How to Recruit Peeping Toms for a Great Life

No one talks about the downsides of anonymity

Oct 24, 2024

Sky Sage has thoughts about you eating that third donut.

Invisibility wasn’t good for Gyges.

Not long after the Greek shepherd found his invisibility ring, Plato tells us he seduced the queen, killed the king, and seized power.

Invisibility wasn’t good for Griffin in H.G. Well’s The Invisible Man. The brilliant scientist becomes increasingly violent and megalomaniacal after disappearing; he starts stealing and terrorizing the public.

And when Frodo offers Gandalf his invisibility ring in Fellowship of the Ring, the wizard has to hold himself back. “Do not tempt me!” he says. “I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great…”

This is one of the paradoxes of the West’s aggrandizements of privacy and anonymity. It sounds fantastic; it allows us to speak our minds and make unusual life choices without fear of reprisals or discrimination. But there’s a dark side of anonymity no one talks about; it can eat away at us and undermine everything we hold dear. Luckily, there’s a 2,000-year-old Stoic fix.

Thriving Under the Microscope

The workers worked harder.

At least that’s what seemed to happen when researchers increased the lighting in the Hawthorne Works factory in 1923.

But then something weird happened; researchers darkened another area and that increased productivity too. Workers were cranking out more telephone equipment under dim bulbs.

The researchers applied varied tweaks to different areas and observed bafflingly similar productivity increases until it dawned on them — the workers weren’t reacting to the changes, but to observers with clipboards.

The so-called “Hawthorne Effect,” was born. It suggests being watched makes us more conscientious, rule-abiding, and productive.

While some of the original research is considered shoddy, modern studies have repeatedly found observation impacts our behavior, usually for the better.

Hypocritical Doctors

Every doctor gives lip service to hygiene because it saves lives. They know it and the data backs it up.

Yet they don’t wash their hands nearly as much as they think they should.

When doctors were informed their hygiene would be observed, handwashing increased 55%. Another study found doctors decreased washings — from five per hour to two — when there was no observer.

Similarly, doctors know prescribing antibiotics for most respiratory infections is bad for humanity even if it makes their lives easier. The antibiotics don’t help the patients and antibiotic resistance increases with each prescription, eroding one of the world’s few trump cards against infections. But patients want antibiotics and ask for them, so many doctors cave.

In one study, researchers tried multiple ways to get doctors to reduce antibiotic prescriptions for inappropriate conditions, but simple observation worked as well as anything else, decreasing it from 24% to 5%.

How can we explain doctors’ failure to live up to their ideals? There are a few possibilities:

Doctors don’t think stringent hygiene practices and antibiotic restrictions are good, but keep quiet out of fear of reprisal.
Doctors think hygiene and antibiotic restrictions are good for other doctors but not for them because they’re above them.
Doctors do think handwashing and antibiotic restrictions are important, but can’t scrounge up the discipline to live up to their values.

I’d like to suggest that the answer is often #3, and we see it playing out across our world again and again.

Speeders Are Murderers in the Making

Speeding leads to car crashes, and 28% of road fatalities involve someone speeding. This is intuitive, but people speed anyway. In 2022, 42,795 Americans died in car crashes — that’s as many as died in the entire Korean War, both Iraq wars, and the Afghan War combined.

So what happens when you install a camera to watch people drive?

A meta-analysis found cameras reduced crashes between 8% and 49%, and reduced road fatalities between 11% and 44%, depending on the location, speed limit, and other factors. If cars were observed on all public roads, and we managed to achieve a conservative 11% reduction in deaths, 4,620 Americans would be saved each year.

Many will object that these cameras aren’t merely observing — the threat of fines is the biggest factor. I agree, but all observation holds an implicit or explicit threat over our heads — public shaming, judgment, being fired or reprimanded by a boss, or whatever.

Digital billboards with a speeder’s face and “Your neighbor Mike Smith sped through this neighborhood at 45 mph last week,” would probably decrease speeding as much as a fine because embarrassment and social standing matter.

Yet for all their life-saving power, Americans hate speed cameras. Only about half support their implementation, 33% think they violate a person’s privacy, and 53% think they’re a government cash grab.

Ignorance may explain part of this rejection, but there’s another factor — as much as people rationally agree speeding is bad for everyone, they can’t bring themselves to give up their bad behavior without being monitored.

Consider all of humanity’s deplorable behaviors — scrutiny decreases most of them.

Where do we see humans at their most vile? Maybe in the comment section of any controversial Youtube video. People say things they would never say to someone’s face, and they do it because no one will ever know they said it. It’s not merely that they’re voicing unpopular opinions, which is fine, but that they’re doing it in a cruel, hate-filled way that degrades civilization.

When people can only comment using their real names, they choose kinder words.

The Police State Would Like a Word

The Cambodians have thoughts about being watched.

They’re a friendly and cheerful and you wouldn’t know a quarter of their population — several million people — were slaughtered between 1975 and 1979.

