Okay, I want to start by putting a very specific
image in your head. I want you to picture the
student center at University College London.
It's, you know, a modern building, lots of glass,
students rushing around with coffee, stressed
about exams. And right there, in the middle of
all this bustle, inside a big glass display case,
sits an old man. And we should be clear, we don't
mean a statue or a painting. No, not at all.
We mean the man himself. He's sitting on a wooden
chair holding this walking stick and he's wearing
an 18th century coat and breeches. His actual
clothes. His actual clothes. And if you look
closely at his hands, you realize, wait, those
are bone. That is a literal skeleton padded out
with hay dressed in his own clothes. It is Jeremy
Bentham, the Otto icon. It has to be the most
bizarre memorial in all of academia. I mean,
most people get a plaque, maybe a building named
after them. This guy decided to become a piece
of furniture. He did. But looking at photos of
this thing, the auto icon, it creates this immediate
tension. On one hand, it looks kind of like a
wax museum figure that's seen better days, you
know? A little creepy, yeah. But then on the
other hand, you find out the history and the
fact that his actual skeleton is in there. It
moves from quirky to genuinely macabre really,
really fast. It does. But, you know, that tension
is perfect. It's the perfect entry point for
understanding the man himself. How so? Well,
Jeremy Bentham is remembered today mostly for
this eccentric afterlife, or maybe as a footnote
in a philosophy class. But the mind that orchestrated
that display, the mind that said, stuff me with
hay and put me in a box, was one of the most
rigorous, radical, and frankly disturbing intellects
of the last 300 years. We're talking about the
father of utilitarianism. We are. But we're also
talking about a man who wanted to reduce all
of human morality to a mathematical equation.
A literal algorithm. A literal algorithm. He
was a man who designed a prison system that inspired
modern surveillance states. And yet, at the exact
same time, he was the man arguing for the decriminalization
of homosexuality and equal rights for women when
most of his contemporaries were still, I don't
know. trading slaves or burning witches. See,
that's the part that always trips me up. You
have this guy who sounds like a cold calculating
machine, literally wanting to govern by spreadsheet,
but he somehow ends up landing on these incredibly
progressive, humane positions. That is the riddle
we have to unpack in this deep dive. Was he,
as he truly believed, a genius who unlocked the
secret code of human happiness? Or was he? as
Karl Marx so famously described him, a genius
of bourgeois stupidity. Marx really didn't pull
any punches with him, did he? Marx absolutely
loathed him. He thought Bentham's view of humanity
was so narrow, so shopkeeper -like that it was
just insulting to the species. Wow. But to understand
why Marx was so angry and why Bentham is sitting
in that glass box right now, we have to go back.
We have to look at where this obsession with
utility and measurement came from. And it all
starts with a very lonely, very brilliant child
in London. back in 1748 i was reading about his
early life and lonely feels like a huge understatement
we hear the term child prodigy a lot you know
mozart and people like that but bentham feels
different it wasn't just that he was smart it's
that he seemed to bypass childhood entirely he
really did he was born into a wealthy family
his father jeremiah bentham was a clerk to the
worshipful company of scriveners which is you
know basically a high -powered legal administrator
right and jeremiah didn't just want a smart son
He wanted a trophy. He wanted a genius. He could
show off. And he got one. There's this famous
story that they found Jeremy, as a toddler, literally
still in skirts because that's how they dressed,
little boys, then poached at a desk reading a
multi -volume History of England. Rapin's History
of England. It's a dense, dry, academic text.
And he wasn't just looking at the pictures. He
was actually reading it. At what age? Maybe two
or three. He started learning Latin at age three.
By age seven... While other kids were playing
with hoops and sticks in the street, little Jeremy
was performing Handel sonatas on the violin for
his father's dinner guests. That sounds absolutely
miserable. It just sounds like he was a performing
monkey for his dad. It's not too far off, honestly.
His father was incredibly pushy. He saw this
incredible intellect in his son and immediately
mapped out a trajectory for him. Oxford, law
school. And then eventually, Lord Chancellor
of England. That was the goal. And he didn't
waste any time. He sent Jeremy to Queens College,
Oxford at age 12? 12. 12. I mean, just stop and
think about 12 -year -olds today. They're awkward.
They're playing video games. Imagine dropping
a 12 -year -old into a university full of...
drinking, gambling, 18 -year -old aristocrats
in the 1760s. It was complete disaster for him
socially. He was small, he was physically weak,
and he was intellectually superior to everyone
around him, including his tutors, which did not
make him popular. I can't imagine it would. He
developed this profound, lifelong sense of isolation.
