The inhabitants of the Brave New World were conditioned to like Soma from their birth. Hypnotically taught lessons such as "A gramme is always better than a damn". This is not such a crazy concept to grasp for this modern world. Hypnosis has recently been used in advertising. Advertising itself is everywhere; on the television, the radio, the local bus stop, on the bus, in the bus, outside the bus, on street walls, on huge billboards towering over the metropolis that we call our home. If that’s not enough you can even buy magazines, newpapers, books, catalogues and pamphlets, to look at what you're going to buy next. This overload of information is frequently used by the drug industry of today. As musical artist "Lazy Boy" preached;
"…we have more prescription drugs now than ever. Every
commercial on TV is a prescription drug ad. I can't watch TV for four
minutes without thinking I have five serious diseases. Like, "Do you
ever wake up tired in the mornings?" Oh my god, I have this, write
this down! Whatever this is, I have this! Half the time you don't even
know what the commercial is, there's people running through fields,
or flying kites, or swimming in the ocean. Like, that is the greatest
disease ever! How do you get that? That disease comes with a hot
chick and a puppy!"
Oh the appeal of sickness! In the "Savage Reservation" Linda drank excessive Mescal because she was in denial of that world, despite the sickness it created she always went back for more because she enjoyed consuming it. Then upon her arrival to the World State she ironically couldn't handle it their either and went on Soma holiday. Her socially acceptable escape inevitably lead to her demise. It's worthy of note that Huxley left this world in similar fashion, famously taking 100 micrograms of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) on his deathbed. To emphasise my point I'll write a story that I concocted;
There once was a boy playing football with his sister when he spied a blue moose,
It was a peculiar moose, not like any moose he had seen before.
He walked over to it and joked to his sister "What a fucked up looking moose!"
"No, you’re the one that’s fucked up" the moose replied.
The boy protested; "You are a talking moose!"
"You are talking to a moose" satirised the blue moose.
And with that the moose gobbled up the boy and left his sister on the field crying.
The moral behind the story of the blue moose was that if you take drugs, drugs will take you. I believe too many people are eaten alive by the desire to experiment with the subconscious. I suppose this more frequently applies to harder drugs such as methamphetamine's and opiates. Huxley was a pioneer of self-directed psychedelic drug use "in a search for enlightenment". The art of thinking is a valid one and should be explored but this should not require a mind altered from its natural state. To what point is thinking if thinking has no point? How could one express oneself when no one else understands your thoughts? I believe this styled search for enlightenment is futile. Hard drugs destroy people, not enlighten them. True self-revelation comes from individual thought, not experiencing what your brain can do when you mess up the balance. The inner self that one finds through drug use has no genuine authenticity to it. Anyone can taste good chocolate if they are fed it, just like how anyone can be "enlightened" if they inject the same shit.
Karl Marx described religion as the opiate of the people. Huxley inversely comments in his text Brave New World Revisited that "…soma is the religion of the people". Opiates are dominantly used for pain relief and to induce a state of calmness. Is this what religion is used for? I believe the answer to that would depend on the individual. Despite this modern worlds conditioning and discrimination against difference no two persons are identical and what one truly believes in is dependant on the individual. As for Huxely's comment on the substitute for god being Soma; the truth behind the statement is evident in our own "brave new world". Soma is a fictional substance and although it represents a drug in the story is could be used as a metaphor for a lot more. Money is just as addictive as the hardest methamphetamine. With the onset the Great Depression bankers jumped from the windows of their skyscrapers, I suppose that would be a side effect of greed and the dependence on materialist happiness. It's ironic that the building their happiness was built from was also used for their suicide.
So ultimately, the consumerism of substance abuse leads to more than the demise of the individual. It was the consumers' money that funded the World State; it's our money that fuels the drug industry. This then backfires as we form a dependence on whatever they fed us.
