At first, viewers are led to identify Riley with the lead character – the yellow cheerful Joy. Yet eventually it turns out that this was the critical mistake that threatened to ruin Riley’s life. By thinking that she alone is the authentic essence of Riley, Joy browbeats all the other inner characters, thereby disrupting the delicate equilibrium of Riley’s brain. Catharsis comes when Joy understands her mistake, and she – along with the viewers – realises that Riley isn’t Joy, or Sadness, or any of the other characters. Riley is a complex story produced by the conflicts and collaborations of all the biochemical characters together.
The truly amazing thing is not only that Disney dared to market a movie with such a radical message – but that it became a worldwide hit. Perhaps it succeeded so much because Inside Out is a comedy with a happy ending, and most viewers might well have missed both its neurological meaning and its sinister implications.
The same cannot be said about the most prophetic science-fiction book of the twentieth century. You cannot miss its sinister nature. It was written almost a century ago, but it becomes more relevant with each passing year. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, with communism and fascism entrenched in Russia and Italy, Nazism on the rise in Germany, militaristic Japan embarking on its war of conquest in China, and the entire world gripped by the Great Depression. Yet Huxley managed to see through all these dark clouds, and envision a future society without wars, famines and plagues, enjoying uninterrupted peace, prosperity and health. It is a consumerist world, which gives completely free rein to sex, drugs and rock’n’ roll, and whose supreme value is happiness. The underlying assumption of the book is that humans are biochemical algorithms, that science can hack the human algorithm, and that technology can then be used to manipulate it.
In this brave new world, the World Government uses advanced biotechnology and social engineering to make sure that everyone is always content, and no one has any reason to rebel. It is as if Joy, Sadness and the other characters in Riley’s brain have been turned into loyal government agents. There is therefore no need for a secret police, for concentration camps, or for a Ministry of Love à la Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Indeed, Huxley’s genius consists in showing that you could control people far more securely through love and pleasure than through fear and violence.
When people read Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is clear that Orwell is describing a frightening nightmare world, and the only question left open is ‘How do we avoid reaching such a terrible state?’ Reading Brave New World is a far more disconcerting and challenging experience, because you are hard-pressed to put your finger on what exactly makes it dystopian. The world is peaceful and prosperous, and everyone is supremely satisfied all the time. What could possibly be wrong with that?
Huxley addresses this question directly in the novel’s climactic moment: the dialogue between Mustapha Mond, the World Controller for western Europe, and John the Savage, who has lived all his life on a native Reservation in New Mexico, and who is the only other man in London who still knows anything about Shakespeare or God.
When John the Savage tries to incite the people of London to rebel against the system that controls them, they react with utter apathy to his call, but the police arrest him and bring him before Mustapha Mond. The World Controller has a pleasant chat with John, explaining that if he insists on being antisocial, he should just remove himself to some secluded place and live as a hermit. John then questions the views that underlie the global order, and accuses the World Government that in its pursuit of happiness, it has eliminated not just truth and beauty, but all that is noble and heroic in life:
‘My dear young friend,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended – there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always [the drug] soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is.’
‘But the tears are necessary. Don’t you remember what Othello said? “If after every tempest come such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death.” There’s a story one of the old Indians used to tell us, about the Girl of Mátsaki. The young men who wanted to marry her had to do a morning’s hoeing in her garden. It seemed easy; but there were flies and mosquitoes, magic ones. Most of the young men simply couldn’t stand the biting and stinging. But the one that could – he got the girl.’
‘Charming! But in civilized countries,’ said the Controller, ‘you can have girls without hoeing for them; and there aren’t any flies or mosquitoes to sting you. We got rid of them all centuries ago.’