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Aldous Huxley: A Theoretical Analysis

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Americans spent $374 billion on prescription drugs in 2014 with pharmaceutical companies having an average profit margin of 19.6 percent. Clearly medicine has become thoroughly rooted in American culture, similar to the essential place medicine holds in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In his novel, Huxley creates Soma along with other mind-altering substances, which the World State uses to manipulate the population. While not all of Huxley’s predictions have proven accurate, his dark vision of the future is not as far off many would like to believe. He correctly anticipated that drugs would be used to control people; yet, in the United States today it is not the government that seeks to control the populous but rather the corporations seeking …show more content…

Huxley describes the drug as having, “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects." The citizens of the World State use this slogan in a positive way, meaning no church on early Sunday morning and no hangover. However, Huxley actually dislikes the particular combination of religion and intoxication because of the control the two exert on their users. Christianity offers an escape by promising hope for a better place in the afterlife, while booze offers the chance to forget and relieve stress in a way that the brain would normally perceive as dangerous yet does not because the prefrontal cortex is impaired by alcohol. The effects of the drug allow Linda, the Savage’s mother, to abandon life before she actually dies. Huxley reflects, “She remained in her little room on the thirty-seventh floor of Bernard's apartment house, in bed… yet wasn't there at all, was all the time away, infinitely far away, on holiday; on holiday in some other world.” Huxley writes Linda’s character to provide a bleak illustration of the ways in which Soma allows users to abandon life and any problems accompanying it. Characters in Brave New World depend on Soma to avoid negative emotions or really any feelings at all. Soma represents a flawed idea to Huxley. He does not disapprove of the use of drugs to improve lives; rather Huxley has a problem with individuals using mind-altering substances to give up their consciousness and personal

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