He looked at the world around him. All the rituals,
the hazing, the religious oaths he was forced
to swear to get in, and he didn't see tradition.
He just saw nonsense. Illogical, inefficient
nonsense. And this seems to be the seed of his
entire personality, right? He's the ultimate
outsider looking in, seeing these complex systems
that everyone else accepts as normal and just
going, this is stupid. Why on earth are we doing
it this way? Exactly. That question, why are
we doing it this way, drove his entire life.
So he graduates at 15, gets his master's at 18.
And then, you know, following his father's grand
plan, he goes off to train as a lawyer. He's
called to the bar in 1769. So he's 21 years old,
he's brilliant, he has all the right connections,
he is perfectly poised to become incredibly rich
and powerful. The world is his oyster. And then
he just doesn't do it. He just stops. He attends
the courts, he watches the judges, he reads the
casebooks, and he is... utterly horrified by
what he finds. What was it about the law that
broke him? Because you'd think a guy who loves
books and logic and systems would absolutely
thrive in law. You would think that. But you
have to understand the state of English law in
the 18th century wasn't a logical system at all.
It was what we call common law. Which means it's
based on precedent. Right. On the decisions of
previous judges. Yes. But imagine that principle
stretched out over centuries. You have thousands
upon thousands of cases, often contradictory,
all written in obscure legal jargon, hidden away
in expensive books that only wealthy lawyers
owned. So there was no single rule book you could
go buy at the store. Not at all. If you as a
regular person wanted to know if you were breaking
the law, you had to hire a lawyer. to basically
guess what the law was based on what some judge
said in 1650. So it's a total pay -to -play system.
If you can't afford the lawyer, you have no idea
what the rules of the game are. Bentham had a
name for it. He called it the Demon of Chicane.
The Demon of Chicane. It sounds like a character
from a fantasy novel. It does, but he meant it
as a profound moral evil. He genuinely saw it
as a conspiracy. He believed that judges and
lawyers intentionally kept the law messy and
obscure so they could charge exorbitant fees
to navigate it. It was a self -perpetuating business
model. Exactly. He called it judge -made law,
and he had this brilliant cutting analogy for
it. He compared it to the way a man trains a
dog. Okay, how so? He said, and I'm paraphrasing
here, you wait for the dog to do something you
don't like, and then you beat him. That is the
way you make laws for your dog, and that is the
way the judges make law for you and me. Wow.
You don't know the rule until after you're already
being punished for breaking it. That is a devastating
critique. And honestly, it still feels a little
relevant today when you look at, you know, modern
tax codes or those ridiculously long terms of
service agreements. Nobody reads. It really is.
So Bentham makes this radical decision. He decides
he isn't going to practice law. He is going to
fix it. He becomes obsessed with this idea of
codification. In fact, he actually invented the
verb to codify. He wants to delete the whole
broken system and write a new clean operating
system from scratch. A single clear book of laws
written in plain English, one that any citizen
could read, understand and follow without paying
a lawyer. He spent the next 60 years of his life
trying to sell this idea to anyone who would
listen. Anyone. He wrote to the kings of Europe.
He wrote to the revolutionary governors in Latin
America. He even wrote a very long letter to
President James Madison in the United States.
So he just writes to the president and says,
Dear President Madison, I hear you have a new
country. Your laws are probably a mess. Let me
write them for you. That's pretty much the gist
of it. Yeah. He told Madison that the American
common law system was fundamentally unconstitutional
because the laws weren't written down by the
legislators the people elected. What did Madison
say? Madison politely declined, essentially saying,
thanks, but no thanks, we're good. It's the sheer
arrogance that gets me, but also underneath it,
this incredible optimism. He really believed
that if you could just write the rules down clearly
enough, you could solve most of human conflict.
That's the key. Bentham was an enlightenment
thinker on steroids. He believed that pure, dispassionate
reason could solve absolutely everything. But
this brings us to a really important clash of
ideas. Because while Bentham was trying to fix
laws with logic, the Americans and the French
were having revolutions based on rights. Right.
1776. The Declaration of Independence. We hold
these truths to be self -evident. And Bentham
read that and thought it was the stupidest thing
he'd ever heard. He hated the Declaration of
Independence, the foundational document of modern
democracy. He despised it. Viciously. In 1776,
he actually collaborated on an anonymous rebuttal
called A Short Review of the Declaration. He
looked at that famous phrase, inalienable rights
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
and he thought it was complete intellectual garbage.
