Addiction In Brave New World

Neil Postman, in his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” asserted that Aldous Huxley’s worry, we are becoming a passive and trivial society controlled by what we love, is coming true. Now, more than ever, these fears are becoming reality. Our society’s addiction to drugs and the stigma against the communication of emotions are causing us to fall down the slippery slope that is leading to an oppressive society similar to that of the one depicted Huxley’s Brave New World. ****

The World State is built on the concept of stability. In an effort to ensure this, the controllers of the World State tried to suppress emotions, especially negative ones, because they can create distractions and cause conflict. Emotions aren’t accepted in the World

State and this is engrained into the heads of its citizens since they were children; “’Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings a week in the Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course’” (pg. 110). By conditioning the children in this way, the World State prevented its citizens from feeling negative emotions from death. Instead, they kept them in a constant state of happiness. "By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles" (Pg. 54). The world controllers used a drug, soma, as a mean to control the emotions of its citizens. The directors kept their citizens in a constant state of contentedness with the sole purpose of controlling them. In present day society, people are free to express their emotions but not everyone does. When asked the question “How are you?” the automatic response for most is either “I’m fine” or “good”. Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post puts it that “no one actually wants to hear the answer. In fact, if you actually answer the question, it’s viewed as a serious faux pas” (Petri). We live in a society that doesn’t oppress us emotionally, yet we fail to express ourselves in this way. By lacking to do so, we are allowing ourselves to be controlled by people in power, just as in Brave New World.
In both Brave New World and contemporary society, drugs are used as an escape from both mentally and physically tough aspects of everyday life.

In Brave New World, citizens of the World State take a drug, soma, to escape from emotionally hard situations. Without soma at her disposal, Lenina was forced to experience life without her emotional crutch. While visiting the reservation with Bernard, Lenina came across a man who was whipping himself for a religious ceremony. “Lenina was still sobbing. ‘Too awful,’ she kept repeating, and all of Bernard’s consolations were in vain. ‘Too awful! That blood!’ She shuddered. ‘Oh, I wish I had my soma’” (Pg. 77). Lenina, like other characters in Brave New World, relied on soma to help them escape from the harsh realities of everyday life. Linda, a former citizen of the World State, didn’t have access to soma because there wasn’t any at the reservation so she turned to other means of mental numbing. "Her tears began to flow again. ‘I suppose John told you. What I had to suffer - and not a gramme of soma to be had. Only a drink of mescal every now and then, when Popé used to bring it’" (Pg. 80). When she lived in the World State, Linda was just as reliant as Lenina on soma. Once she couldn’t get soma anymore, she turned to alcohol to mask her emotional pain. Lenina and Linda’s compulsion for soma is similar to the growing phenomena of young adults overdosing on heroin in the northeastern areas of the United States. In modern society, individuals turn to painkillers to help lessen some of their mental pain, but this type of habit is an expensive one and as result more and more people are turning to heroin, a more inexpensive option. Johnny Bousquet, a heroin addict, said, “I felt like [heroin] alleviated the pain that I was going through. It just made me feel like I can make it through that moment. And eventually, I needed it to get through every moment” (Frontline). Both Linda and Lenina, along with other citizens of the World

State, felt this reliance on drugs to get them through everyday aspects of life. The depiction of this dependence in Brave New World serves as a warning to our society as to the consequences of own enslavement to drugs. This reliance is making us incapable of facing tough situations as a society.
The World State utilized science to develop their goal of a stable society in which its citizens were content. The world controllers employed both biology and psychology to manufacture and condition the World State citizens, but once stability was reached, the idea of scientific progress was abandoned because of its threat to stability and happiness. Mustapha Mond was tasked with reading scientific articles to decide if they can be published for the rest of the World State to read. While reviewing a piece called “A New Theory of Biology” Mond said, “it was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes – make them loose their faith in happiness as a Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the human sphere” (pg. 119). This advancement in science wasn’t published because it challenged the principle of stability in the World State. The world controllers thought that too much progress in the scientific field would reduce the overall happiness in the World State. There is still science in the World State but it’s a restricted and watered down version. “’Yes; but what sort of science?’ asked Mustapha Mond sarcastically. ‘You’ve had no scientific training, so you can’t judge. I was a pretty physicist in my time. Too good - good enough to realize that all our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn’t be added to except by special permission from the head cook’” (pg. 153). The world controllers heavily filter the type of science their people have access to but this is completely different in contemporary society. In our society, we can pursue any field of science we want without restriction. New ideas and advancements in science are rewarded through prizes and grants. This celebration of new ideas encouraged people to get into a field of science and helps to further advance our culture.
While contemporary society differs from the World State in the subject of science, the stigma against emotions and our reliance on drugs is leading us down the path of a society similar to the World State. Our use of drugs as a distractor is making us passive observers of our lives.