Have you ever opened a book to a random passage...

[Technodaoist]

...and seen something strangely appropriate? It could be anything. Whether in answer to a question / prayer, or just in a "Huh..." kinda moment. It could be a holy book, an encyclopedia, or even something like a Fortune Cookie or the Tarot... Whatever this synchronicity is - Otherworldly Guidance or Random Mechanism, it is a perspective outside ourselves that gives us a new way to look at things, perhaps learn something along the way...

So I thought this was neat.

I have a book in my "library" that I pick up occasionally. Its title:
"1000 Years, 1000 People - Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millennium"

I'm ashamed to say I haven't completely torn through this book yet, but its a casual read. As you can guess from the title, it ranks what the four collaborating authors feel are the people who most influenced history from 1000 - 2000. They have various factors they use to determine ranks, which they fully explain in the prologue. The usual suspects are in this book, but I'd be surprised if anybody recognized every entry. Here's the man who made 383rd out of 1000:

==============================
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
Philosophy's Dr. Feelgood
He was the prime expounder of utilitarianism, which he described as "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." This formula underpinned his life's campaign for social reform. Early in his career, he said, he was disillusioned to discover that "people in power were against reform," following their "sinister interest" rather than the general good. In studying the obstructionism of the powerful, this Ben Franklin look-alike categorized their four basic tactics for quashing reforms:

1) The "fallacies" of invoking a higher authority.
2) Warnings of the risks of change.
3) Delaying debate.
4) and if all else fails, sowing confusion.

Bentham's plan for a model prison, the "Panopticon", was never implemented in Britain, though penitentiaries in the United States copied it. He also loved fancy language. The writer Lucy Duff recalled how as a child she was escorted by the elderly Bentham around his garden in an activity he called "ante-prandial circumgyration."
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So I'm in my "library" reading this, and I'm thinking, "Wow... figured it out 240+ or so years and its still going on." The more things change I guess...

I'm off to do more research and learn more about this man. I'd be interested to see what people have to say about him and his ideas. The four tactics could be topics by themselves, and I'm curious to find out just what his "Panopticon" contributed to our penal system...

Synchronicity is fun :)

[enlightenment]

1. You need to read Michel Foucault's

Discipline and Punish

It will prove enlightening, I think.

A quick grab from Wiki:

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison was translated into English in 1977, from the French Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, published in 1975. The book opens with a graphic description of the brutal public execution in 1757 of Robert-François Damiens, who attempted to kill Louis XV. Against this it juxtaposes a colourless prison timetable from just over 80 years later. Foucault then inquires how such a change in French society's punishment of convicts could have developed in such a short time. These are snapshots of two contrasting types of Foucault's "Technologies of Punishment". The first type, "Monarchical Punishment", involves the repression of the populace through brutal public displays of executions and torture. The second, "Disciplinary Punishment," is what Foucault says is practiced in the modern era. Disciplinary punishment gives "professionals" (psychologists, programme facilitators, parole officers, etc.) power over the prisoner, most notably in that the prisoner's length of stay depends on the professionals' judgment.

Foucault also compares modern society with Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" design for prisons (which was unrealized in its original form, but nonetheless influential): in the Panopticon, a single guard can watch over many prisoners while the guard remains unseen. The dark dungeon of pre-modernity has been replaced with the bright modern prison, but Foucault cautions that "visibility is a trap". It is through this visibility, Foucault writes, that modern society exercises its controlling systems of power and knowledge (terms which Foucault believed to be so fundamentally connected that he often combined them in a single hyphenated concept, "power-knowledge"). Increasing visibility leads to power located on an increasingly individualized level, shown by the possibility for institutions to track individuals throughout their lives. Foucault suggests that a "carceral continuum" runs through modern society, from the maximum security prison, through secure accommodation, probation, social workers, police, and teachers, to our everyday working and domestic lives. All are connected by the (witting or unwitting) supervision (surveillance, application of norms of acceptable behaviour) of some humans by others.