Wait, hold on a second. Life, liberty, pursuit
of happiness, that's the brand. How can you be
a social reformer and hate that? Because Bentham
was, at his core, a lawyer and a logician. He
asked a very simple question. Where do these
rights come from? the American said, from the
creator or from nature. And Benson's response
was essentially, show me. He's asking for the
receipt. Where's the proof? Exactly. He argued
that there are no rights in nature. In a state
of nature, the strong eat the weak. That's it.
A right, he argued, is a child of law. You only
have a right to free speech if there is a law
that says you have free speech and a police force
to protect you if someone tries to shut you up.
So to him, saying I have a natural right to be
free is like saying I have a natural right to
own a unicorn. It's just imagination, a pretty
fantasy. He had a much more cutting phrase for
it. He famously called it nonsense upon stilts.
Nonsense upon stilts. He thought it was dangerous
rhetoric. Because if everyone can just claim
God gave me the right to do X, then you have
anarchy. You have terrorists and revolutionaries
claiming natural rights to justify anything they
want. I can see his point, but it feels incredibly
dangerous in the other direction, doesn't it?
If rights are only what the law says they are,
then if the government passes a law saying slavery
is legal, then the slave has no rights, period.
Bentham seems to be saying there's no higher
moral ground to appeal to. That is the exact
critique. And it's a powerful one. If you remove
the idea of natural rights, do you remove our
ability to stand up and say this law is fundamentally
wrong? Yeah. Bentham would say no. He would say,
you can say the law is wrong, but not because
it violates some spooky concept of nature. You
say it's wrong because it violates utility. And
here we go. The big one. Utilitarianism. This
is the engine that drives his entire life's work.
If we can't look to God or nature or tradition
for our morality, where do we look? Bentham said,
look at your own body. Look at your nervous system.
And this is where he says, nature has placed
mankind under the governance of two sovereign
masters. Pain and pleasure. It sounds so simple,
maybe even too simple. We like things that feel
good. We hate things that feel bad. It is breathtakingly
simple. But the implications are massive. Bentham
is saying that every single thing we do, whether
we're writing a symphony, robbing a bank, or
praying to God, we are doing it to either get
pleasure or to avoid pain. He calls this psychological
egoism, right? The idea that we are all, at our
core, selfish. We are all selfish. pleasure -seeking,
pain -avoiding machines. That's the human animal,
according to Bentham. Okay, but what about something
like charity? If I give money to a homeless person,
that seems selfless. Bentham would have an answer
for that. He'd say, you do it because the act
of giving makes you feel good, that warm glow
of altruism. Or, perhaps more likely, because
the guilt of walking past and not giving would
be a source of pain for you. So you're still
serving yourself. Okay, so if we're all just...
chasing our own dopamine hits, how do you possibly
build a society? Because my pleasure might be,
you know, stealing your wallet. Precisely. And
that's why you need government. The whole role
of the legislator for Bentham is to create a
system of rewards and punishments laws that cleverly
align my pursuit of happiness with your pursuit
of happiness. To channel our selfishness into
something productive. Exactly. And the ultimate
goal of that entire system is what he called
the fundamental axiom, the greatest happiness
of the greatest number. It's a giant maximization
problem. You're trying to get the highest possible
score for collective happiness. It is. But Bentham,
being the obsessive that he was, didn't just
leave it as a vague philosophical principle.
He wanted to make it a science. He created the
philosophic calculus, the happiness algorithm.
This is where I really start to struggle with
him. How do you quantify a feeling? I can measure
a table in inches. I can't measure joy in. What
are the units, joy units? Well, he actually tried
to break it down. He gave us seven dimensions,
seven variables to measure the total value of
any action. And we're going to really get this.
We should probably walk through them. Let's do
it. OK, let's imagine a simple scenario. Let's
say the government is deciding whether to pass
a law banning loud parties after 11 p .m. A classic
noise ordinance. I like it. Right. So on one
side, you have the party thrower who gets pleasure.
On the other, you have the neighbors who experience
pain. We have to do the math. The first variable
is intensity. How strong is the pleasure of the
party versus the pain of the neighbors trying
to sleep? Okay, well, the party is really fun,
a good time with friends. Let's call that a plus
eight on a scale of 10. But being woken up by
loud music when you have to work tomorrow is
infuriating. So maybe that's a nine and nine
for the pain. Okay. Second is duration. How long
does the pleasure or pain last? The party is
maybe four hours, but the sleep loss, the grogginess,
that affects the neighbors all the next day,
so the pain lasts longer. Good. Third is certainty.
