"Ah, though art a heartless bitch"

If you could take a pill that would mean you never feel heartache, never feel loss, nor any other emotional pain, would you take it?  What if that pill made you a cold and heartless bitch?  That's the question the concept of Cybermen raise in Doctor Who.

In Doctor Who, Humans' obsession with technology and obselescence and the destination of the path it creates is examined through the characterisation of the Cybermen.  These mechanoid creatures take biological hosts such as humans and "upgrade" them.  The process usually involves removing all human emotions to increase efficiency.  Individuality is sacrificed and people essentially become a walking, talking, robot army.

Happiness and Sadness exist on a scale, we swing back and forth between them throughout our lives.  Through it all the trials we are put through, some at our behest and some at our request, we confront the reality of emotion.  Pain can come in many forms, the physical kind can be numbed with drugs.  We can make ourselves more comfortable.  In this, physical pain is really something of a scientific concept.  We can experience other kinds of pain however and when it comes to emotional pain we can feel things far worse than any physical pain can cause.  Physical pain we can become numb to in time, it is the body's way of letting us know there is something wrong.  Emotional pain however isn't necessarily about things being wrong, just, not right.  Emotional pain can be debilitating, despite the fact there's nothing physically wrong with you.

Emotional pain is often said to be demonic by those of artistic and poetic inclinations.  The idea of mental struggles being depicted as hunans wrestling with metaphorical demons is something that has been around for a long time.  Whether or not these struggles are demonic in a religious sense is questionable, but in a spiritual sense at least it is easy to agree the spirit is weakened by emotional pain.  You can quarrel over the definition of a spirit, even venture into the realms of duality and discuss the concept of a soul.  With the message and sentiment that the language alone conveys the spirit being the embodiment of our being beyond the physical form, this can be incapacitated by many emotions.  Love is perhaps the most prominent and the one most openly discussed.  The subject of countless ballads and many movies, and artistic works, heartache is in many ways a source of power.

While Love in itself is often depicted as the cure to heartache, there are those who are depicted as harnessing the power of heartache to become more powerful than they ever were.  The dark and desperate nature of this emotion often influencing these depictions cast these characters as becoming evil and consumed by their darkness, rather than the person consuming the darkness instead.  It's not really questionable whether love, a positive emotion, can give you power - it can.  The confidence it gives people, the connection it builds, the influence it gives you over other people are just a few ways that it can be exploited.  Love and many of its close relatives such as empathy and pity, are exploited endlessly.  The much more seductive side to love - lust - is perhaps the most potent.  You'll be hard pressed to find someone who has not themselves, or known someone else, who has used lust to get what they want.

So if you can use one end of this emotional scale to gain power, should it not be entirely possible to use the other too?  Is hatred really a path to power?  Those of a loving disposition would find the thought of taking such a path to be something they could never stomach, and that's where our pill comes into play. If you had a pill that would make you a cold heartless bitch, would you take it?