“All human beings are becoming humanoids. All over the world, not just in America. We’re just getting there faster since we’re the most advanced country.” – Howard Beale

Paddy Chayefsky’s character, Howard Beale, wasn’t the first protagonist to point a finger at dopamine addicts. Satirists have been writing about dopamine-induced behaviors for centuries. It is evident, whether it is Jonathan Swift exploring dopamine’s influences from Liliput to Bromdingnag, Charles Dickens staging a dopamine intervention on Ebeneezer Scrooge, Oscar Wilde shining a light on the idiocies of Victorian England, or George Orwell providing a catastrophic prediction into what it will look like if the most diseased addicts continue to take over the world.

As each of these writers turned reality on its head to skewer the buffoonery, insanity, and inhumanity that riled them, they somehow ended up diagnosing dopamine addiction — long before there was brain scanning equipment to reveal how the brain disease they were writing about worked.

All incisive social critique is really an exposé on dopamine addicts running amuck in diseased societies. When the censors stopped Rod Serling from exposing bigotry, xenophobia, and general stupidity during prime time, he wove his insights into Twilight Zone vignettes and the movie, Planet of the Apes. Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek and planted his dopamine addicts in outer space. Theodor Geisel, writing as Dr. Seuss, filled dozens of “children’s books” with simpleminded caricatures who had about as much insight into their diseased behaviors as the power-hungry pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Then there was Hans Christian Andersen’s wonderful tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes — a story that’s been read by millions of clueless adults who believed Andersen was writing about other people’s foolishness. By playing the self-deceptive game of “look at those dummies,” generation after generation of well-meaning grown-ups squandered countless opportunities to help themselves, and the children they were reading to, gain invaluable insights into how afraid we all are to be the first to speak up about obvious absurdities that most others prefer to ignore.

There’s an important difference between yesteryears’ satirists and the authors ofThe Perfect Pandemic. Modern brain scanning equipment makes it possible to get past the satirizing, critiquing, and complaining. For the first time in history, scientists can explain how dopamine disease and dopamine addiction keep just about everyone behaving like self-deceptive buffoons who never seem to figure out that we’re the ones being satirized.

The problem is that dopamine addiction is so all pervasive that it’s reached pandemic proportion. So much so that even the smartest scientists can’t understand how, why, and that they share a vested interest in not wanting to look into the possibility that they’ve spent their lives earning degrees, titles, and positions in the hopes of being accepted into an exclusive club dedicated to keeping anyone from figuring out that a brain disease has turned everyone into dopamine addicts.

It would be interesting to invite scientists to view a Twilight Zone episode about highly intelligent researchers scrambling to keep anyone from discovering a brain disease capable of keeping sufferers from wanting to know they had the disease. My guess is that very, very few of them would figure out that they were the researchers being satirized.

What do you think?