Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. Before we get into today's episode proper, I want to introduce you to a physics concept that I think is going to provide us with a helpful analogy later on. So hang in there with me. And if you're a physics guru and I butcher my physics explanation, please forgive me as well. About a 100 years ago, there was this guy named Heisenberg.

Derek: 00:54

You're probably actually familiar with that name even if you're not into physics because Heisenberg was Walter White's alias on the show Breaking Bad. But the original Heisenberg was a scientist who, among other things, came up with this idea known as the uncertainty principle. To grossly simplify the uncertainty principle, in part because I can't do anything more than grossly simplify, Heisenberg argued that if you wanna know both the location and the momentum of an electron, you'll always be uncertain about one of those properties. In fact, the more that you know about one of those properties, like the location, for example, the less that you'll know about the other property, the momentum, and vice versa. Focusing on one measure causes you to forego accuracy in the other measure.

Derek: 01:45

This uncertainty principle led another scientist by the name of Schrodinger to develop his now famous thought experiments known as Schrodinger's cat. He was attempting to draw out the logical implications of the insanity of quantum physics. In his thought experiment, Schrodinger said that there was this imaginary box, and it had a radio, radioactive element inside of it. The element had a 50% chance of decaying in the period in which the experiment was run. Now inside the box, there was also a Geiger counter to measure whether or not any radioactive decay occurred.

Derek: 02:22

If it detected any decay, it would trigger a hammer to smash a vial of poison, and there was a cat inside the box, which would subsequently die. If there's no radiation present, then the cat would live. Yet Schrodinger argues that if the cat in this box were to act according to the laws of quantum mechanics, the cat would be both dead and alive until someone opened the box to observe the cat and make reality happen, make it so. And for as crazy as this seems, this is exactly what quantum mechanics seems to show, perhaps most clearly seen in the famous double slit experiment or an experiment dealing with quantum entanglement. You can go all look all this stuff up and try to get a better grasp on it, but the point is that in the last 100 years or so, the scientific community has been coming to the conclusion that reality doesn't simply just occur as we humans observe it, but rather reality, at least on some level, is dependent upon observation, upon observers.

Derek: 03:29

Alright. Let's switch gears here and, and get on to our main show, but keep that analogy in the back of your head. Now from what little I know of Jeremy Bentham, I have to say I'm not a fan, And not only because he reminds me of The Lost TV series that ended up being a big waste of my time, but also because he's considered the father of what I think is one of the worst moral systems in existence, utilitarianism. But I'm not gonna deal with that broader concept today. If you're interested, you can go back and check out season 2, which is all about consequentialism, which is basically synonymous with utilitarianism, as people tend to use it.

Derek: 04:12

In this episode, though, I rather want to zoom in and explore one of Jeremy Bentham's specific ideas, an idea known as the Panopticon. What is the Panopticon? Well, etymologically speaking, you can just look at the word and kind of figure out a good bit. Pan and opt. All and seeing.

Derek: 04:34

The panopticon was a structure invented by or at least in part supported strongly by Bentham. The structure was envisioned as a cutting edge prison. It was a building with cells arranged in a big circle and with one lone guard tower in the middle of this circle. From the guard tower, the guard or guards could see into every cell in the prison. But as the tower was to be created with one way glass, the prisoners could not see into the guard tower.

Derek: 05:04

This meant that every single prisoner could be surveilled at any time, while they would never know if they were being surveilled. So at any time, even if the guard wasn't actually observing the prisoners, the prisoners would tend to act as though they were being observed. That surveillance reminds me a little bit of a book on epistemology that I'm currently reading right now. And the other night, as my wife and I went to bed, I asked her a question, and she knows to expect strange things. Like, I I asked her the most random things because of, you know, the things that I I read and think about.

Derek: 05:38

But the other night as I I was getting into bed, I said, can I talk to you about something? About what? She asked. About muskrats. I said, Yes, that's right.

Derek: 05:49

Muskrats. That's one of the reasons that, I love this book that I'm reading by Esther Meeks entitled Loving to Know. You can tell that the author that, she has such a passion for learning and and that she doesn't just dissect the world, but it, it really is something that's a love for her. She just loves every aspect of it and learning about it. She loves to know.

Derek: 06:15

And I feel a great kinship with her because that's the type of person that I feel that I am. That's how I hope I am in the world. It's why I love reading so broadly because a breadth of knowledge actually contributes, in my opinion, so much to a depth of it. And Esther Meeks has this, the same idea, the same passion. So of course, someone like that can bring up muskrats in an epistemology book.

