The other night I re-watched
the movie Equilibrium. (Written and
directed by Kurt Wimmer, 2002.) The story follows the journey of John Preston
(Christian Bale) who is a law-enforcement officer and warrior-priest. The
setting is a future dystopia (post-WW III) where the State has outlawed
feelings and artistic expression, so as to ensure there will be no more war.
How can you require people
to not feel? Easy: each and every citizen is required to take a daily injection
of drugs. (Prozium) Voila! No more war or conflicts of any kind … except for
the sense-offenders who, refusing the drugs, secretly cherish Beethoven,
revel in the poetry of Yeats, fall in love, and adore their pets. Anyone caught
experiencing emotions or possessing objects with Emotional Content are in
violation of the law. These people, when discovered, are summarily incinerated,
along with their memorabilia and art.
When Preston decides to
begin to secretly stop taking his daily dose of Prozium, he starts discovering
beauty and love, anger and heartache. He also begins seeing that, while wars
have ceased, the State has declared a war against individual freedom and
self-expression, and is committing heinous crimes against its own citizens.
Avoiding War But Murdering Souls
Whether it is the external
wars of family conflicts or marital debacles, or the internal wars of, say,
self-hatred or bitterness, so many people “deal” with the accompanying tumultuous
emotions by some form of Prozium: the favorites are numbing-agents (drugs, booze
or comfort foods), escapism (TV, recreation, or work), and denial (I am doing
GREAT). Some of us devise cocktails that include all three! And sure enough, the
pain “disappears”!
The problem here is that
“the absence of war” is not the same thing as achieving peace. Those emotions
that have now been medicated into silence or placed into a vault you never open,
were seeking to communicate with you. When you cut off this communication, you
are committing an act of violence against your soul, inflicting wound after wound,
and are slowly bleeding to death.
Refusing to feel what you
feel in your relationships also leads, metaphorically, to acts of violence. Preston
actually witnessed his sense-offending wife being taken away for execution and
he didn’t experience the slightest bit of emotion. Just as the Zombie-like
State in Equilibrium had no qualms
about devouring the living, individuals who ignore, stifle, or deny their own
emotions and, thus, their souls, don’t lose any sleep over all the dead bodies and
relationships stacking up around them. If my soul doesn’t matter, neither does
yours.
The Road to Hell is paved
with Prozium.
Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2013
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