Lost and Floating in the Liminal

The Panopticon of Privilege

Hi everyone,

So this is a little personal and informal, and it has nothing to do with The Winds of Change. I ask that you have a little empathy with me. And with yourselves.

The Dissonance of Decadence and Misery.

Something has felt off.

I’m back in the United States. Seeing family and friends. And in my incredibly privileged situation, I have no immediate stress of trying to make ends meet. I can focus on applying to jobs, on eating home-cooked food, on reading Galeano and bulldozing my way through TV series while eating ice cream and chocolate bars. It’s decadent. It’s comfortable. It’s full of upper-middle class conversations about “What do you do for work?”, and “What is your five year plan?”, and the small talk of comparing the taste of 5 dollar coffees and 20 dollar pizzas, running it on a credit card that I think I can pay off in an indeterminate amount of time. It’s much different from how I’ve spent the last year.

There’s moments in this decadence—many in fact—when my manic energy and instant gratification get absorbed by a darker cloud. The cause is manifold: a snarky comment from someone else, an embarrassing self-inflicted gaffe, or most commonly, one experience of feeling completely out of place.

And yet, as this cloud envelops my joy and fills my head with grayness and panic at the eternal decay of the fragile walls of self-esteem I maintain, I cannot help but feel a little righteous.

“Can’t you see, everyone?? We shouldn’t be enjoying this! We don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve this.”

This five dollar cup should have gone to the hundreds of thousands of children and mothers in Gaza whose emaciated ribs and unjustified suffering could benefit from a shipment of wheat flour. My time spent drinking alcohol on a day boat with a bunch of young software engineers could have been spent plugging into local mutual aid groups that I claim to admire in my intellectual musings.¹

My short time back in the U.S. has told me that I love to preach justice. And yet I live in decadence, in the humming of blasting A.C. fans and my Macbook Air and of overpriced breakfast tacos and of only reading the news to force-feed myself sadness at others’ suffering instead of risking anything to empathize.

In such moments, the cloud numbs my fingers. It glazes my eyes. It makes smiling an impossibly guilt-inducing experience, a reminder that I am “ok” with how things are.

In one such moment in my brother’s apartment, I lazily called to Alexa, “What percentage of Americans are happy?” And in her tone-deaf robotical chime, she promptly responded that according to Pew, 84% report being at least “pretty happy”.

I’m torn apart by these statistical slashes, where reading data can both affirm my confirmation bias that Americans are suffering from loneliness, economic insecurity, and lack of belonging, while forcing myself to accept that buying things feels good, that having nice things feels good, that being in nice coffee shops with AC and leisure time next to tech bros on Airpods and color-coordinated Fabletics influencers on vacation feels, well…good.

This dissonance has to mean something. I’m privileged enough to be in many spaces where people worry more about their next vacation than their next meal, where “climbing the career ladder” gives us more anxiety than not having a ladder to climb in the first place. I am also knowledgable enough to know that the vast majority of humanity does not get to live like this. And that the actions of the very wealthy and the privileged upper-middle class spaces I occupy, directly contribute to the privation of so many people and creatures inhabiting our planet.²

This dissonance produces a feeling of middling. That I’m floating in the liminal, paralyzed in-between my moral attitudes and my actions.

And on top of that, this dark cloud feels so arbitrary, so self-absorbed, so unnecessary. As one activist rightly told me, “Feeling guilty about your privilege is a form of selfishness.”³

In my liminal paralysis, in my half-hearted job search to find “social impact non-profit and policy work” fighting within systems that I critique with ease and benefit from at the same time, when I can’t just enjoy things for what they are (“just enjoy the boat party, Rishab!”) nor leave them (“nothing is stopping you from leaving the U.S. for your utopia but you, Rishab!”).

And while this cloud envelopes my soul, I harden my exterior, close myself off, oscillate between my moral righteousness (“The people I’m surrounded by are so ignorant”) and self-condemnation (“Aw, you’re feeling bad for yourself? Get over it, you’re not the one suffering or fighting.”).

That leads me to a hypothesis, or rather a question:

• Do some of you may feel this paralysis, spurred by the dissonance between your privilege and others’ misery? Sipping your Starbucks while doom-scrolling on X? Striving to be the morally righteous one out of your community while knowing its insufficiency?

Entrapping Ourselves in the Panopticon

My ultimate end goal is to convince some of you (and myself) that there’s a concrete explanation for this feeling. I argue that we have imprisoned ourselves and individualized the guilt and anger that result from systemic failures.
Imagine what this prison could look like in physical form.

“The building with the prisoners is only one cell thick, and every cell has one open side facing the central tower. This open side has bars over it, but is otherwise entirely exposed to the tower. The guards can thus see the entirety of any cell at any time, and the prisoners are always vulnerable and visible. Conversly, the tower is far enough from the cells and has sufficiently small windows that the prisoners cannot see the guards inside of it.

The sociological effect is that the prisoners are aware of the presence of authority at all times, even though they never know exactly when they are being observed. The authority changes from being a limited physical entity to being an internalized omniscience- the prisoners discipline themselves simply because someone might be watching, eliminating the need for more physical power to accomplish the same task. Just a few guards are able to maintain a very large number of prisoners this way. Arguably, there wouldn't even need to be any guards in the tower at all.”

