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

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