Derek: 06:42

Anyway, the point of bringing up muskrats, was that she was describing this other author's experience with coming to know more about nature, an experience that specifically revolved around muskrats. The other author talked a bit about how forcing yourself upon nature actually changes it. I saw this firsthand just the other week when I was out at a, a park with my kids, like, an outdoors woodsy park, not a just playground park in the city. But my kids, they ended up finding this little snake that was slithering through the grass. Of course, they followed it, and he went into his hole.

Derek: 07:28

And so, you know, they're really curious about the snake. They wanna know about it. They want to experience the snake. And so what do they do? They start to put sticks down its hole to try to, like, dig it out.

Derek: 07:41

And it was just so repulsive to me. Like, I'm like, I understand the curious, the curiosity in here, but it's like you're jamming a stick down the hole to try to know more about the snake yet in doing so, not only are you probably going to injure the snake, but what are you really going to learn about it? You're not going to observe a snake being a snake, you know, hunting in the grass or, doing whatever snakes do. You're actually going to change. You're going to impact the behavior of the snake.

Derek: 08:15

Right? Well, likewise, if you force yourself on a muskrat or on a snake, do you really come to know that thing, or is your forced presence actually changing the behavior of that thing into something that's less of that thing? Meeks summarizes when she writes, quote, it makes a difference how the would be knower behaves. In this, I recognize 2 things. 1st, knowing is covenantal.

Derek: 08:46

2nd, therefore, there are better and worst ways of going about it. Knowing is perhaps a bit like a marriage. First, you bind yourself with promises to love, honor, and obey. Only then does reality unfold itself to you. If you do and you're favored, it will.

Derek: 09:05

Dillard notes that she learned from the muskrats themselves how to stalk. Also, if you don't comport yourself sensitively, reality won't unfold. If you don't comport yourself honorably and you force the real into disclosure, perhaps what you have is less like marriage and more like rape. Such an approach would distort the thing that we were trying to know. It is objectifying rather than personifying.

Derek: 09:30

We would not know it as it is, or we may not know it at all, end quote. So what Meeks is talking about here and what my kids showed us is something that you might want to call intrusive observation. And many forms of observation are intrusions. And in the case of my kids jamming a stick down a snake hole, it's much more like epistemological rape of the creature. It's objectification.

Derek: 09:57

I guess that's what objectification is. Right? They're ravaging nature in order to try to experience it. But in doing so, they're not really truly experiencing it for what it is. I think the analogy holds when we're talking about something like the uncertainty principle.

Derek: 10:17

Sure. Electrons don't have conscious natures by which our presence can be known and subsequently alter their course, doing what they would have done had we not attempted an observation in the first place. Not here advocating for electron rights or that we stop imposing on the course of electrons. I'm merely belaboring the point for effect here that observation and especially intrusive observation or observation that is detected by the observed, it impacts behavior. If observation impacts the behavior of unconscious objects like electrons, how much more so of the conscious ones?

Derek: 10:57

Now perhaps when you think of something like the Panopticon, you are in favor of it. Maybe you think that this observation mechanism would be good for prisons. Maybe it would be. I don't know. Maybe that's, that's better than tons of barbed wire and like a 1000000 armed guards and augment.

Derek: 11:17

Maybe it is. I'm not at all here to argue for or against that in this episode. But what I do want to argue is that whether or not a Panopticon is ever implemented in our prison system, it's already been implemented in our society. The government, big brother, big business, whoever you wanna call them, they have eyes on nearly everything that you do. We know that there are CCTV cameras all over the place, especially if you live in a city.

Derek: 11:46

But even outside the city, there are cameras along highways that detect license plates and images. Living here in Romania, this is actually how they detect if you've paid their road tax. If you don't have a valid tax payment for your license plate, you'll get a fine in the mail because the government has cameras set up all over the country on their state roads. But that also means they could, if they wanted to know where you've been. The British government, in an operation known as Optic Nerve, captured images from millions of webcams of regular people.

Derek: 12:19

The US, decades decades ago, opened millions upon millions of pieces of mail in an operation known as HT Lingual. There are a plethora of known operations that have garnered data on average citizens. And a great place you can find more recent stuff is by taking a look at WikiLeaks or by reading Edward Snowden's book. But civilian surveillance has a very long history, and it's only grown exponentially in the last decade or 2. I mean, we are living in a panopticon.

Derek: 12:51

There are very few moments throughout the day when the government or some company couldn't, if they wanted to, know where you've been and what you've been doing. Now the pushback that most people have is, so what? I don't ever do anything that I'm worried about. I don't do anything illegal. Only criminals have to worry.

Derek: 13:09

Right? We could go down the road of looking at how tyranny and oppression and persecution develop and the danger of giving too much power to groups. I mean, that would fit in very nicely with this season. But you, if you've listened to season 9 here on governments, or if you've listened to this season at all, I mean, the case has already been made. You know how terrible governments and really any institution with power ends up being.

