SOMA - ecstasy or oblivian

WCU - Spring 2006 The Problem of Stability in BRAVE NEW WORLD

SOMA: ecstasy or oblivion?

How do Brave New Worlders use soma?

* To find relief from any kind of physical or emotional pain or any mental strain; to switch off any kind of difficult feeling or painful event.
* To recreate; to take a pleasant “holiday.”
* To lose consciousness of individuality, to meld into a communal whole.
* To enhance ecstatic orgies.
* To switch on a feelings of well being, comfort, pleasure, hallucinatory pleasant sensation.

How does soma compare to our legal and/or illegal recreational, or medicinal psychotropic drugs? How does it compare to your own conception of a utopian “wonder drug”?

In what ways is SOMA a “wonder drug” and in what ways does it underwhelm?

Soma seems great…

* It’s great how soma provides instant relief, escape, well being—instant comfort and numbness—no pain. If we can take aspirin to relieve our headaches without feeling guilty, why not have a bottle of soma around to relieve our heartaches?
* It’s simple and safe. It has no side effects or consequences unless you consciously, repeatedly overdose.
* It provides protection against any trauma by raising an “impenetrable wall” between your mind and the “actual universe.”

The “wonder drug” tag hangs very loosely and is liable to fall off if you pull it just a little. The “impenetrable wall,” seems at first like “protection,” but on second glance it might seem like something else. Who does that wall benefit, the individual or the ruling powers who are interested in keeping the individual from feeling anything? Would it hurt people to feel pain? Isn’t pain an important source of growth? (No pain, no gain?) Isn’t pain what makes us empathize with the world around us, what makes us sensitive to other people? Furthermore, if you are walling everything out, you are equally walling everything in. The impenetrable wall may as well be a chemical prison. Maybe the prisons of the future will be in the form of a pill instead of a jail cell.

…but what is not so wonderful about Soma?

* It controls rather than enriches people. (The riot scene in chapter 14.)
* It disconnects people from one another rather than connects them. Can you think of any scenes in the novel that illustrate this? (Linda escapes all of her problems with soma. She abandons John completely.)
* It makes all personal growth impossible. (Because soma is such an easy solution to her problems, Lenina will need to invest any effort to understand Bernard or John.)
* It makes people “amoral”—it’s taken “hedonistically,” for the pure pleasure it provides, and for no other reason. Because it blinds us to tragedy, we end up incapable of empathy. We are amoral because we just don’t care. Why should we? Why would we?
* It is one of the instant gratifications that contribute to keeping people in a “childlike” or “infantile” state.