Soma, Screens, and the Pacification of Passion
Brave New World's miracle drug is more relevant than ever
It's a world where everything is easy. Where insurmountable obstacles need not be overcome. Where desire sits within arm’s reach of fulfillment. Where obedience is drilled by "brains and buttocks, never with the fists."
It's a world where everyone is happy, all the time. Where solitude is abnormal and thinking is alien. Where consumption is king and waste is unseen. Where people are pacified by pleasure, conditioned to conform, and if ever unpleasant emotions arise, there is always soma, the miracle drug that fills its users with empty serenity and raises “a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.”
Soma, to me, serves as a metaphor for technology, and how we use it to pacify our unpleasant emotions. Feeling down? Throw a comedy on TV. Overwhelmed? Instagram reels. Existential crisis? Distract yourself with Reddit.
By allowing soma—technology—to dominate our consciousness, we may be escaping life’s burdens, but we’re also escaping life’s beauty, its passion, its equanimity, its chaotic splendor. As John “the savage”, says, “I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
Truth and beauty have no place in Brave New World’s “civilized” society, which our protagonist John experiences through the eyes of Native American culture. John is born at a “savage reservation” to Linda, a woman who became lost during a trip to this reservation, and thereby had no access to contraceptives and became pregnant, a disgusting taboo to “civilized” culture.
John was lonely and ostracized at the reservation because of his mother’s promiscuity with the reservation’s married men (a perfectly normalized practice in “civilization”) and their complexion. “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely. They’re beastly to one.”
In his loneliness and hearing from his mother stories of the Brave New World, he eagerly accepts Bernard’s invitation to return to civilization—a self-serving scheme that Bernard, who is ostracized in his own society due to his stature and strangeness, hopes will gain him acceptance. But John soon experiences the horrors of a society that has repressed humanity in favor of progress and comfort.
His mother Linda, in the eyes of civilized society, has become fat and grotesque in her time away from medical control, and is immediately rejected, sinking her into a depression that she escapes through soma, while John is studied and fetishized.
“The return to civilization was for [Linda] the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as though you'd done something so shamefully anti-social that you could never hold up your head again. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks. The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday.”
Her soma holidays stand outside of time, in eternity, and I can’t help but think about the way we treat time itself today, as something to “kill” rather than to savor. We sink into eternal holes of scrolling social media or watching mindless television, unthinking, unfeeling, allowing time to slip into the ether until the next day comes so we can do it all again. We escape from time, because time, now, is a reminder of the ugliness of modern existence.
This is the key difference between Brave New World and our technology-driven modernity. Everyone is happy in Brave New World; they’ve been conditioned to be so. There is no intensity, but there is also no suffering. Citizens are entertained by artificial “feelies”—essentially overstimulating but vapid films—distracted by ceaseless socializing and sex, which is normalized to the point of meaninglessness.
Modern reality has none of this gratuitous socializing; in fact, one could argue that technology has driven social interaction to an all-time low. And sex is glorified but not necessarily readily accessible and meaningless. But the escapism of soma? That is real.
By escaping reality, we are escaping the here and now, “the appalling present, the awful reality -- but sublime, but significant, but desperately important precisely because of the imminence of that which made them so fearful.”
We live in a world rife with ugliness and darkness. It’s always been there and will continue to be. But Brave New World tells us that without ugliness there can be no beauty. Or, as Camus said, “there is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”
I am not trying to gloss over the very real potential for catastrophe we are heading for. I go back and forth on if humanity will survive another millennia; we may very well be doomed to destroy ourselves. But we’ve managed to make it this far. We’ve managed to come out the other side of unimaginable injustice and tragedy, like what we’re seeing today in Palestine (my next video will discuss this at length).
The most frustrating and terrifying truth of humanity is that we refuse to learn from history. Noam Chomsky calls this “historical amnesia.” I think this frustration is an undercurrent for the desire for escapism for many of us. But frankly, if I’ve learned one thing from the events of the past year, it’s that the luxury of being able to put on blinders to the world no longer exists, to the extent that it ever did. We need to be vigilant, now more than ever, and find a way to use our voices, our talents, and our collective power as forces for good.
As I continue to write and share my views, I am gaining a bit of a platform. I want to use this privilege as a means of engaging more truthfully with the world through education, conversation, and collective action. There has to be a way to make us realize that we are all on the same team; we see this realized in the response to disasters, when people put aside their differences to help one another. I have no idea how to achieve this on a large scale, but in the words of Ursula K Le Guin, “human solidarity is our one hope,” and the only way we can create a brighter future is by making an effort to recognize this.
Quotes from:
What We Say Goes by Noam Chomsky
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley