Soma

Soma is the fictional happiness drug at the center of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — the chemical institution that lets the World State abolish discontent. In the novel’s highlights it is “delicious soma,” the thing that gives citizens “a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology”; Mustapha Mond calls it “Christianity without tears” and “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” When the Savage tears down the World State’s bargain — “Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it” — soma is the mechanism: “there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts… to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies.” Kyle’s reading frames it as the chemical version of the book’s larger trade of struggle and meaning for comfort.

In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley revisits soma as a real-world prophecy rather than a fiction. The non-fiction essays read it as the people’s religion — “Opium, or rather soma, was the people’s religion… it called up visions of another, better world” — and Huxley maps it onto the actual sedatives and euphorics of 1958: alcohol, tobacco, barbiturates, and the tranquillizers (“Miltown”) doctors were prescribing “at the rate of forty-eight millions a year.” His worry: a population “tranquillized” by chemical comfort is easier to control than one “constantly stimulated by threats and promises.”

Context: “Soma” in Huxley’s 1932 novel is an invented mood-altering drug (the name borrowed from the ritual intoxicant of ancient Vedic texts). It has become shorthand in cultural criticism for any pleasant, sanctioned distraction that pacifies a population.

Where this appears

• Brave New World — the chemical abolition of discontent; “Christianity without tears”; the soma habit as the World State’s tool for keeping subjects content.
• Brave New World Revisited — soma revisited as a real-world institution (alcohol, barbiturates, tranquillizers); the people’s religion that pacifies rather than stimulates.