Jeremy Bentham

It were one Jeremy
Put a scare in thee
Stuffed wit straw
But for his maw
Menacing his posterity

Call him ‘The Headless Horseman’ of philosophers. Bentham arranged to have his skeleton padded with straw and stitched into his clothing .. where he’s since dwelled in a closet (for the past 183 years.) This is quite apropos as he was altogether unsuccessful when he’d sought to decriminalize homosexuality. Because his mummified head is too grotesque to gaze upon, it is kept locked away and does not attend those College of London council meetings where Bentham’s wax substitute for his dehydrated brains is perched on his bones and listed at roll call as ‘present but not voting.’

Like so many champions of modern democracy, for instance Barack Obama and David Cameron, Bentham espoused individual freedoms while in actual fact he’d been busy designing the precursor to our present day surveillance state:

The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a single watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly. The name is also a reference to Panoptes from Greek mythology; he was a giant with a hundred eyes and thus was known to be a very effective watchman

Jeremy Bentham had been the prime candidate for patron saint of the National Security Agency, that is until a debate arose; whether he’d been the inspiration for a shepherd’s sexual encounter with a body of straw stitched into a man’s clothing:

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Perverts of Western Philosophy

The Satires