The Social Panopticon
“You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”
On the remote island of Jura, engulfed by rolling Scottish hills and thrashing waves, George Orwell’s creative output couldn’t have been further removed from his surroundings. As he wrote, slowly dying of tuberculosis, he envisioned a totalitarian world that he would never live to see. The devastation of the Second World War, the isolation of the Iron Curtain, and the emergence of a bipolar world created in Orwell a profound impression of the misery mankind was capable inflicting. Writing 1984, Orwell dedicated the last moments of his masterful literary career to alert society to the bleak vision of the future that he saw unfurling before him.
In the novel, society is controlled from the top-down. There is no truth as we know it. The present moment represents how things have always been, and how they always will be, and no alternatives exists. Wars fought against nations of sworn-enemies turn into eternal peace and stability in the blink of an eye, and whether out of an instinct of self-preservation or indoctrination, citizens accept this as the state of being. Big Brother, the omnipresent figurehead of the structure of power of the totalitarian state, is always watching. Any suspicion of alternative thought, of a step outside of the lines, and the truth of your existence snaps into the truth of your non-existence — never remembered, because you were never there.
The most interesting part of the novel, to me, are the secondary effects of Big Brother’s watchful eye. With the constant threat of disappearance and the lack of advancement opportunity outside of the Party, and in fact, life outside of the party, a social paradigm emerges in which political advancement becomes the sole motive for existence, the only goal to which Party members can aspire. The only way through is up, climbing the ideological ladder for as long as Party allows it.
As a result, the human social life completely breaks down.
Individuals in this society do not deserve such a title, nor do they deserve the title of a society. This black mass exists somewhere in between, with none of the redeeming qualities of either end. These pieces, as they might well be called, have lost all human characteristics — love, hope, identity. They accept whatever is handed down to them from up above, whether from exhaustion, or from the simple fact that they have forgotten what it means to be human, because they have not had a chance to experience true humanity, born into a world of paranoia. They become nothing more than a means to an end, an implement of the State to perpetuate an eternal war machine against the day’s most convenient enemy.
Nor do they function as effective cogs in a machine. Big Brother creates a system in which there is only one way up, and leverages the human self-interest to create a system in which no mutual trust is possible. Apart from the telescreens, your neighbours, your coworkers, your wife and children are all silently observing for any sign of deviancy, eager for recognition from the State. This fervour is terrible; it rewards not agency or innovation but deception and blind loyalty, stifling innovation and progress in the name of the Party.
Once this watchfulness is ingrained in the minds of the mass, generation after generation, the State’s task becomes simpler; there is no need to discipline the mass if it has learned to discipline itself. The State is no longer forced to be the means of surveillance, but rather the means for punishment. This is perhaps the most powerful aspect of a totalitarian state — the deconstruction of human relationships, an aspect so critical to our survival that it has been present since the days of the hunter-gatherers. The pieces of the black mass rove as solitary entities, without anyone to confide in, and break.
This ‘self-discipline’ is reminiscent of the Panopticon, an architectural design created by Jeremy Bentham and used by French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe how power structures, like those outlined by Orwell, enforce self-discipline in the individual. The Panopticon is a set of cells, containing one prisoner each, arranged in a circular manner around a central tower. The tower’s windows are tinted, meaning that prisoners in the cells cannot tell whether or not a guard is watching in the tower, nor can they see prisoners in any of the other cells. At any point, a guard might observe their intent to escape, but they can never know when this might be. Thus, the prisoners live in a state of assumption of observation, whether or not this observation exists, and condition themselves to acceptable patterns of behaviour, in our case, a quiet life with no machinations of the outside world.
Foucault uses this image to explain how states maintain control within societies, which he argues has spread to all aspects of our lives. Continuing with with 1984, top-down power most definitely exists; after all, the Thought Police and the Army do exist to maintain military control should anything go awry, and it is the Thought Police that come to arrest Winston when he has transgressed. However, as Foucault would argue, the state has more subtle, and in this way more powerful, methods of forcing systemic adherence: cultural indoctrination and technological innovation:
“You are the dead’ said an iron voice behind them. … To run for life, to get out of the house before it was too late — no such thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall.