Source: Brown University

This is what Jeremy Bentham, a 1700s English philosopher, coins as the perfect prison, the Panopticon.

The abandoned Presidio Modelo complex in 1995. Photograph: The Guardian

Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, wrote extensively on the societal conditions that entrap us into the behaviors we grow to accept as normal. (note, I am not an expert, and he is so prolific that anything I say will be pretty uninformed and wrong). But one of his most famous works is a critique of the Panopticon, captured in his book Discipline & Punish.⁴

What Foucault ultimately argues is that society has evolved to build such self-regulating structures that shape humans to conform to societal norms. This is an individualized society in which we teach ourselves to conform to norms even when there is no authority, all due to the fear that the ever-present prison guard will punish us.

We are herded through bureaucracies and institutions that mold us into productive, law-abiding citizens, and the people that resist are called “unproductive,” “lazy,” or “criminals”.

I might argue that I live in the “First Class” of prison, alongside many of my fellow “overachievers,” where my individual life is well protected. If I stay in my spacious prison cell, I will be able to eake out a wonderful material living. Of course I see suffering on the other side of the prison, if I choose to squint hard enough. But I can’t cross to their side. After all, we all have our individual lives to attend to, lest the prison guards see that we are trying to link arms instead of chasing individual comfort.

If I tell myself this a hundred times, and I am reminded by media and friends and family that everything earned is deserved, then I may stop seeing my place as a cell. It becomes a home. Or worse, I see that people are suffering, and I accept that there’s nothing I can really do about it.

My worst fear is that we are being shaped to believe that societal rules are neutral, that everything has to be this way.

We are prisoners.

This is the crescendo of the piece. Where I convince everyone reading that everything I’ve said comes together in a beautiful, terrifying symphony. Let me try just that.

If I am a prisoner living in luxury, then I have three choices.

1. Ignore that I am in a prison.

2. Feel trapped, looking at the guard tower and other prisoners with hurt and guilt.

3. Try to escape.

I think people in option 1 are scared. Everyone has seen the one-way mirrors lining the guard towers falter. Their metallic sterileness flickers and shimmers until they see that there is no guard for a split-second. They see momentarily that they don’t need to conform, and that the rules they’ve been taught might be incorrect. But they don’t escape.

My dissonance is a reminder that I am living through option 2. Trapped inside my cell, I have no outlet but staring at the mirror on my wall and the ignorance of prisoners taking option 1. Instructed that my fellow prisoners are nothing but ignorant individualists that fail to resist, I blame them instead of being patient.

But what does option three look like? Can individuals muster up the courage to link arms, to expand their circles of empathy as far as they can reach, to look at others with patience and humility instead of judgment and loathing? This is what I hope.⁵

Living in our Panopticon

I have failed to describe the ruling ideology of our Panopticon. Is it surveillance capitalism? Is it human-superiority above other life? It could be those. And more. But, I think our duty as prisoners is to individually and collectively reflect upon our pathologies so that we can create working definitions of our prison. We need more people to realize that they are imprisoned. Because that’s the first step to liberation.

I can’t change the fact that a job market exists to increase profits. An insidious energy company would never actually hire me to hold them accountable for their own sake. So it makes sense that I don’t see many jobs for my type of work. The non-profit industrial complex exists to maintain the order of the wealthy and keep impact-oriented folks strapped to short term grant applications instead of real transformation.

But I do think I can remind other people in similar places that their decadence is also a set of Golden Handcuffs. That they are prisoners as much as the “vulnerable” people they post on social media for.⁶ And that they should listen to the inner voices that tell them that something isn’t right.

Even if we adopt medications and subscription services to buy well-being, depression “signals that soul, while tragically weakened, has not disappeared” (Rogers-Vaughn 514). It is a “final cry of soul…a residue of voice” that cannot articulate its losses but still holds ‘the desperate desire to have a voice’.”

I’ve been returning to Huxley’s Brave New World, perhaps the best analog to what I’m describing on a societal level. And maybe if we listen to that voice, we’ll find much more meaning on the other side of our luxurious cells.

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

There is one thing, amongst many, that I want to acknowledge is missing from this piece. Joy. And that’s what I want to explore next as I try to escape my prison.

1. Where am I supposed to land??

2. Check out Jason Hickel’s https://globalinequality.org/ for a data-driven approach showing some of these lacks.

3. See these posts above and below for a deeper reflection on these conversations.

when emotions turn to language

4. I got most of my information from Purdue’s module on Foucault, a chapter excerpt from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Chapter 3 on Panopticism, and this helpful analysis of the Panopticon from Brown University

5. Empathy is something I think about a lot. And it is entirely the case that no one has the capacity to expand their empathy to everyone. We all have families, close networks, people that we truly love. We are good people. The question then becomes, if we stretch that love a little further, can we cover everyone?

6. Post-note:

Gosh, there is so much to write on this topic. I wish I had discovered Foucault earlier, and I’ve only read a few articles on this piece. Prisons exist everywhere, and I haven’t explored how gender, sexuality, race, and class fit into the Panopticon. But I bet there is really good literature out there.