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4:53

(In »Living religion versus deadly alienation«)

A flagrant example of such a compensatory narcissist ideology is the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian vision of a future prison, erected according to the architectural Panopticon model, a complete institution built in pie wedges around a single human, all-seeing eye at its centre. Bentham imagines a prison built from a central viewpoint from which a sole actor constantly surveys all other activities within the construction. The panopticon is of course nothing other than a material reflection of Bentham’s own self-image and world view, his attempt at a Napoleonisation of bureaucratic architecture. The panopticon is quite simply the dark flip side of Bentham’s utilitarianism, his runaway fantasy of a hyperrationalist ethics, which can calculate every individual’s wishes in advance, put a price on and determine the value of all people’s wishes vis-à-vis each other and then compile how one might be able to maximise these wishes into empirically measurable, maximised total utility.