In privacy you are never alone, and in rebellion there is no thought to escape. The system is so entrenched in the psyche of Winston and Julia that a vision of a life outside of the surveillance doesn’t exist. In another time, perhaps, they could have broken free, but here, they have nowhere to go. The pieces of the mass have no sympathy for them, provide no refuge, and the telescreens are everywhere. Their final act of resistance is to relent. The protagonists of the novel, the hope for some alternative, end by betraying each other in the Ministry of Love, under Big Brother’s careful eye.
Orwell himself affirmed that the novel was not a prophecy, rather a cautionary tale of a world that could come to pass had we not paid more attention to it. With a focus on the social narrative to the novel, however, there is a strong case to be argued that a Social Panopticon is indeed present in our world today, and is having a massive impact on our quality of life. We may not always perceive it, but subconsciously, it is always there.
The Social Panopticon is a twenty-first century adaptation of Orwell’s Oceania and Foucault’s Panopticon that, given the radically different modes of social interaction and perception that have emerged in our decade, the authors could not possibly have predicted. Instead of following the model of an oppressive Party or State, the watchtower is now one built by society, and each member of society is at once sentinel and inmate.
Society has always had its degree social and cultural norms, and they are necessary. They outline the basis of relations between man and his neighbour, and set a common morality upon which a nation can be built. They are a common set of beliefs and ideals that we all hold onto, and they enable us to build towards a common good which we may never be able to see — in short, the development of a pair to a band to a village to a city to a nation.
The issue in our time is hyper-conformity, which has been enabled in large part by instant communication and social media, in particular. It is much easier now than ever to keep track of hundreds of people, some of whom are known at most tangentially, and to pass judgment without any form of profound understanding, an experience that is exceptionally rare in deep emotional bonds, let alone in our virtual social ties. A frightening aspect of this judgment is the speed with which it occurs — opinions can be shaped with a single post, often the first one that an individual encounters. Thus, posting with frequency and with ideas that satisfy System 1 thinking disproportionately influence society at large, an effective hijacking of the collective consciousness that has never been possible before.
Foucault’s early years were spent steeped in Marxist thought, and his later rejection of its ideas would likely have applied here. What good is the revolution of the proletariat, if it is to free itself from the chains of an oppressive State only to put the shackles on itself? The people have taken the place of the State, both in surveillance and in pronouncing judgment.
The result of this transition is that we all now live under the assumption of observation. There is not only a need to conform to the culture, but to be forever cognizant of its rapid shifts, as well. Much like the Party’s war narratives, the ‘correct’ views are forever shifting, and what is true in one moment is false in the next. Instead of being narrated by an authoritarian figurehead, these shifts are now reflected in the collective consciousness, which in turn is dictated by focused advancement of narrative across a variety of platforms. Those not in the know, acting or speaking outside the bounds, face social exclusion and shaming from the group — the punishment.
Living in this Panopticon kills the creative expression of the individual. Humans are social creatures, after all, and we’ve seen that the creation of society has served the essential purpose of creating a defined set of social norms by which we can all relate to one another. But, the Panopticon into which have stumbled is a swing too far in one direction, as social cohesion actively overrides the need for creative expression. We need space to experiment, and a constant vigilance takes that aspect away from us. We are slowly boxed in, in the things that we can say, think, and do.
Without creative expression, we lose our individuality — an amalgamation of our many selves, interconnected in a way that even we struggle to understand. Instead, we become the pieces of the black mass that figure so prominently in Orwell, consumers of whatever is served in our direction, and constantly vigilant of those around us without any real interest in their humanity. We become passive, and in this way, enable the structure of power to become a self-sustaining one, that begins from within.
The only way to break out is from the source. All action begins with the assumption that someone is watching. Regardless of whether this is true or not, the modus operandi should switch to a resounding ‘no.’ The first application is extraordinarily difficult — after all, we have grown accustomed to the system, and taking a step outside of it, a proverbial dent in the prison wall, is an adrenaline rush. From there, it gets markedly easier. The weight of societal expectation, and judgment for not meeting those expectations, slowly melts away, and there is a profound realization that, even if someone is watching, they have no power over the self-realizing individual.
Once we free ourselves from these false shackles, we can remember again what it feels like to be truly human — to explore individuality, to reason carefully and critically, and to love unabashedly.