I visited their “killing fields,” where more than a million bodies were left to rot. It’s a place of foreboding I recall whenever I hear about government surveillance.

The totalitarian Khmer Rouge bragged about having, “as many eyes as a pineapple.” Critics found by those eyes were rounded up and killed, of course. But worse was their search for anyone with the slightest intellectual spark.

“Intellectuals,” in the broadest sense, were unacceptable. Speak a few words of a foreign language? Trained as a nurse? Wear glasses? They were going to murder you. Only pliable and unopinionated peasants were acceptable.

You see the result when riding a motorbike from relatively well-developed Thailand into the barrenness of the Cambodian hinterland beyond Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. It’s like traveling into the past. You see it in what's not there, the lives lived with painstaking quietness so as to not disturb the man with the AK-47. The Cambodians were forced to become like living ghosts in their own homeland.

The slaughter set the country back generations, and it began with those all-seeing pineapple eyes — ubiquitous, never sleeping.

Persecution is the looming counterfactual to the benefits of an unbridled surveillance state. What is publically known about you will never be lost, and it only takes a regime change or a single local populist to destroy you.

The cancel culture of recent years is a mild but telling example. Politically incorrect speech — even if voiced years prior in a bout of youthful stupidity — has become a liability that ruins lives. For many, it’s only reasonable way to hide what you are and what you think and do.

Oscar Wilde knew a thing or two about hiding what he was. The English poet and wit was gay, and not always discrete about it. In 19th-century England, the result was what you’d expect — he was convicted of sodomy and spent years doing hard labor.

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person,” Wilde would later sadly note. “Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.”

This is the balancing act. Anonymity may well ruin us. It can turn us into hatred-spouting monsters and allow our bad habits and laziness to run rampant; innocent people can die because we’re not being watched. But strip us of anonymity and the Khmer Rouge are but a few steps away.

Scrutiny Without the Gulag

Beneficial public scrutiny and freedom from oppression sit astride either side of a seesaw, staring each other down. They’re unlikely to settle into a comfortable equilibrium anytime soon.

So everyone who cares about living up to their values needs to figure out how to deploy observation for their own good. Because let’s be honest, how often do you take the easy way out? Would you be as likely to if you were being observed and judged?

We have several ways to deploy observation against our worst impulses.

Option One: The Montaigne Approach

The first approach requires the most bravery. We might consider it the toned-down path of Socrates, who held the principled middle while Athens went mad around him. I don’t need to tell you how that worked out.

The philosopher Montaigne used this approach while The French Wars of Religion were tearing his country apart:

“I have enjoined myself to dare to say all that I dare to do; I am displeased even to have thoughts that I would not publish. the worst of my actions and qualities do not seem to me as vile as the vile cowardice of not daring to own them.”
— Montaigne, Upon Some Verses of Virgil

The Montaigne approach is publically owning what you think and do. This promotes the truth, checks your worst impulses, and gets you off the couch. If everyone knows about your failures, you’ll think twice, and probably be better for it.

I utilized this strategy earlier this year when I couldn’t bring myself to edit a book I’d written. So I emailed a few dozen friends and family and told them my deadline. Most of them probably didn’t give it much thought, but my awareness of their knowledge pushed me psychologically. They seemed to loom over my shoulder, and I finished two weeks before my deadline.

But while Montaigne was a skeptic and a critic of the morals of his time, he was also a devoted Roman Catholic. Had he been a Protestant his approach would have gotten him killed. If our carefully considered opinions are controversial, we must decide if we’re willing to be martyred for them. We may judge it healthier to keep certain actions and opinions to yourself — to push where you can and keep your head, or at least your job.

Option Two: Choose Your Peeping Tom

The “Sky Sage,” approach requires more discipline but sidesteps persecution by keeping observations internal. This approach intertwines beautifully with the great Stoic invincibility game and your “personal religion.”

We’re trying to recruit an infallible peeping Tom who possesses omniscience and all your ideals — a "Sky Sage.”

You’ve probably heard Christians ask, “what would Jesus do,” but the idea is far older, with roots in Roman and Greek philosophy.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca observed:

…it is good to appoint a guardian over oneself, and to have someone whom you may look up to, someone whom you may regard as a witness of your thoughts. It is, indeed, nobler by far to live as you would live under the eyes of some good man, always at your side…
— Seneca, Letters on Ethics, Letter 25.

Your Peeping Tom can be Buddha, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, or your higher/future self. Anyone representing what you want to live up to will work.

It’s asking “How would someone I respect the most behave,” and then leveraging the felt psychological presence of that person to be like that person. It’s a way of bringing about self-respect.

You’ll know this sky sage is a figment of your imagination, but keeping him/her in mind will force you to wrestle with your ideals instead of giving in to the easy way.

My experience with myself, and much of humankind, is that we all desperately need a watcher to keep us on track. As Seneca observed, “You will never straighten what is crooked unless you have a ruler.”

Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.

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