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Genuine researchers cannot get it right now. Now, black market LSD is liable to be loaded with many other things. Especially if it comes from the syndicate, it is apt to be spiked with heroin so as to get you hooked.
Other people mix it with amphetamines to soup up the effects. Then, also, the idealistic graduate student may give you a larger dose than you thought you were buying. And so it’s twice what it says on the bottle.
And since there is no control over the quality of manufacture, it is as bad as the state of affairs in prohibition when people were drinking highly deleterious bathtub gin. Nobody in his senses will take black market LSD. You don’t know what you’re getting.
So, by comparison with black market LSD, these other materials are not nearly so dangerous if taken in moderation. This really isn’t dangerous at all. It’s just that probably, if people smoked it, it would give the liquor industry a bit too much competition for comfort.
So now, for each of these I’ve drawn a characteristic limit point where I said it will take you of itself. But then, with a little push—if you’ve got the background and the initiative and the what have you, the training—you can take each one of them further. In fact, you can take even this one right the way through to here.
And this, likewise. But, you see, there’s a corresponding effort, or whatever you want to call it, involved in each case. And, you see, generally speaking, their effects are everything that I described under the terms of sensory consciousness: the sense of time slowed down, being at one with the full physical environment, finding enormous delight and significance in what would ordinarily be called insignificant or unimportant patterns.
The tones of people’s voice, the fantastic vibrations of musical instrument, the different qualities of texture and so on, is very much emphasized here, which is why this is a favorite chemical among musicians. Here, one goes into this very much. The utter fascination of the microscopic world: of texture, of the splendor of nature.
I picked up, with using mescaline, a rotten log about so long, so thick, with fungus on it. You know, that kind of shelf-like fungus that grows? And in the state of mescaline, this looked like a piece of jewelry.
A great big thing made of ebony and ivory, and heaven only knows what. All of it looked as if it had been my minutely carved by a man like Cellini. It looked like a superb work of art instead of just a rotten old log.
With LSD, the same initial sort of effects. But with it is apt to go, for a while, a kind of a strange sensory jazz. Walls start to breathe; to waver, ripple.
Supposing you see something like—let’s take a sea urchin’s shell. You can look at it and all the nipples on it start to wiggle. Not only to your eyes, but also to your sense of touch.
Meanwhile, the shell breathes in and out with the nipples wiggling on it. And you wonder, “Now, what’s the reason for that? Is this a hallucination?
What’s going on?” You know it’s obviously the effect of the chemical. But I begin to wonder about this, because I have tried to establish why they wiggle, and I find if I hold my eyes quite still on a certain point, they stop wiggling. But if I, in the normal way, let my eyes drift hither and yon over the thing, it wiggles.
So I begin to think, “Well, after all, my eyes are gelatinous. And my brain is a pretty gooey mass of stuff. Maybe that thing is seen in the eye and on the soft surface of the retina actually do wiggle a bit.” Only, we learn not to see that.
After all, when birds walk—have you ever watched When a bird walks, its head goes like this. Now, if you do that, you get your landscape going, you see? But obviously, surely, birds don’t permanently live in a landscape that goes like this when they walk.
In other words, they screen that out and they make a constant. So likewise, we’ve learned, socially, that all these lines in this room are straight. See?
They’re not wiggly, they’re made of a solid substance and they don’t wiggle. Well, maybe they do in our eyes. Only, we’ve learned to ignore that.
Just as we can—see, I don’t have binocular vision. And so if I look at something, I should be seeing it double. But I don’t, because I repress, psychologically, one of the eyes.
I can be either. But I’ve simply repressed that information so that I see like anybody else. So these changes are rather strange.
And not only do colors become intensely vivid, but sounds boom through you. And then you get to a point where you can see light in terms of sound, in terms of shape. All the senses seem to be one sense, fundamentally.
A kind of fundamental sense of touch. But you touch light with your eyes, you touch sound with your ears, you touch wood with your fingers, you touch gas with your nose, and you touch taste essences with your tongue. But it’s all one touch.
And then, beyond that, you get into something else. When the sensory jazz wears off, the effect seems to go to deeper levels of one’s mind. And I would say, for me, the most startling property of all these three chemicals in their varying ways is that they substitute for either-or (thinking and feeling) both-and.
