John Stuart Mill once wrote:
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied and in suffering than to be a pig satisfied and comfortable.
It is better to be Socrates tormented and dissatisfied than a fool contented and happy.

The Black Mirror episode Metalhead on Netflix opens with a scene whose purpose, in my reading, is to criticise a society in which all human beings have been transformed into homogeneous, identical, low-valued and narrow-minded units, none standing taller than another, their desires, ambitions and horizons all held at the same level.

A society in which consumption and the feeling of satisfaction are the only values and the only measures of value.
A society in which human beings are worth “nothing,” and their security can be supervised by surveillance systems incapable of understanding, stripped of human feeling and unable to recognise human difference, like guard dogs watching over a herd of pigs.

The opening dialogue of the film reminds us how many people in societies today have reached an inverted version of what Mill regarded as the aim of human life. For many, even deep within the heart, the belief has become:

“It is better to be a pig satisfied and comfortable than a human being dissatisfied and suffering. It is better to be a fool happy and contented than Socrates tormented and dissatisfied.”

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A translation by meaning of the opening dialogue of the film:

“I don’t think I could live like a pig under any circumstances.”

“What’s wrong with being a pig?”

“I think it’s humiliating.”

“Humiliating? Why?”

“Because you have to live in a condition where your nose and your backside are at the same level.

Not only are your own head and tail on the same level; every day when you look at others you see only beings whose heads rise no higher than anyone else’s backside. That is all they see and experience every day and throughout their entire lives.

What sort of society is a society like that?

An equal society.”

The first aim of those who want to walk the path of individuation should be to ensure that they never accept such a reduction of the purpose of life or of the meaning of equality.

Aydin Areta

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied!

John Stuart Mill