It feels to me like anyone who grew up with narcissistic parents already knows what it feels like to live in a Panopticon. Your boundaries are shredded to the point of non-existence, and your most intimate emotional states, even if you learn to succeed in hiding them, as I did, still feel open to the world. You spend your life feeling naked, even when you are not.
And of course, unexamined, this sense of nakedness easily shades itself into a repetition of the narcissism. Narcissism is not about an over-abundance of self. It is about a LACK of self. There is a hole in the middle, which is why that person tried and fails across a lifetime to fill it with attention.
The Panopticon–standing broadly here for the totalitarian temperament and emotional gestalt–represents a demand made by people who don’t exist that attention be paid to them. The best way to do this is to make themselves omnipresent, unignorable, and a severe and present factor in every element of their chosen victims life.
And self evidently, gaslighting is an important part of this. What greater victory than taking from someone their very capacity for sanity? That now belongs to you.
And to be clear, most of this happens below the level of conscious awareness. It is papered over with frauds of various sorts, and words like justice, compassion, empathy, decency, and fairness.
If the future is my past, then I have already seen it. I have already felt it. It is an inhuman spectacle, whose emotional violence should chill the hearts of all humans still capable of honest emotion.
This year, the choice is ruin and faith; destruction and reconstruction; evil and humanism. It could not be more stark.
I don’t know, even now, why so many millions of people around the world are so fucking stupid. That deep, deep fear underlies it, though, is obvious.