Soma vs. Mescaline: The Two Huxleys

“Brave New World's soma makes people comfortable. Doors of Perception's mescaline makes people see. Huxley wrote both, and he knew the difference.”

Twenty-one years separate Brave New World from The Doors of Perception, and those years are the distance between two different theories of what drugs are.

Soma is a sedative. It produces contentment and eliminates anxiety. It makes the social order acceptable by making its inhabitants too comfortable to notice its constraints, 'Christianity without tears.'

Mescaline does the opposite. It removes the filters that make ordinary existence tolerable. It produces not comfort but clarity, a quality of perception so acute that ordinary management strategies stop working.

Huxley wasn't changing his mind between 1932 and 1953. He was specifying. Brave New World was always a satire about the wrong use of consciousness-alteration, the use that produces compliance. What he found in May 1953 was the right use, the use that produces genuine perception.

Soma and mescaline are opposite ends of the same axis: one drug that makes you less conscious, one that makes you more. The political argument between the two books is about which kind of consciousness-alteration a society should value and which it should suppress.

Sources

• Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
• Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)