That is to say, they facilitate polar feeling and thinking. You see, according to Gestalt psychology, our normal attentive consciousness is captured by the figure rather than the background, by the moving rather than the stationary. Enclosed figures with clear outline against a background win your attention in such a way that you see the figure and ignore the background.
If, on an empty blackboard, I draw this figure and say to an audience, “What is it?” Most people will say, “It is a circle.” “It is a ball.” “It is a disk.” Very few people will suggest that I have drawn a hole in a wall. You see? Because attention goes here.
But you realize: obviously you couldn’t see the figure without any background. Now, you find you can reverse the tension between figure and ground fairly easily. You see this either as a ball or as a hole in the wall.
But it’s difficult to see it as both. In the same way—you know that figure of two faces in profile which are about to kiss each other? And they are a black silhouette.
But the area between the profiles forms a white chalice. Now, it’s very difficult to see simultaneously kissing faces and white chalice. You tend to see one or the other, because the two images are incompatible.
Unless, perhaps, you form the concept of it as a loving cup. Then you may be able to see both. Because what you see depends to a large extent on the concept that you’re using.
If, for example, you have a concept of number which goes 1, 2, 3, many, then you can never know that a table has four corners. You haven’t got the number four. It has “many” corners.
Because it’s one above three. Anything above three is “many.” So there’s no difference in concept between a table with four corners or a table with twenty. For those primitive kind of arithmeticians.
So, then, polar thinking becomes characteristic of all of these, in here, and increasingly felt that the inside goes with the outside. In the same way that the back goes with the front, that you go with your circumstances. It isn’t that you are pushed around by them, as a puppet, but that you and your circumstances, you and your environment, are all the real you.
That’s what you are doing. And so you experience—even though the circumstances may not be what would ordinarily be called harmonious (that is to say, pleasant circumstances), you realize that there is an unbreakable harmony between your behavior and the behavior of the external world. And so this polarity becomes very important, but it can scare the wits out of you.
And this is a danger point. If you say now, then, alright, if inside goes without side, likewise good goes with bad. As I said before, you wouldn’t know you were law-abiding people unless there were some criminals around to compare yourselves with.
By comparison you know that you’re law-abiding. Well, now you begin to worry. If good goes with bad, who’s in charge around here?
Who’s to say what’s right? If, after all, everything works out in the end, anything goes. And therefore, you can start to get worried.
How will I know? What will I depend on in myself that I will behave in what is considered a sane way at the next moment? Will I suddenly be overcome with a passion to kill somebody?
And, in this way, not knowing which end is up because everything is so relative, it feels as if, when you put your foot (your psychic foot) upon what you hope to be firm ground, the ground immediately collapses and you find yourself freely falling in space. And this is terrifying. You are afloat.
You are in the floating world. You are in the relative universe in which there is nothing to hang on to, because the only thing that might be hangable-onto is you. In other words, suddenly the eternal rock, the firm foundation upon which the saints of the Lord are supposed to build, the rock of ages in which you’re supposed to be able to hide yourself—all that has gone.
And it seems at first that there is nothing, nothing, nothing to cling to. And so the sweat can fall from you. Until you say, “Well, that’s really the way it always was.
When I was born I was kicked off the edge of a precipice. And I’ve been consoling myself all this time by hugging to a big chunk of rock that fell off with me.” But, you know, there is no security. And if you go with it, you see, and you don’t try to fight and to find something to cling to, it’s alright.
Then you discover that the void that you were so frightened of is the clear light. This thing. That it isn’t empty in the ordinary sense of the word at all.
But once you let go of your clinging, that’s all you let go of. There’s no you to let go of, really. All the thing to do is stop clinging.
Because what that does is bunch you all up. It’s like going around like this. Sort of totally paranoid.
Clinging. What’s gonna to happen to me? Oh, come on.
Loosen up! You can’t do anything if your hands are tied up here all the time holding onto yourself. You know, you’re trying to get on by pulling up your own belt, and try and lift yourself off the ground this way.