If I throw the party, how certain am I that I'll
have fun? How certain is it that the neighbors
will be disturbed? Pretty certain on both counts,
I'd say. High probability. Fourth is propinquity,
a great old word. It just means proximity in
time. Is the pleasure or pain happening now or
later? We instinctively value immediate gratification
much more. The party is now. The hangover is
tomorrow. The pleasure is immediate. The pain
for the neighbors is also immediate. Fifth is
fecundity or productiveness. Will this pleasure
lead to more pleasure down the road? Or will
this pain lead to more pain? I guess you could
argue a good party strengthens friendships, which
leads to future happiness. But the neighbor's
sleep loss leads to a bad day at work, which
is more pain. It seems like a wash. Okay. Sixth
is purity. Is the pleasure purely pleasure or
is it mixed with some pain? For the partygoer,
there's always the risk of getting a noise complaint,
maybe even a fine. So the pleasure isn't pure.
Right. And finally, the most important one for
politics, extent. How many people does it affect?
And there's the clincher, isn't it? You have
one household, maybe 5 or 10 people, having a
great time, but you might have 20, 30, 40 neighbors
in the surrounding apartments trying to sleep.
Exactly. So even if the party people are having
a plus 100 total intensity experience, if you
have 30 neighbors each suffering a negative 10
pain, the math says the total pain is negative
300. The net result is negative. Therefore...
The law should ban the party. The needs of the
many outweigh the needs of the few. Spock was
a true utilitarian. But this gets really scary
really fast when you raise the stakes. You use
a noise complaint, which is trivial. But what
if we talk about, I don't know, sacrificing one
innocent person to stop a massive riot that would
kill 100 people? This is the classic. trolley
problem or the Christian to the lion's objection
that always gets thrown at utilitarianists. Explain
that one. Okay. Imagine the Roman Colosseum.
You have 50 ,000 spectators and they all get
a huge thrill, let's say plus 10 pleasure units
each from watching one Christian get eaten by
a lion. Okay. And the Christian obviously suffers
an extreme amount of pain. Let's call it Indigus
1000 units. Right. Well, 50 ,000 spectator times
10 pleasure units is 500 ,000 units of pleasure.
That is way, way bigger than the media's 1 ,000
units of pain. So does utilitarianism say feed
him to the lions? The raw math seems to say yes,
and that's morally repulsive. It is. And Bentham
was aware of this potential problem. He tried
to patch it with the overarching concept of security.
What did he mean by that? He argued that if we
live in a society where the government can just
grab an innocent person and throw them to the
lions for public entertainment, then everyone
lives in constant fear. That background anxiety,
the insecurity, the uncertainty is a massive
negative value that affects the extent calculation
for the entire population. So the fear of the
50 ,000 spectators that they could be next outweighs
their pleasure from watching the show. Precisely.
So the math, when you zoom out, actually says
no lions because personal security is a fundamental
prerequisite for any lasting happiness. That
feels like a little bit of a cop out. It feels
like he's twisting the math to get the moral
answer he already knows is right. It's a common
criticism. But to Bentham, the alternative was
so much worse. He thought relying on fuzzy concepts
like. justice or natural rights without actually
looking at the real world consequences was just
emotional superstition. He wanted to look at
the hard data of human pain and pleasure. And
this obsession with hard data and security and
controlling behavior leads us directly to his
most infamous and I think most misunderstood
invention. It does. Because if your goal is to
maximize happiness, you have to minimize bad
behavior. And to minimize bad behavior, you need
to watch people. Welcome to the Panopticon. The
all -seeing eye. I feel like everyone kind of
knows the word, or they know the Foucault version
of it from college. But what was the actual plan?
Because he didn't just write about it as a thought
experiment. He genuinely tried to build this
thing. He spent 16 years of his life and most
of his personal fortune trying to get it built.
It was his great obsession. The idea actually
came from his brother, Samuel, who was an engineer
working in Russia for Catherine the Great. What
was Samuel doing? He was managing a factory with
a lot of unskilled, unruly workers. And he had
this clever architectural idea. If you put the
supervisor's office in the middle of a circular
workshop, a single supervisor could watch more
workers with less effort. Jeremy visited, saw
this design, and had a massive lightbulb moment.