Derek: 13:35

Right? I don't need to belabor that point. I don't even want to go there in in this episode. To me, that's just self evident, and, and and you can just see some other stuff that I've done if you wanna get more. But even if you're not worried about having a social credit system or the tyranny of governments, if you're not worried about becoming like, China with their social system and such, Don't you think that the knowledge that we're being observed, that our privacy is being invaded by so many people, don't you think that has an impact on our individual actions on on the micro level, but also our societal values and actions on the macro level?

Derek: 14:20

And more and more research is coming out about the ills of social media, especially its influence on young developing minds. It seems that the Panopticon that we have immersed our children in and encouraged them to join has been ravaging them. It has at least, in part, been the cause of driving many youth to depression and sometimes subsequently to suicide. It's changing what they consume, who they think they are, what they think they desire, and the list goes on. They are participants being observed in a panopticon while simultaneously observing others, and that's impacting their actions.

Derek: 15:01

We'd be foolish to think that it's not impacting ours as well. Our beings and character are formed as we decide what to reveal and what not to reveal of ourselves based on what others might see and think. In a strange irony, we find entry into the Panopticon alluring in part because while none of us want to be surveilled, we all wanna be known. We've just come to conflate the intellectual known with the relational known. I call this the stalker and mistress syndrome.

Derek: 15:35

There are a lot of Christians who are very smart theologically. They know a lot about God, yet they don't have a relationship with him. They're no better than paparazzi stalkers who know every detail about their Hollywood quarry, but have no personal interaction or relationship with them. Likewise, some Christians experience the emotions of God, reveling in the love he has for them and their experience in prayer or through faith, yet they never grow in their understanding of who God is. Rather than being stalkers, these Christians have God as their mistress.

Derek: 16:10

God is good for the pleasures that he brings, for the comforts, for the encounters that he offers, and for the momentary pleasure and whatever mode that he offers, but he's not really worth knowing about. I think this is where so many go wrong today when opting into the Panopticon. We wanna be known, and we conflate stalker and mistress interactions with being known fully in a true relationship. Social media seems like a quick fix to make us known, but not only does being observed in a panopticon not make us truly known, it simultaneously shapes us to be someone new, someone who says and does things that they wouldn't otherwise do, someone who avoids saying and doing things they would otherwise do, and someone who begins to feel things that they wouldn't otherwise feel or desire things they wouldn't otherwise desire. By now you know that I've continued to offer up discipleship as the antithesis to all the garbage that we've been exploring this season in regard to propaganda.

Derek: 17:19

That is no less the case here. Discipleship is the opposite of this panopticon. In discipleship, we come to be known for who we truly are. We aren't passively observed by stalkers, but actively engaged as we choose to enter relationship with others. We aren't engaging in a few erotic flings with mistresses, but in discipleship, we are rather growing in relationship over time and circumstance through commitment.

Derek: 17:48

Discipleship is not only an extended endeavor over time that one willingly enters, but it's an endeavor that one enters with others. In the Panopticon, your life may be put on display for everyone to see, but you display that from your solitary cell, separated by bars and walls, screens and cameras, apart from everyone else. But in discipleship, not only do you enter willingly on and off the stage, but you don't really enter the stage or the cell at all. You enter the bar, the table, or whatever other analogy you want to give. You sit down and you meet face to face with another who, like you, is stepping off of the stage to experience something real, not something contrived.

Derek: 18:36

Unfortunately, I feel like there is still a lot swirling around in my head in regard to all these thoughts, in regard to this, this episode, the idea of discipleship, the Panopticon, observation, epistemology. There's just there's so much that as I begin to wrap up the season, that I'm realizing I don't have a full grasp on, and, I'm just starting to learn. You know, I feel like I've I've had a good go at this idea, and I'm getting there, but I don't think that I've really said all that I need to say or express everything in the clearest terms. It might be something that, that I'm able to come back and revisit, but hopefully you kind of get what I'm saying in this episode about knowing and being known, about the importance of epistemology and how observation is a is a large part of propaganda, and it's it's shaping of us. I mean, that's a lot of what marketing, and narrowcasting is.

Derek: 19:44

It's knowing you superficially so it can, it can try to form you through propaganda. So anyway, there's there's really a lot here, and I'll put some links in the show notes to to Snowden and and some of the other things. But but understanding that observation, but and what we can sense to or what we don't consent to really is a formative thing, even if if you're not worried about being caught by the law doing anything illegal. Make sure you check out the links in the show notes. That's all for now.

Derek: 20:22

So peace, And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom outpost network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom living.