You never get anywhere. But when you let go, then there’s the possibility of doing something. Well, I hope that people will get some sense about these things, and that those of us who are interested in their responsible use will be able to use them responsibly, and through that be able to educate the public into a sane behavior with these things—just as we are able, to some extent, to educate the public to behave sensibly with automobiles and whiskey.
We haven’t done too good a job, but at any rate, we do make a try at it. I must apologize to listeners for the irregularity with which my broadcasts have been appearing during the last few weeks. And the explanation is simply that I’ve been on the road and traveling over various parts of the country, and under these circumstances it’s rather difficult to get tapes in on the mail.
And therefore you’ve had to put up with some rebroadcasts and lapses in various stations of the Pacifica network. At the moment I’m settled, however—for a couple of weeks, at any rate—in New York. And this living in New York gives rise to certain philosophical reflections.
Whenever I come here to this city of cities, I am flabbergasted and amazed at a miracle: the miracle that the thing works at all. When you consider the colossal density of population covering a huge area in which there are no farms or fields, the problem of, to begin with, providing along rather narrow lanes of transportation the immense quantities of food that these people consume. The problem of transportation involved in constantly rebuilding the place.
And above all, the problem of the circulation of the human population itself going in and out, in and out, constantly through these narrow trafficways in which a single car stalled at the rush hour can make everybody an hour late for dinner. And you just wonder sometimes whether the day isn’t shortly coming when people will simply leave their cars where they are and abandon them. And at that moment the whole city will go to sleep and become obsolete.
But that all seems so highly probable, and the city planners and the prophets of doom for the city like Lewis Mumford feel that that’s quite imminent—and in many ways they may be right. But there is another factor to this picture, and that is that the way in which you look at a city as a stranger, or the way in which you look at it even if you are not a stranger, but look at it to get an overall picture of it—you watch crowd,s you watch almost identical little cars swarming along great parkways. And from this point of view there’s an extraordinary impersonality to the whole thing.
Everybody looks alike. Every car looks alike. They seem to be so many ants.
And news reports and statistical reports of the doings of human society reflect this same point of view, whereby the individual cell, the individual human being, becomes a sort of ant-like statistic. The same sort of thing happens when we confront peoples of other races. They might be Negroes or Chinese, even Hindus, with whose facial characteristics we’re not really familiar.
They all seem alike to us of at first sight. We think, for example, that the Oriental has an expressionless face because he doesn’t have a high bridge to his nose, because he tends to have rather smooth skin. And we don’t realize that their first impression of us is that we all look identical, too; that we have bright red hair, and enormously long pointed noses.
But to go back to the problem of the great city: the reason why it works—or rather, it doesn’t work; it muddles through. And the reason for this must be explained, I think, not so much perhaps of the organizational level as of the individual level. Because the whole mass really consists of little units of intelligence with an astonishing degree of possible varieties of action, an astonishing degree of adaptability, and an even more astonishing degree of persistence in, say, sticking to their jobs and carrying on their daily routines.
There doesn’t really emerge—if you look at human behavior at the level of the mass. And so much of our impressions of what the world is doing are gained at this mass level that I think our perspective becomes very much falsified. It isn’t that the observations of the statisticians and the newspapers are just frankly untrue.
It isn’t that at all. It’s that they represent only a half truth. This becomes a problem in a world where it has for so long been supposed that there is such a thing as the truth.
And if there is any really important thing that I think a reflective person has to understand—especially in our own time—it is that there is no such thing as the truth. This always sounds dangerous; I know. It sounds as if one were opening the gates to an extremely slimy kind of relativism where all values and facts become slippery, and history and the physical world becomes something simply to be manipulated.
Now, one of the real reasons why there are people who can manipulate in this way—why, for example, certain totalitarian states can get away with rewriting history—they can get away with it because people are accustomed to thinking that there is some such thing as the truth. And the moment we are, as it were, suckers in this sense for the truth, someone can very simply misrepresent it and say, “On the contrary. The truth is this and so.” But if we were free from the idea of there being a fixed truth, then we would recognize that anybody who writes history is presenting a point of view.
We would know that he cannot really tell us the truth, because there isn’t any such thing. And we would be more inclined to ask: why does he say what he says? From what point of view is he looking at it?