He thought, this isn't just for factories. This
is the solution to everything. Prisons, schools,
hospitals, workhouses. So paint the picture for
us. What does a Panopticon prison actually look
like? Okay, picture a hollow cylinder, like a
giant donut -shaped building. The prisoners live
in individual cells that are ranged around the
outer ring. Okay. The cells have bars on the
front, facing the center, and a large window
on the back, facing the outside. This means they
are constantly backlit. The prisoners are always
visible as silhouettes. Like butterflies pinned
in a display case. You can see their every move.
Exactly. And in the center of that donut hole
where the supervisor's office was in the factory,
you have the inspection tower. And this is the
genius part. The tower has special blinds or
louvers. and a clever lighting system so that
the inspector inside can look out and see all
the prisoners, but the prisoners cannot look
in. They just see a dark, ominous tower. That's
the core mechanic. It's the asymmetry of the
gaze. Yes. Bentham called it creating the sentiment
of an invisible omniscience. The prisoner never,
ever knows for sure if he's being watched at
that exact moment. The guard might be staring
right at him. The guard might be in the bathroom.
The guard might have gone home hours ago. But
the prisoner has no choice but to assume at every
single second of every single day that he is
under surveillance. It's pure psychological warfare.
You force the prisoner to internalize the guard.
You start policing yourself because you're terrified
of that invisible, all -seeing eye. And that
makes it incredibly efficient. You don't need
50 guards patrolling the halls. You need one
guy in a tower. Or maybe you don't even need
one guy. A cardboard cutout might do the trick
if the bluff is good enough. It sounds absolutely
horrifying. It sounds like the blueprint for
a totalitarian state. It does to us, looking
back. But here is the crucial nuance that people
often miss when they talk about the panopticon.
In Bentham's mind, this was the humane option.
Humane? How? In what possible world is invisible
omniscience a humane form of punishment? You
have to compare it to the reality of 18th century
prisons. They were not nice places. They were
dark, filthy, disease -ridden dungeons. Prisoners
were literally chained to walls in the dark.
They died of typhus and starvation. They were
brutally abused by guards with no oversight.
So context matters. This was an alternative to
that. A radical alternative. Benthone's Panopticon
was designed to be bright, heated, and have fresh
air circulating. He wanted to get rid of the
physical chains and the beatings. He argued that
if you can use the mind to control the prisoner,
the power of the gaze, you don't need the chains.
He called it a mill for grinding rogues honest.
He genuinely thought he could reform people with
architecture. He did. He was so convinced that
he even wanted to run it as a private business.
He proposed a system of contract management.
What did that entail? He, Jeremy Bentham, would
be the owner and operator. He would pay for the
food and health care of the prisoners, and in
exchange, he would get to profit from their labor.
He designed treadmills they would walk on to
power looms and other machinery. So private prisons
profiting from inmate labor. This sounds incredibly
modern and controversial. It does. But, and get
this, he proposed that his contract would include
a clause where he would pay a hefty fine to the
government for every single prisoner that died
under his care. Like a life insurance policy
on his own inmates? Basically. It's pure utilitarian
logic. He wanted to align his selfish interest
making a profit with the prisoner's primary interest,
staying alive. If he starved them or let them
get sick, he would lose money. So theoretically,
it incentivized him to treat them well. It's
the ultimate capitalist solution to criminal
justice. I'll bet you I can keep these guys alive
and productive for a profit. And the British
government actually bought it. They signed a
contract with him. They paid him money. He bought
a plot of land for it at a place called Millbank,
right on the Thames. But it never got built.
What happened? It all fell apart. The land he
bought was marshy and unhealthy. The king, George
III, personally hated the idea. The aristocratic
landowners in the area thought Bentham was a
dangerous radical and lobbied against it. After
years of fighting, the project was officially
scrapped. And Bentham was crushed. He was heartbroken.
He felt the government had betrayed him. He wrote
that they have murdered my best days. He eventually
got 23 ,000 pounds in compensation, which was
a huge sum. But he remained bitter about it for
the rest of his life. He never got over it. Never.
But of course, the idea didn't die. The French
philosopher Michel Foucault picked it up in the
1970s and made it famous again. Foucault argued
that while we didn't build the specific building,
we built the panoptic society. Schools, hospitals,
factories, even open plan offices, they're all
forms of panopticons. We behave because we think
we're being watched by the teacher, the doctor,
the boss. And now, of course, we carry the panopticon
in our pockets. But let's hold that thought for
the end because that's a big one. I want to pivot.
