Brave New World

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Granada, 1932. Print.

Brave New World has been my favourite comps text so far. One of the things I really liked about it is that I think it can be read in many different ways: as a pro-communist text, as a pro-capitalist text, as a colonialist text, or as an anti-colonialist text, as essentialist and constructivist as sex-positive and sex-negative, as pro-science or anti-science, as pro-religion or anti-religion. It doesn’t give us easy answers.

I became increasingly excited as I read it because I think I could do a really interesting analysis of the novel as an anti- or counter-psychiatry text. Although Brave New World cast light on various aspects of bio-politics (I thought a comparison of the baby-making system in BNW with those in other texts, like Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time or The Matrix might be productive, too) (15-25), I found the idea of a drug (soma - the body as distinct from the soul, mind, or psyche) being used to keep everyone happy the most compelling for my own research.

Although soma mostly keeps people sated in body (although not entirely - since they must simulate natural drives for adventure/danger and for reproduction as well) (41, 192) it does not satisfy them spiritually or intellectually, but instead, simply dampens their need for/ability to conceive of spirituality or creative thought. As Mustapha Mond explains, “God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness” (188) and “universal happiness keeps the wheels [of production] steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t” (183). In Huxley’s future, religion is not the opiate of the masses, but rather, opiates are the religion of the masses ––soma is “Christianity without tears” (190).

The whole culture is build around soma: soma relaxation after work, soma holidays, soma orgies (78, 117, 190, 72-5). I think the novel thus provides a good commentary of the way in which our own culture is increasingly relying on psychiatric epistemology (including the use of psychotropic drugs produced by Big Pharma), and is increasingly obsessed with everyone being happy all of the time (you only have to be unhappy for two weeks to be diagnosed with clinical depression, for example). Soma is the solution to not only unhappiness, but to feeling much of anything, especially anything that resembles social dissent. Although most citizens take soma voluntarily because they have been conditioned to do so, the few, like Bernard, who choose not to take it are either pressured (by peers) or forced (by authorities) to take it, just as both the media and the medical system are increasingly pressuring and forcing people to take psychotropic drugs (182). As Lenina suggests to Bernard, “why you don’t take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You’d forget all about them” (80). In similar fashion, many mad activists have talked about the way in which psychiatric drugs have been used to suppress dissent, as well as to subdue feelings (such as anger, frustration or unhappiness) which are often a response to being intellectually/socially/spiritually stifled and/or ostracized/silenced/medicalized/imprisoned simply because one does not comply with particular social norms (ie. gender roles, consumerism).