(Author: Jay Ramalingam)

Good old chap Jeremy Bentham, in 1780s England, designed a clever prison building called Panopticon. He designed a prison to reduce the number of guards needed and their salaries. This design did not allow prisoners to know when they were being watched. Prisoners in such situations behaved well even when there were no guards watching. This made prisoners to become their own guards. Does this sound familiar?

This pattern of behavior is more common in our ‘free’ lives than we realize or care to admit. We will get back to old Jeremy and his clever prison design a bit later.

Breakfast club

One of the few advantages of a difficult pandemic situation is that we can spend more time with family. Whether everyone in the family enjoys this is debatable. Anyhow, I get more opportunities to sit with my daughter K. for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Last week we were having a conversation was about movies we watch on Netflix. I noticed that I watch more thriller movies than comedy movies or documentaries. The story arcs of these thriller movies are basically similar. There is a villain who breaks rules like “thou shall not kill”. There is a hero who brings order back by taming the villain. The victorious hero also breaks rules. Ironically, many times the hero also breaks the same rules that the villain breaks, by killing the villain!

It seems like such thriller movies are very popular all over the world. And, villain characters and actors are as popular as hero characters and actors. Could this be because rule breaking, and rule breakers are “interesting” in some fundamental ways?

On Rules

All humans want freedom as the basis for happiness. I wonder if we feel free when do not have any rules to follow or can break the rules at will. When we see movies or read stories where rules are broken by both villain and hero, we may be identifying with characters who exercise their freedom of thought and action.

In human societies rules rule! Rules are everywhere. Whether they are written into laws or not, rules operate in our lives in very fundamental ways.

All social and cultural norms are rules. To have glowing fair skin is better; to look thin is better whether we are healthy or not. To have more money is better, whether we are peaceful or not. To have the power to make and break rules at will is the ultimate desired status, whether that causes misery or not.

We may agree with some reasonable rules and disagree with some unreasonable rules. We may understand some complex rules. We may not understand some old outdated rules handed down from centuries ago. But we are supposed to feel guilty if we cross the line, whether anyone is watching or not. Does this ring a bell?

We feel righteous when we follow the rules. We shame others who break the rules, even while secretly wanting to break out of the box of rules ourselves. In recent times we have also started sharing our private moments with family and friends on social media. We post photos and articles on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Medium to signal to the entire world that we are happily following the socially expected and accepted norms and rules.

In fact, we feel bad if our fellow citizens as ‘guards’ are not watching us as prisoners. And, we need them to ‘like’ and approve our obedient and ‘normal’ behavior. We live within the confines of external social rules and more insidiously within the confines of habitual patterns of thought and action.

Continued in the link: On Habits and Efficient Prisons

(About the author: All too Human, Engineer, Leader, Seeker, Yoga Teacher, Ever the Student).