And what does he want to achieve by presenting what he sees in such and such a way? And this, I think, is the essence of the thing: that what is true is always relative to a way of looking at things and an intention to do something. Thus we can see very clearly that, say, in physics today, light may sometimes be described as a wave behavior, and sometimes as a particle behavior.
To ordinary common sense, which tries always to reduce the behavior of the physical world to three-dimensional images—something which, as a matter of fact, can hardly be done. Nevertheless, from that point of view it seems that the two theories of the nature of light are mutually exclusive. Surely it can’t be both a wave behavior and a particle behavior.
The fact of the matter is, though, that looking at it from the particle point of view is useful in some circumstances, looking at it from the point of view of wave behavior is useful in other circumstances. In the same way, our common speech reflects the idea (which we know is astronomically obsolete) that the sun rises and sets. But for purposes of astronomical thinking we don’t talk about the sun rising and setting, we talk about the rotation of the Earth.
And we would say that the view that the Earth rotates, rather than the sun rises and sets, is more true. Yes, it’s true for a certain point of view. A point of view which is more useful for astronomical purposes and for the daily conduct of human affairs and winding up your watch.
But we can see that these apparently contradictory points of view can be held together simultaneously without either the sense that they contradict each other, or the sense that there must be some true fact underlying the differences. You see, if we were to try and find out what the truth is, we would have to fill the whole universe with eyes. And they would have to be able to report simultaneously the way everything is from their point of view.
As Norbert Wiener once put it rather amusingly, he said, “To get accurate meteorological predictions you’d have to fill the entire atmosphere with weather balloons.” And so, in the same way, to get the accurate picture of the universe, or even of this planet, or of the solar system, you would have to fill the whole of space with observers. And the pandemonium of their all talking at once to explain what they saw could never be digested by any individual mind. And if they were to speak one after another in order so that we could listen to them, time wouldn’t be long enough to hear more than a tiny fraction of the observers.
It is for such reasons as this that something called the truth can never be established at all, except in such ways as we can do so, for example, by agreeing to certain standards of measurement—whether of rulers or of clocks. Because our agreement to these is standard everywhere, we can say that it really is a fact, it is true, that such and such an object is four inches long, or that such and such an event happened at four o’clock. This problem, of course, arises in the very ticklish question of the relative freedom of human actions, and in the assignment of responsibility for their actions to individuals.
Because there is, on the one hand, the point of view common to almost every individual in civilized society that he himself is the source of certain of his actions. And he expects to be praised and blamed accordingly, and expects to praise and blame others. But there is of course the increasingly pervasive point of view of the psychiatrist and the social psychologist and the sociologist which sees the behavior of the individual as determined by the social and natural environment.
And therefore his point of view with regard to responsibility to the human being as a source of action tends to be deterministic. And the point of view of these scientists is naturally rather the same point of view as one who observes behaviors statistically; who looks at it in the mass. And he feels that at that level, what the group as a very large number of people will do is: the more numerous it is, the more predictable it is.
And therefore, whatever is predictable seems to be highly determined. But, of course, at the level of individual behavior, what people are going to do is the most difficult thing of all to predict. And just for that reason alone one is inclined to say that what is not predictable is not determined.
We have no means of demonstrating that it is determined, even though we may have hunches that it’s so. But somehow or other I think we’ve got to be able to look at human behavior in such a way as to synthesize, or take at once, both the voluntaristic version of behavior and the deterministic in rather the same way that we regard light as both particles and waves, even though the two positions seem to be contradictory. It is as if, when we change the level of magnification of observing anything—for example, in the analogy of the city—one level of magnification shows the swarming crowds of automobiles cluttering the traffic lanes.
The other level of magnification shows the individually unique, intelligent, and adaptable little human being sitting in the swarming automobiles. Here you see a sort of mad crazyness at the mass level, and relative intelligence at the individual level. Sometimes, when you change your level of magnification, it’s the other way around—as, for example, when you examine the constitution of human blood, you find an enormous dog-eat-dog warfare going on of cells eating cells, bacilli of various kinds warring on each other and on the component elements of the organism.
But what this turmoil and conflict adds up to at a larger level is the ongoing health of the body composed of all these tiny elements. Logically speaking, you see, health, harmonious functioning, is something totally opposed and exclusive of warfare. But the contradiction exists only if you suppose that these two things are on the same level of magnification.
