I'm reading Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and am being forced to look at just how institutionalized our society really is. Think about it. When you're born, your name, weight, place of birth, gender, race, etc. are all registered and kept in hospital or county records.

When you get old enough, it becomes illegal for you not to go to school. In school your grades, conduct reports, standardized test scores, health screenings, etc. are all also registered. In school you must sit still in a desk. You must abide by rules and stay in classrooms that are square and confining. When you go home you must do homework. This continues up through high school and for a lot of kids university.

Once you turn 18, you are also being monitored by the police. If you're a boy you sign a draft card. You have credit cards and records. You register to vote.

If you get a job, you have a job history you must report on subsequent applications. There your performance is judged and compensated accordingly. You must report your income regularly and get taxed. Death and Taxes. Your only other alternative is wellfare, which is another system of forms and record keeping.

If you break the law, you enter a different institution consisting of courts and metal cages. Endless forms. Paper work and permanent records you must always present any time you want a job.

If you get sick, more paper. You have a medical history. Shot records. Insurance companies get to know how many kidney stones you've had.

If you go mad, you go to a psychiatric ward. More paper. Meds.

If you get old, you go to a retirement home. The government gives you Social Security. People walking around in scrubs and take notes about the regularity of your bowel movements.

You die, and your time of death is pronounced and written down on a piece of paper. You are buried in a place where it is legal and regulated for you to be buried. Always square, confined spaces.

No wonder our culture relates powerfully to movies like The Matrix. No wonder words like "freedom" and "liberty" mean so much to us. For a lot of people the institutionalization is so far in the background that it doesn't really bother them. For others they appreciate the efficiency and control and sense of safety it provides. For others they feel like one stupid thing like having bad credit or a criminal record or being born black or with a heart condition is not something they can ever escape.

I'm wrestling with how I feel about it. Emotively, the rebel in me wants to look at the cameras and computer monitors like Nero does in Matrix II and give them all the finger. Not a very Christian response. A small part of me (the part that made me idealize my short career with Harding Security) believes in the utopic vision of justice and service to mankind these tools might potentially empower. The problem is that the systems are set up like an enormous machine where all the controls are organized into a neat control panel that sits in Washington DC. The machine isn’t inherently good or bad, but it certainly empowers whoever is pushing the buttons. This seems to be a strangely pyramid shaped power structure for a supposedly democratic society.

I know some of the consequences of this institutionalization can be pretty bad. It does funny things to ethics. Because the system is so surveillant, corrective, and automatic, instead of “doing the right thing” people are “doing the correct thing”. It’s like legalistic religion where people have forgotten why they have religious feasts and ceremonies. This is one among many complicated reasons that kids take guns and start shooting teachers and classmates. Have you noticed where all these shootings take place? They go into INSTITUTIONS like school, the workplace, and courtrooms. They don’t seem to have very personal indictments against the people they are shooting. They seem to be attacking something vague and abstract. They have lost any reason not to shoot people other than that it’s against the rules. “This is a classroom, not a videogame son.” The classroom, in my opinion, is just as virtual and constructed as videogames are.

As is typical of liberal ranting, I’m not really offering an alternative to institutionalization here. I am saying, however, that it’s important that we as individuals develop ethics based not on institutions but on morals. The reason we don’t run the red light in the middle of the night when nobody’s around should not be because we’re scared of being seen by the power structures around us. We might choose not to run it because as Christians we believe in submitting to authorities. We should not, however, be held by an invisible wall of fear. That, to me, seems evil.