Huxley Revisited: How Engineered Drugs Tranquilize Modern Society
To many, the 1932 novel has come uncomfortably close to our 21st-century reality through its depiction of a hyper-technological society where human nature is under the ruthless control of a scientific elite.
One critical method of control is the pervasive use of drugs — strongly encouraged by the government— in order to placate the masses. As Huxley hints at in the book, the concept of a drug has expanded, including both chemical substances and technological entertainment, each addictive in its own way.
Drug use is nothing new, being a staple across cultures and ages for medicinal as well as ritual purposes. Ancient Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian herbal medicine predates the second millennium B.C. [1], but it did not take long for mankind to also discover hallucinogens for use in spiritual rituals and for recreational purposes. For example, Native Americans have likely partaken in the psychoactive drug peyote for several thousand years [2]. Nonetheless, a true pharmaceutical industry as we know it today did not emerge until Huxley’s time — now humans had the ability to isolate active ingredients from natural sources and synthesize man-made versions, producing a slew of new medicinal and recreational drugs.
Huxley first learned of the Hindu ritual drink called ‘soma’ during a trip to India in the 1920s. Huxley repurposed this psychoactive drink for his fictional soma – a narcotic which induces euphoria in its user. Whether taken by tablet or through inhalation, Huxley’s ‘soma’ has a quasi-religious significance to Brave New World’s society.
Soma then acts as an “opium of the masses” — a widespread recreational drug, meant to offer relief from those ‘dead’ moments between work and entertainment. Huxley wrote:
“Now–such is progress–the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think–or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon…"
This need to fill each and every moment with hedonistic pleasure through the use of drugs is a prediction of Brave New World which has been nothing but prophetic, when one considers the current role pharmaceuticals play in our times. Over-the-counter and prescription drugs have erected a new pleasure market of sorts. The Rolling Stones’ 1966 hit Mother’s Little Helper captures how the real-life analogue of Huxley’s soma had found its way into the cabinets of the modern household:
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day
Though over-the-counter painkillers of this sort have risen in use since Huxley’s time, how ubiquitous illicit psychoactive drugs for recreational use are, is less clear. The drug of choice changes across generations — from marijuana (now licit in many several nations) to methamphetamines to prescription painkillers. Old drugs evolve and new drugs are invented, creating new crises and black markets. What is clear is that many pharmaceutical companies and illicit drugmakers alike cater to similar cravings the characters in Brave New World experienced: the need for escape, pleasure, and a ‘heightened’ experience.
What is perhaps even more prescient than Huxley’s vision of a medicated society is how he views the role technology plays in pacifying the people of the future — technology and drugs are both tools to achieve one aim. One such “electric drug” is a new form of cinema called “the feelies”. Rather than simple audio and video, the feelies incorporate touch and smell to create hyper-realistic experiences that are “more solid-looking than they would have seemed in actual flesh and blood, far more real than reality…” But Huxley’s rudimentary description of the technology involving knobs for touch and aerosol fragrances for smell pales in comparison to the intense audio-visual experiences modern virtual reality—a technology that is bound to disrupt the “normal” human experience as much, if not more, as any drug—offers.
However, even Huxley failed to predict the advent of today’s predominant opium of the masses; social media, which has become as ubiquitous as his soma. While social media has only been prominent for just over two decades, its capacity to draw people in and have them invest more and more of their time, is already making itself felt. By commanding people’s attention via finely-tuned algorithms to match individual preferences, social media accomplishes what Huxley’s dystopian drugs aimed at—not only pacifying the user, but distracting him to the point of inactivity and filling his head with whatever content is most mollifying. Excessive social media use comes with real consequences: depression, shortened attention spans, and disrupted sleep [3]. Furthermore, like soma, non-use of social media is often frowned upon—those avoiding sites and apps used by their peers are often ostracized [4].
Though both pharmaceuticals and technology offer significant advantages to society, Huxley recognized that our innate vice of immoderation would transform these inventions into means of base gratification. He understood that man’s promethean instinct to create new technology would be hijacked by his pleasure-seeking tendency, leading to ever more dangerous and addictive creations.