Chapter 10: Satirists Have Been Writing About DIM for Centuries

November 1, 2017

Noticing the obvious

“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, in Paddy Chayefsky’s film, Network

Chayefsky wasn’t the first writer to use a fictional character to rant about dopamine-induced madness. Satirists have been lampooning DIMwits for centuries. Swift wrote about Lilliput’s fear addicts, Dickens staged a dopamine intervention for money addict Ebeneezer Scrooge, Wilde shone a light on Victorian England’s esteem addicts, Orwell predicted what would happen if power addicts prevailed.

As authors turned reality on its head to skewer the buffoonery, insanity, and inhumanity riling them, they exposed and diagnosed dopamine-induced madness — long before brain scanning equipment revealed how the disorder they wrote about worked.

Constructively criticizing destruction.

“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” – Jonathan Swift

All incisive social critique is really an exposé of dopamine addicts running amuck in diseased societies. When censors stopped Rod Serling from covering bigotry, xenophobia, and stupidity during prime time, he hid his dismissive missives in Twilight Zone vignettes and the first Planet of the Apes. Star Trek’s Roddenberry planted his dopamine addicts in outer space. Theodor Geisel, writing as Dr. Seuss, filled children’s books with simpleminded caricatures who were as clueless about their diseased behaviors as Orwell’s Animal Farm pigs.

Then there was Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes — a story recounted by countless delusional adults who missed the irony of their missing the point. By playing the dopamine game, “look at those dummies,” generations of well-meaning adults squandered valuable opportunities to help themselves, and their unsuspecting kiddies, admit they’d be more likely to throw the boy under the bus for being honest than be, or even defend, him.

There’s an important difference between yesteryears’ satirists and today’s researchers. Modern brain scanning equipment makes it possible to get past the satirizing, kvetching, speculating, and lamenting. For the first time in history, scientists can explain how dopamine-induced madness and addictions keep just about everyone behaving like self-deceptive buffoons who never seem to figure out we’re the ones being satirized.

I submit for your approval.

“We have come to rely upon a comfortable time lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.”
– H. G. Wells

It could take fifty years for the first group of influential DIMwits to acknowledge DIM’s existence, another fifty to convince mediocre minds something must be done, and fifty more to get started. We don’t have a century to address the mess. We might not have decades.

The problem is dopamine-induced madness has reached pandemic proportions. So much so, seemingly brilliant scientists (the group that should and could be getting the word out) can’t understand that, how, and why they share a vested interest in not wanting to look into the dopamine-repellent possibility they spent their lives striving for degrees, titles, and positions in the hopes of being accepted into an exclusive club dedicated to keeping both insiders and outsiders from figuring out a brain disease has turned everyone into dopamine addicts.

It would be interesting to invite scientists to view a Twilight Zone episode featuring self-important researchers complaining about behaviors destroying the species. Convinced they were the only ones qualified to grasp complexities eluding laymen they collude, convolute, and connive to discourage members and attack non-members who threaten to expose their addictions to peer approval, power, and esteem.

My guess is that most, if not all, would discover everybody’s face but their own.

Discussion

One Response to “Chapter 10: Satirists Have Been Writing About DIM for Centuries”

  1. You neglected to mention Voltaire, the greatest of them all! You need read no further to get a glimpse of human idiocy.

    Posted by Forrest A. Mow | August 28, 2011, 5:54 pm

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