Aldous Huxely did what great writers do - he distilled his earlier thoughts and positions into literary form through his later novels. Take these excerpts from his 1923 essay ‘Pleasures’
NO, the dangers which confront our civilization are not so much the external dangers—wild men, wars and the bankruptcy that wars bring after them. The most alarming dangers are those which menace it from within, that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary man.
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The horrors of modern 'pleasure' arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile.
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In place of the old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions —distractions which demand from pleasureseekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort.
From these ideas we end up in Brave New World but to distill his ideas even further in Brave New World Huxely gives us Soma.
Soma is the drug of choice used to placate and medicate the population.
there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon...
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Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.
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As soon as they got back to the rest-house, she swallowed six half-gramme tablets of soma, lay down on her bed, and within ten minutes had embarked for lunar eternity. It would be eighteen hours at the least before she was in time again.
Sounds familiar to me, in fact it sounds just like how people today talk about cannabis. Legalization is upon us of this ancient drug and plant, like many things once precious or mystical in antiquity today it has been distilled into something far more sinister.
Cannabis today enjoys an outrageous amount of support from the liberal powers that be. It is touted for its health benefits and lies have been sold to many that it is somehow ‘less dangerous’ than alcohol. All the while the cultivation and curation of this drug has taken it to become a stronger and stronger narcotic. It induces narcotic oblivion in users of the strongest stuff, just look at the edibles or shatter/dabs that are now produced. This stuff is so powerful it’s almost an entirely different drug. The humble flower sold in legal shops has not escaped unscathed either of course, it has continued to get stronger and stronger.
Where alcohol has been demonized cannabis seems to be celebrated. The worlds most popular podcast by a long shot has been shouting its benefits for a while. Big Weed is now as potent a force as Big Pharma and if you argue against them they treat you no differently than the rabid pro-vaxxers did. These people are complete idealogues, worshippers of their magical plant and lack the mental capacity to even consider the alternatives or to look at the evidence. Worse still some are apparently so blinded they can’t even have engage hypothetically.
Weak.
Unfortunately though this drug is malevolent and sinister. Whilst Big Weed, like Big Pharma, tries to sweep things under the rug there is plenty of evidence that cannabis is destroying lives and wreaking havoc. There is an irony there because I sincerely believe many of the globalists who see this drug as useful to their ends because it turns users into dull, boring, addicts also don’t seem to realize it creates a higher propensity for schizophrenic violence. Perhaps this is just another luxury belief they and others hold - I know of multiple young men who have had their lives drastically altered and minds ruined through over use of this drug.
As access becomes more available and people are ever more encouraged to self-medicate from the horrors of our society things will get worse.
If we want to win for our people we have to reject these substances and acknowledge it is not the plant of old. It has become a deadly weapon of the globalists that numbs our people and sparks tragic outcomes. There is a cost to be paid.
Too many are at heart libertarians about drugs, these people are hopelessly naive to the point the do the work of our enemy for them. They assume that their ability to tolerate and moderate use of this drug means it should be readily and easily available to all. They close their minds from the horrors or signal that “actually I also hate stoner culture” some might even acknowledge what has happened with the cultivation becoming stronger and more narcotic but rebel at the idea of being asked to sacrifice for the greater good of their folk and society.
Something will have to give, beliefs and world views are jumbled by modernity. What I know is that our enemy want us drugged up, be that drug from big Pharma, big Seed Oils, or big Weed.
We inhabit an age of escapism and pleasure seeking to numb the horrors.
Huxely can see us out from 1923 with an eerie prescient vision.
Self-poisoned in this fashion, civilization looks as though it might easily decline into a kind of premature senility. With a mind almost atrophied by lack of use, unable to entertain itself and grown so wearily uninterested in the ready-made distractions offered from without that nothing but the grossest stimulants of an ever-increasing violence and crudity can move it, the democracy of the future will sicken of a mortal boredom.