Because so far, Bentham sounds like a bit of
a monster. He wants to delete human rights, he
wants to calculate morality with an algorithm,
and he wants to put us all in a glass donut to
be watched. Right. That's a fair summary of the
dark side. But then... You keep reading his work
and suddenly this exact same cold calculating
logic leads him to conclusions that are so progressively
radical, so compassionate that they make the
founding fathers look like medieval dinosaurs.
It's the other side of the same coin. And the
connecting thread, the thing that unifies both
the prison and the progressive politics is sensation.
Explain what you mean by that. Remember, Bentham's
entire moral system doesn't care about. or what
the Bible says or the natural order of things.
He cares about one question and one question
only. Does it hurt? Pain and pleasure. It always
comes back to that. It always comes back to that.
So he applies this to animals. Now, in the 18th
century, the dominant philosophical view from
people like Descartes was that animals were basically
clockwork machines. They were automata. They
might scream if you kick them, but it was just
a mechanical reaction like a spring uncoiling.
They didn't have souls, so they couldn't truly
feel pain. So you could do whatever you wanted
to a dog and it had no moral weight whatsoever.
None. Bentham looks at this and applies his calculus.
Right. And he writes this incredibly famous line.
He says, the question is not, can they reason?
Yeah. Nor can they talk. But can they suffer?
That shift from can they think to can they feel,
that changes everything. It completely shatters
what he called the insuperable line between man
and beast. If a horse feels pain, and pain is
the definition of evil, then causing a horse
to feel pain is a morally wrong act. Period.
Full stop. And he didn't mince words about it.
Not at all. He explicitly compared the treatment
of animals to the institution of slavery. He
predicted that one day we would recognize that
the number of legs an animal has, or the velocity
of the skin, is not a sufficient reason to abandon
a sensitive being to a tormentor. He was writing
this in the 1780s. Mind blowing. It is. He essentially
invented the entire philosophical basis for the
modern animal rights movement almost 200 years
before it became a mainstream idea. But did he
live it? I mean, was he a vegan? No. And this
is where the logic gets. Well, it gets very utilitarian.
He ate meat. Isn't that a huge contradiction?
Mm hmm. Not to him. He argued that animals, unlike
humans, live mostly in the present. They don't
have complex plans or anxieties about the future.
So if you kill a cow painlessly and instantly,
the cow doesn't lose its future plans for retirement.
It just ceases to be. And if we then eat the
cow, we humans get a great deal of pleasure and
nutrition. So, cow feels no pain in death, plus
human gets pleasure from food. Net good for the
universe. That is an incredibly convenient piece
of logic. It is, but he was absolutely adamant
that the life of the animal before its painless
death should be free from suffering. He was okay
with killing, but he was vehemently against cruelty.
And he applied the same sensation logic to something
that was even more taboo for his time, sex. This
is perhaps the bravest and most hidden part of
his intellectual life. In 18th century England,
sodomy was a capital offense. It was a hanging
offense. It was viewed with a level of religious
and social revulsion that is hard for us to even
comprehend today. And Bentham writes an essay
about it. He wrote thousands of pages on it,
actually. Most famously, an essay he titled,
Pateristi, which he wrote around 1785. But he
didn't dare publish it. He knew it would ruin
him. It would destroy his reputation completely.
But in those private notes, he crunches the numbers.
He applies the philosophic calculus. He looks
at two men engaging in a consensual sexual act.
Yeah. Variable one. Pleasure. Well, they are
both enjoying it. That's a clear positive value
on the ledger. Okay. Variable two. Pain. Who
is being hurt? No one. It's consensual. Exactly.
He called it an imaginary offense. He argued
that it creates no primary mischief. No one is
robbed. No one is assaulted. No property is damaged.
The only pain that exists is the abstract offense
taken by other people in society because of their
own prejudice and superstition. So he's balancing
the actual real pleasure of the couple against
the imaginary prejudiced pain of the pearl clutchers.
And he concludes, quite logically, that the state
has absolutely no business regulating it. He
called homosexual acts mere irregularities of
the venereal appetite. Basically, just a different
taste, like preferring tea over coffee. It had
no moral significance. He pathologized the reaction
to the act, not the act itself. He basically
said, if you have a problem with this, that's
your problem, not the laws. For 1785, That is
astoundingly modern. It's the first known argument
for homosexual law reform in English history.
