Comparison Of Drugs In Brave New World By Aldous Huxley

Many individuals wonder about whether using artificial pathways to happiness, through drugs, yields more positive or negative results for society. People enjoy the fact that they can easily escape from their stress by using these drugs. However, these drugs also can lead to terrible consequences, such as becoming more oblivious to reality or overdosing. In the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Huxley criticizes society’s reliance on drugs to provide citizens with artificial happiness. By writing about soma, a made-up drug that the government distributes in order to ensure that their citizens remain happy, Huxley implies that the allowance of similar drugs can lead individuals to become dependent on them and fine with their lack of freedom,

For example, in the 1920s, addictive drugs could be found in everyday products that people consumed. Despite the fact that “The Roaring Twenties” was also the time of the Prohibition Era and the time of the banning of various drugs, Americans increasingly turned to drugs in order to feel better. However, this “period of prosperity” came to an end when the stock market crashed in 1929. Huxley’s work displays the possibilities of what could happen if people become too dependent on a artificial pathways to satisfaction with life. He uses soma in order to spread the message that over-dependence on drugs can lead people to become blind-sighted to the problems in their society, which could have been part of what caused America to go from prosperous times to a time of economic depression so rapidly. Since Huxley’s time, drug-dependence has become an even larger problem in our society. With the increasing amounts over-medication, abuse of drugs, and deaths due to drug overdoses, Huxley’s novel continues to serve as an important reminder of just how dangerous taking the “easy” route to happiness can potentially

One of the main questions that will shape this project is: how would our society be different if people were less dependent on “taking the easy way out,” often using drugs, in order to solve their problems? Currently, I believe that our society would be more productive and learn more if people stopped relying on finding artificial solutions to their problems. Also, people would more easily notice the reality of society, allowing them to notice and solve problems in the world. A claim that I would like to explore would be the idea that this dependence is entirely negative to our society. Some people may argue that people may be better off relying on easy escapes to their problems, as they remain less stressed instead of enduring the hardships of life. I would like to weigh and analyze the positives and negatives of people artificially maintaining a state of contentedness in this essay. Another driving question for this essay would be: in what ways, if any, has the government ‘controlled’ people implicitly? Analyzing possible answers to this question could work to help draw parallels between our society and the society in Brave New World. In Brave New World, the government controls their citizens by giving them soma so that they remain fine with their lives and do not question the way that society runs. Similarly, in our society today, the government attempts to control our knowledge by shaping the way information is