When someone has eyes on you~

Central Argument: Surveillance makes us choose right actions but usually without the right reason -- wanting to do the right thing.

Everyone knows that they have different choices in their life. The two choices after narrowing down are the right and the wrong. Most of the time, the wrong path seems to be more thrilling and exciting, inculcating into people a desire to be bad despite their conscience. They do, however, know that their acts are wrong and often want to cover their mistakes from other people. Over time, the discovery of surveillance has been uncovering people’s mistakes, thus leading to even justice through surveillance. This makes people choose to do right things. However, as Emrys Westacott says, surveillance cannot make people morally upright; through experiences and observations of people’s behavior, it is clear that people choose to do right things under surveillance just because they feel someone is watching them and their immoral behaviors.

My aunt is very particular about obedience. All of us, especially her son Ye Chan, know this very well. I always thought Ye Chan, who is only five years old, knows to obey elders. However, one day when my aunt had asked me to take care of him, I noticed that he does not obey my grandparents. He screamed and threw things around when he was angry, and he did not eat healthy food but junk. But the day my aunt returned, he was again a quiet, cute little kid. We could simply say that this isn’t a big deal because he is still a small kid, but the fact he is still small yet knows how to behave when in front of his mom proves that humans want to cover their mistakes since they are very little kids.

While observing students and myself, I realize that surveillance doesn’t really make us morally upright. When a teacher gives an assignment to be submitted to plagiarism-detecting website turnitin.com, all of us try not to let even a single phrase to be copied from any source. However, when we are assigned to simply hand the work to the teacher, we usually do not care much even if we copy few phrases; we simply give an excuse: “well, I can’t think of any way to rephrase this.” It is so clear that we students are often stressed and not happy to submit our work on turnitin.com, showing that we aren’t really learning to be morally upright in our lives but are learning how to act accordingly under surveillance.

My uncle is another example. Although he is a working, employed adult, he does what we do in school – acting accordingly under surveillance. The day he sent me a chat, I wondered how he was free to chat with me during his working hours. It was soon clear that he usually chats with lots of people while his boss is not around. Perhaps he was really glad to chat with me after a long time, but if chatting during working hours is not wrong at all, why doesn’t he reply to my chats when his boss is around? My uncle stops chatting when his boss is around because he knows that chatting during working hours makes him a lazy, not-focused employee. Focusing on his work not because he wants to do the right thing but because he wants represent himself as a trustworthy employee, is that the goal of surveillance?

Surveillance surely makes people more likely to choose to do the right thing. But it does not make people to do so because of the right reasons. Observing a small kid Ye Chan, my friends who are teenagers, and adults like my uncle, I understood that whichever phase of life we are at, we only try to cover up our mistakes and thus do our best only under surveillance while we are carefree when we aren’t under surveillance. If we keep on acting right because we have to and not because we want to, will we be morally upright inside out or only when under surveillance forever?