If You Felt Nothing, Could You Save Mankind?

*** Spoiler Alert ***

Suppose emotion were eradicated. Could we prevent hate, rage, and war? This is the premise of the film, Equilibrium. A society built upon the belief that emotion is the root of all wars, governed by an elite few who decide what material consists "Emotional Content," regulated by a drug called "Prozium," and policed by a highly trained force known as the "Grammaton Clerics."

Director, Kurt Wimmer, presents the story of John Preston, a Grammaton Cleric, played by actor extraordinaire, Christian Bale. It begins with Cleric Preston as the Tetragrammaton's highest and most respected officer, and follows his transformation into a champion of the revolution that would change the utopia known only as Libria.

In Equilibrium, "sense-offenders" are tried and punished by death through incineration, or "processing." To feel is a crime and it is believed that such feelings can only lead to chaos and mayhem. That society cannot function if people are allowed to follow their emotions. Regulation of emotions is done through the drug, Prozium.

"Prozium - The great nepenthe. Opiate of our masses. Glue of our great society. Salve and salvation, it has delivered us from pathos, from sorrow, the deepest chasms of melancholy and hate. With it, we anesthetize grief, annihilate jealousy, obliterate rage. Those sister impulses towards joy, love, and elation are anesthetized in stride, we accept as fair sacrifice. For we embrace Prozium in its unifying fullness and all that it has done to make us great."

The Tetragrammaton assumes that all feelings lead eventually to war. They start with smaller crimes such as the hate crime and murder. World wars are shown to be rooted in passion, fury, and hate. Take World War II for example. Hitler's war on the Jews was the direct result of his anger towards a "lesser race," those not of Aryan descent. If these feelings had been prevented, could World War II have been avoided? Possibly, but hate is often steeped in a desire to do good, twisted though it may be. Hitler wished to create a society, a world, of "better" people and he believed that to accomplish this, elimination of those who would pollute and diminish the gene pool must be done.

Another example is that of Eugenics which is still practiced in some countries. Eugenics is the purification of the gene pool through the destruction of mutants and deviants. Consider what it would be like to believe that society's rise to perfection can only occur if deviants are purged. Life would be better if we didn't have a constant flow of sick and diseased people filling our hospitals to the point of overflowing, would it not? That those beds might better be used to help those with injuries resulting from day-to-day interactions? Precious government funds could then be spent on improving the quality of life instead of worrying about those with AIDS or cancer.

Purification of society is also depicted, granted in a more extreme light, in John Wyndham's The Chrysalids. Here, deviants are those who are very literally mutated by the nuclear fallout of the previous wars. These deviants are either killed or exiled to the "Fringes," where they can be kept separate from the remainder of society. Again, why waste resources on those who would be better off dead?

Humanity seeks to improve itself; that is the nature of mankind. So how do we do this? How can we, as a united people, find a way to make our society greater than it is, to achieve a higher state of being? Some would say that religion is the answer, that faith and belief in a power greater than our own is the answer to this question. But what of the religious fervor that drives the current wars in Israel/Palestine? Zealots are merely Grammaton Clerics, are they not? Clearly, drugs like Prozium are out of the question since such dependence on them is nothing more than a cracked and faulty pillar. So what then? I don't know the answer to this question; if I did, I might have my own revolution brewing, but alas I do not. There is no simple answer, society is simply far too complex.

As to Equilibrium's message, I think it's safe to say that we require emotions to survive. Without emotions, we see not people in search of betterment, instead we see drones who live merely to serve our own "Tetragrammaton." "It's circular. You exist to continue your existence. What's the point?" The point is emotions are not the key to a higher path; such precise and exacting answers are not solutions, they are the mistakes from which we will learn and grow.