power to define the future and career of such person, there wouldn’t be new important philosophers, thinkers, scientists anymore. For many reasons, the elite was quite never more judgemental than the common people, because they had the possibility to travel and learn more. But now everyone has the possibility to travel and learn, so this shift might change. An elite that is more close-minded than the average people will definitely harm progress, as the Islamic Revolution in Iran harmed the country after its occurrence.