81–90 of 187 posts
Whenever I hear John Lennon's Imagine, I always imagine the world portrayed in this story.
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Probably because of that part well, most of them would otherwise be addicted to something else anyway.
That doesn’t seem so obviously wrong that one should simply downvote rather than counter-arguing. Drug trends come and go. People who for whatever combination of reasons (genetics, life circumstances, surrounding culture) are likely to get addicted to drugs seem to find their way to whatever the currently popular drug is.
Life circumstances like “needing to get their wisdom teeth removed.” The doctor prescribes you painkillers afterward and makes absolutely no mention of how addictive they are, or even that they’re opioids.
I don’t think those people were going to wake up one morning and start using on heroin on their own, so I have a hard time writing them off as “well, some people would have used drugs anyway.”
It's a little harder to parse then the others because it was written in world war 1.
I think it's really interesting as the earliest example I've found of this kind of story telling.
I will probably go against the grain here but my inner tinfoil hat is telling me that the recent marijuana legalization is actually secretly run by the military industrial complex in order to silence dissent. Kind of the 'lithium in the water supply' thing.
Heh. Except it took forever for states to begin decriminalizing/legalizing marijuana, and it isn't legal at the Federal level yet.
More importantly, he predicted the rise of The Pill (birth control) very eerily too. And the long term effect that it will have on civilization is undeniable. Whatever your stance on the pill, I think it is naive to think that it will not have a lasting and deep impact on western civilization (and as it spreads globally, to all of human civilization). Never before has sex been able to be had without consequence. Or t…
Sprinkle on top a nascent anti-natalism coming from the environmentalist left and you have a recipe for a societal disaster.
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Is the name soma based on the hindu soma [1] by any chance? I alwawys wondered but never got a chance to find out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(drink)
Yep. Huxley was heavily into Hinduism. "The original soma, from which I took the name of this hypothetical drug, was an unknown plant (possibly Asclepias acida) used by the ancient Aryan invaders of India in one of the most solemn of their religious rites." (_Brave New World Revisited_, Aldous Huxley)
I hate to be That Guy Who Argues With Everything, but I will. I'm a big fan of Huxley and Brave New World, but he wasn't particularly visionary with Soma. Drug use goes back as far as humankind does because people have been trying to cope with the stress of life since there have been people. If you're looking for a drug that helps with the anxieties of everyday life, alcohol would have my vote. It's been used for tho…
Alcohol's definitely #2 though.
Would at least be useful to point out in this article that Huxley didn't have an overly moralistic view of substance use in general and he wrote one of the most classic books about using psychedelics to explore consciousness with Doors of Perception! -- I tend to find simplistic pro and anti substance screeds yawn-inducing. All psychoactive substances, whether legal or not, whether they have physical dependency issue…
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There is a really interesting tension in the world of propaganda - I see it in the modern Hong Kong situation. The better job the propagandists do of minimising Tienanmen for example the more likely China is to get Tienanmen-like protests again. From that perspective, Western democracies have really struggled to assimilate their long history of toppling other nations and benefiting from their resources into the cultu…
>From that perspective, Western democracies have really struggled to assimilate their long history of toppling other nations and benefiting from their resources into the cultural framework I think that's a post internet thing. Pre-internet most of us got all of our historical information from school, and there weren't places like Twitter or Facebook to spread what were previously dismissed as fairy tales. I certainly…
Every teenager thinks "I know the real truth unlike the rest of the sheeple!" Usually they grow out of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a really interesting tension in the world of propaganda - I see it in the modern Hong Kong situation. The better job the propagandists do of minimising Tienanmen for example the more likely China is to get Tienanmen-like protests again. From that perspective, Western democracies have really struggled to assimilate their long history of toppling other nations and benefiting from their resources into the cultu…
>From that perspective, Western democracies have really struggled to assimilate their long history of toppling other nations and benefiting from their resources into the cultural framework I think that's a post internet thing. Pre-internet most of us got all of our historical information from school, and there weren't places like Twitter or Facebook to spread what were previously dismissed as fairy tales. I certainly…
Separate and beyond your point, which I very much agree with, I predict this will ultimately re-center a focus onto publicly ratified power. As it stands, corporations are effectively state institutions with no public ties. There are some striking congruencies with feudalism in modern capitalism, but technology makes it all virtually incomparable in the big picture. The internet transcends beyond physical empire not only for worse but ultimately for better in this case. If only the road to democracy from here were not so bloody nonetheless.