Most notably, soma in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is depicted as a cross between a non-addictive opioid and a hangoverless tranquilliser. Thus Huxley 's utopians enjoy only an empty imbecilic happiness, not life-enriching peak experiences. Unlike dopaminergics , soma doesn't increase incentive-motivation, nor does it heighten the felt intensity of experience. You can use it to drift off to sleep. Yet this negative stereotype of synthetic bliss is profoundly misleading.
Addictive tranquillity is only one option among many.
It reflects a poverty in our conception of the range of options for paradise-engineering that biotechnology puts on offer. In reality, the quality of our consciousness can be intensified , sharpened and radically diversified by creative psychopharmacology . Intellect and empathy , and not just mood, can be prodigiously enhanced when the ideology of Better Living Through Chemistry finally enters mainstream culture. Thanks to biotechnology, the real obstacles to curing the nasty side of life are set to become doctrinal, not technical. Suffering is due to become optional.