Our world has become a panopticon. Many of us re controlled by constant technological surveillance and control devices that cause us to be unaware of or unable to avoid such control. Before our sophisticated technologies, a panopticon came from self-censorship via hegemonic convictions, guarded walls, or historical obeyance to handed down rules. North Korea is an example of oppressing its people with mostly human intelligence via recruiting and rewarding thousands of snitching neighbors.
Today this concept of control is mostly technological. Surveillance technologies, algorithms, impersonation technology, and fake news all contribute to our internalizing the gaze. We self-censor, self-brand, and self-police in exchange for visibility, convenience, or perceived safety. The result is not just compliance, but quiet despair.
This is not science fiction, although it is a realizing of George Orwell’s famous dystopian book. In 1984, written in 1949, he predicted that by 2050 Newspeak” would be so powerful that people will believe 2+2=5 whenever the controllers want them to believe it. From constant surveillance to not knowing if you are watching a real or a fake presenter on Youtube, Newspeak is operational. It is also being shaped by billionaire wealth, media power, and control of technology.
Panopticons Are a Worldview Problem
I do not blame technology per se for the problem. Rather, I point to our foundational beliefs, our worldview, that allows for the normalization of separation, hierarchy, deception and control. The loss of interconnectedness and spiritual awareness about the significance of others, human and otherwise has brought it to us. Hierarchy is not natural, even though a relatively superficial witnessing of non-human ‘pecking orders” convinces many that it is. It is our separation and sense of superiority to Nature that is allowing such control and destruction of life systems.
The rise of billionaire influence over governments, media, food systems, and digital infrastructures is also a worldview issue. Our anthropocentric, materialistic beliefs have led to the accumulation of money, disregard for others, greed, disregard for clean air and water in many cases, etc. Colonial worldviews privilege extraction over relationship, accumulation over sufficiency, and control over reciprocity. In this frame, wealth is not a means to support life but a measure of domination. An example of such billionairre control of governments and militia is what continues in Palestine. Israeli-controlled, highly surveilled housing zones are being designed to shape not only movement but consciousness itself, especially for a new generation of Palestinians.
Such environments regulate where people can live, how they move, what they can access, and how resistance is pre-empted through constant monitoring. From an Indigenous perspective, this is not merely an occupation; it is an attempt to sever a people’s relational ties to land, memory, and collective identity. When housing becomes a tool of behavioral control, the goal is not safety but submission. It is the colonial logic of domination via information control, disregard for truth, military might and anthropocentrism.
What Indigenous Counter-movements Offer Us?
Indigenous teachings warn against this loss of our inner authority. When people forget their relational responsibilities to ancestors, to future generations, to the more-than-human world and to one another, we become easier to control. Fear replaces conscience. Metrics replace meaning.
Returning to a Nature/Spirit based worldview is not about anti-technology, anti-wealth, or anti-innovation. They are anti-disconnection. At their core are principles that directly counter the billionaire panopticon:
- Relational accountability: Power is legitimate only when it serves the whole web of life.
- Sufficiency over excess: Wealth beyond what sustains community is a danger signal, not an achievement.
- Visibility with consent: Being seen is sacred, not coerced or commodified.
- Decision-making by consensus: Collective wisdom is valued over unilateral control.
A Counter-Movement Already Emerging
Fearless engagement, however, is currently being practiced by a growing number of people. Across the world, quiet resistance is underway. It does not always look like protest. Often it looks like refusal.
- Refusing to equate success with accumulation.
- Refusing platforms that profit from division and surveillance.
- Refusing the lie that humans are separate from Nature or from one another.
- Refusing to go to work for the controllers.
Community land trusts, local food sovereignty movements, Indigenous-led conservation, and alternative education models grounded in relational ethics all represent cracks in the panopticon. These movements share a common insight: systems built on fear cannot outlast systems built on kinship. Indigenous cultures are on the front lines of this resistance.
Conclusion
Thus, An Indigenous response to the panopticon is not invisibility, but sovereignty and a sacred sensibility toward Mother Earth and the damage she suffers from such human hierarchy. It is not so much about the right to decide when, how, and why one is seen, but it is the responsibility to make sure being seen happens. It is the responsibility for helping assure we all live without being reduced to data, labor, or uninvestigated corporate directives about what we need. Resistance is not radical. It is responsible.’
To become responsible, however, calls for imagining responsible actions. Jason Silva says “Imagination is more fundamental than atoms.” Einstein says “Imagination is more powerful than knowledge.” The phenomenon of natural hypnosis is key to imagination in action. It is also that which deactivates us if we are not aware of it happening to us instead of coming from our own inner wisdom. Join me in my one-on-one sessions to learn how to master self-hypnosis and worldview literacy. Contact me via fourarrowsbooks.com.