And it's the exact same logic he used for women's
rights. He argued for complete female equality,
suffrage, the right to divorce, the right to
hold political office. Why? Because women feel
pain and pleasure just as intensely as men do.
Excluding half the population from public life
massively reduces the total happiness of the
society. It's just amazing how the same intellectual
tool. This cold, robotic principle of utility
can be used to build a terrifying prison and
to liberate the oppressed. It's a tool. It's
an amplifier. It just amplifies whatever input
you give it. If you put security above all else,
it builds a panopticon. If you input the alleviation
of suffering is the only thing that matters,
it builds a framework for human rights. We've
talked a lot about the philosophy, but we have
to talk about the man himself because you don't
write thousands upon thousands of pages about
the demon of chicane and auto icons without being
a little different. Different is definitely the
word. Bentham was a supreme eccentric, a true
English original. As he got older, he became
more and more of a recluse in his house in Westminster,
which he nicknamed the Hermitage. He had names
for everything, didn't he? Everything. He had
a favorite walking stick he called Dapple. He
had a teapot he called Dick. And, most famously,
he had a cat. The famous cat. Originally, the
cat was named simply... but then Bentham decided
the cat should be knighted, so he became Sir
John Langbourne. Eventually, Bentham concluded
that the cat had taken holy orders, so his final
name was the Reverend Sir John Langbourne. I
love that. It shows a real sense of humor, or
at least a sense of private playfulness. It does.
But there was also a profound rigidness to his
life. He had a strict daily routine. He woke
up at 6 a .m. every single day. He would go out
into his garden and trot, not walk. He called
it trotting for exercise. Then he would work
until 4 p .m. And he was constantly inventing
words. Constantly. He invented his own vocabulary
for his philosophy. We still use many of his
words today. Words like maximize, minimize, codify,
and international. He invented the word international.
Wait, international is a Bentham word. I had
no idea. It is. Before him, people talked about
the law of nations. He coined international.
But he also coined words that thankfully didn't
stick, like catwhips starve him, which was his
proposed term for a bad government. Some modern
psychologists and researchers have looked at
all this, the obsessive focus on systems, the
social isolation, the rigid routines, the lists
and word making, and have suggested he might
have been on the autism spectrum. Maybe what
we would now call Asperger's syndrome. It's a
retrospective diagnosis, which is always tricky
and speculative. But the pattern of behavior
certainly fits. The intense focus on systems.
The apparent difficulty with emotional nuance.
The fact that he fell in love a few times but
could never quite make it work. He proposed to
a woman when he was 57, and she rejected him
gently, noting his many peculiarities. It makes
the whole auto -icon thing make a lot more sense,
doesn't it? He didn't process death emotionally
as a tragedy. He processed it logically as a
problem of waste. Exactly. To him, burying a
body in the ground was just wasteful. It was
rotting, useful material that could be printed
to better use. He wrote this incredible tract
called Auto Icon, or Further Uses of the Dead
to the Living. Further uses, as if we'd already
figured out the first few uses. Right, and he
suggested that our dead ancestors could be preserved
and used as memorial statues. He said, imagine
a country estate where the driveway is lined
not with elm trees, but with your grandfather,
your great -grandfather, your great -great -grandfather,
and so on. That is the stuff of absolute nightmares.
He argued it would be a great moral lesson for
the children. You could see the actual presence
of your ancestors inspiring you to virtue. So
he decided to lead by example. He left very strict,
very detailed instructions in his will. Step
one, public dissection. Public dissection, yes.
This was really important to him because at the
time, dissection was seen as a punishment. It
was only performed on the bodies of executed
criminals. It was a mark of shame. Bentham wanted
to destigmatize it to help advance medical science.
So on June 9th, 1832, three days after he died,
his friend, Dr. Southwood Smith, performed the
dissection in front of a crowd of students and
colleagues. And there was a thunderstorm during
it, right? The story is always told with a thunderstorm.
A massive electrical storm over London. The lightning
was supposedly flashing through the windows while
the doctor cut into the great philosopher's body.
It's all very gothic and dramatic. And then step
two. The stuffing and mounting. The skeleton
was meticulously cleaned and wired together.
He was dressed in his own underwear, two pairs
of socks, his breeches, and his favorite coat.
