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In Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley,  everyone is content. There’s even a substance called Soma that makes people feel better, not sad, agitated, or longing for more. It levels them out, so they experience no struggle, no unruly passions, no opportunity to sin, and no desire to be noble or heroic. Someone may say, ” That’s fantastic! At least everybody is happy.” Really? So you think so? Yes! Not so fast!

Well, I advance  the claim that there’s something deeply wrong here, and it is so in light of human flourishing. Rather than helping, it sabotages the human experience. Now, let’s dig a little deeper.

Hence, I think the primary danger of taking Soma, as Aldous Huxley describes it in Brave New World, is that it annihilates individual rights and reduces personhood to serving solely the ends of the State. Individuality is sacrificed in the name of happiness (with suppressed emotions) and stability. I think this is wrong.

However, we can admit that the tendency to treat science or technology as the solution to many problems has existed for some time. It was not different at the time that Huxley wrote the novel. This means the “Ford generation” believed in efficiency and mass production. Consequently, society generally places too much emphasis on scientific progress and technology at the expense of human flourishing, including human goods and virtues such as love, beauty, art, pleasure, individual thought, and creative achievement.

So, I think the quest for social stability and happiness can create a society devoid of emotion and genuine relationships. I also think it is not the government’s prerogative to intrude upon people’s lives to limit their expression of freedom, which is fundamental to the human condition. Soma only replaces meaningful pursuits with superficial happiness in a society where the mere pursuit is to eliminate pain, where pain is seen to be incompatible with happiness.

Thus, it is unsurprising that science will turn against its true purpose of improving the quality of human life and use it instead to undermine the human condition from birth. Take the example of the unorthodox practice of eugenics. This technology could easily be at the State’s disposal to condition human beings according to the State’s liking.

In addition, contemporary pharmaceutical medications can be one way to pacify the population. Pharmaceutically anesthetized people to “live or do their jobs” are indeed problematic. So, I think that the pleasure drug Soma is the equivalent of opiates for people in today’s world. But as Nozick mentioned in Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), “When humans plug themselves into machines, we are left with a sort of simulacrum of experience in a pleasant reality, but we never experience genuine pleasure in which we are in contact with the real world.” So, it is my understanding that humanity wants more than superficial pleasures.