But then, they got to the head. This is the part
I was waiting for. Because the head in the glass
case today is made of wax, what happened to the
real one? Bentham wanted his real head to be
used. He instructed Dr. Smith to preserve it
using a special desiccation technique he'd read
about from the Maori people in New Zealand. It
basically involved using an air pump and sulfuric
acid to slowly dry it out. DIY mummification
in his garden shed? Pretty much. And theoretically,
it's supposed to preserve the features. In practice,
it went horribly wrong. I mean, it worked in
the sense that the head didn't rot, but the skin
turned a dark, leathery brown. It shrank tight
against the skull. The eyes were gone, so they
had to put in glass eyes. So instead of a dignified
philosopher, he looked like a bog body. It was,
to quote the official reports, distastefully
macabre. It was genuinely terrifying to look
at. Southwood Smith took one look at this shrunken
head and said, I can't possibly put this on top
of the body. It'll scare people away. So they
commissioned a much more pleasant -looking wax
head from a French artist. But they kept the
real head, right? They didn't just throw it out?
Oh, they kept it. For decades, the real mummified
head sat on the floor of the display case, right
between Bentham's feet, just sitting there. That
is just asking for it to be stolen by students.
And trouble it found. Students from King's College
London, which is UCL's great rival, sold it in
1975. They held it for ransom. They demanded
a 100 -pound donation to a charity. The university
eventually paid up. There were all these legends
about it being found in a luggage locker at a
train station in Scotland. And what about now?
Where is the real head today? Today, the real
head is locked away in a secure, climate -controlled
vault at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. It's
considered too fragile and probably too sensitive
to be on public display anymore. But the body,
the skeleton in the clothes with the wax head,
is still there, sitting in the new student center.
And what about that persistent myth, the one
that says he attends the college council meetings?
Ah, yes. Present but not voting. Is any part
of that true? I hate to be the one to kill the
magic, but it's mostly no. He does not regularly
attend the meetings. The minutes do not list
him as a member. However, the legend isn't entirely
baseless. The Otto icon was wheeled in to attend
one meeting in 2013 as a special tribute for
a retiring provost. but he is not a regular board
member. Still, the fact that we are sitting here
talking about him almost 200 years later and
that I can literally go visit him tomorrow means
his utility calculation about his body worked.
He achieved a strange kind of immortality. He
absolutely did. He is arguably the most finitely
visible philosopher in the entire world. So let's
bring this all home. We've covered the genius,
the surveillance state, the radical progressive
ideas, and the skeleton in the box. When we look
at the world around us in 2026, how much of it
is Bentham's world? An incredible amount of it.
Almost all of it in some ways. If you look at
how modern governments make policy, they are
fundamentally utilitarian engines. We use cost
-benefit analysis for everything. Should we build
a new highway? Well, let's calculate the economic
pleasure of faster travel versus the pain and
cost of the homeowners we have to displace. That's
pure Bentham right there. The welfare state.
The very idea that the government has a responsibility
to ensure the basic health and happiness of the
poor. That's Bentham's greatest good principle
in actions. The fact that homosexuality is legal
in most of the West. That's Bentham's logic winning
out. The fact that you can go online and read
the laws of your country for free. That's his
dream of codification. But then there's the dark
side. Then there's the pentopticon. We live in
a world where data is the new currency. We are
constantly observed. CCTV cameras on every street,
cookies tracking our every click, our phones
monitoring our location. And we accept it. That's
the most amazing thing. We willingly accept the
terms of service. Why? Because it gives us utility.
I let Google track my location because I want
the pleasure of Google Maps working perfectly
to get me to a restaurant. Exactly. We have willingly
traded our privacy for convenience and pleasure.
We have accepted the sentiment of invisible omniscience
because the algorithm optimizes our happiness.
It shows us ads for things we want to buy. It
recommends music we'll like. It's the ultimate
tradeoff between freedom and optimization. Bentham
didn't really care about freedom for its own
sake. He saw it as a tool for happiness. He wanted
us to be happy, safe, and productive. And if
being watched helps achieve that, he'd say, watch
away. And that, I think, is the final provocative
thought to leave with. Bentham dreamed of a world
run by a benevolent calculator of human happiness.
So if an algorithm, a super intelligent AI, could
calculate exactly how to run your life to maximize
your personal happiness, but in exchange, you
had to give up your free will and just follow
its instructions. Would you do it? That is the
ultimate utilitarian question. And looking at
how glued we all are to our phones and our recommendation
feeds, I think for a lot of people the answer
is already yes. I think you might be right. On
that cheery note, next time you're in London,
go say hello to Jeremy. Just don't tap on the
glass. He's watching. Always watching. Thanks
for diving deep with us. We'll see you next time.