War at one level is peace at another. And so, isn’t it possible to approach the problems of freedom and determinism in rather the same way? That what is free at one level, or voluntary, is determined at another, and that the truth of the matter depends upon the level about which we’re speaking?
The problem naturally also applies to ethics. That, seen from a very, very vast cosmic point of view, what we do—whether it’s right or wrong—doesn’t matter very much. It all seems somehow or other to work out, to fit in, to build up a harmony at a very vast level.
But looking at it from a more circumscribed view, what we do matters very much indeed whether it be good or evil. People seem to be afraid that if a human being takes any of these differing points of view simultaneously, they will fight with each other, and the one that’s easier to take—the one that serves self-interest most—will conquer the other one. There is, of course, always that danger.
Nevertheless, it seems to me to be vitally important to be able to take both points of view simultaneously. In the case of the illustration of the city it is quite obvious why one should be able to take both points of view. For if the individual unit of the population does not become aware of the vast problems which require intelligent handling and planning, he does indeed run a very serious danger through overestimating the power of his simply individual adaptability and intelligence.
On the other hand, the prophets of almost imminent doom for the great cities must take into consideration the faithfulness and intelligence of the individuals, and not regard them as mere statistical blobs. So, in the same way, with regard to, say, the problems of guilt. Responsibility and guilt.
Where the freedom of action of the individual is enormously emphasized and the deterministic aspect of it is underemphasized, the individual can feel guilty about things he’s done to a completely excessive degree. Guilt can, in other words, become a state of consciousness which really prevents constructive change of behavior entirely. Let’s say the alcoholic situation, who is in a vicious circle of guilt.
Because when he feels guilty because he drinks too much, he has to go on drinking in order to get rid of the guilt. Because it seems to me that, at any rate, in its extreme forms guilt is an emotion which blocks the possibility of intelligent action. This, then, is why it seems to me constructive rather than destructive for every human being to know that his evil, his selfishness, his immorality, or whatever it may be, only penetrates (shall we say) into his being to a limited depth.
Beyond that depth there is a core, a center, which is at once his own and at once universal—something like the Hindus call the Ātman—at which he is beyond good and evil and beyond guilt, where, shall we say, he is profoundly sane. I believe it’s a real hallmark of sanity that a person who is fundamentally human and mature always has the awareness of that center in himself somewhere. I never forget the first time I discovered it in myself.
It was when I was a child, and I’d just played an outrageous prank. I had mixed some acetylene with carbide and water, and thrown the mixture at someone by way of a practical joke. And there was a frightful uproar.
It was done at a neighbor’s house, and my friend’s elder brother bawled me out and said, “Never come back to this place again!” I felt suddenly that I’d done the most awful thing possible, because I didn’t really know that it was relatively harmless, and that he mixture wasn’t going to cause any serious damage. I thought probably I’d done something like vitriol at somebody. And I remember feeling absolutely terrible about the whole thing—and yet discovering somewhere in the middle of this frightful sensation of guilt that there was a curious inner strength somewhere right down, where I knew in the middle of me, somehow, whatever happened, I would weather it.
It didn’t quite ultimately matter—although it did matter very much indeed on the surface. That was the first glimmer of the sort of sensation I’m talking about: the sanity of being able to live simultaneously on two levels, where the truth at one is not the same as the truth at the other. I suppose that, next to the question of racial disturbance, there is no more controversial problem about the domestic affairs of this country at the present time than drugs.
The word “drugs” has a very funny semantic problem. You have a place called a “drugstore,” which is perfectly inoffensive and a regular part of the scene of life in these United States. But at the same time you have a word, “drug,” as when we say a person is drugged, which means that he is happy but incompetent; under the influence of heavy medical sedation.
We also have another word that should be “drugged” (I suppose, if we use it in that way), which is called “drunk.” Because a person even pleasantly inebriated with alcohol is just as much drugged as a person who might be under the influence of morphine. He is rendered insensitive and vaguely sleepy. Now, I should explain how I came to be interested in the problem which has now become so controversial: of the influence of chemicals on the human mind.
For many, many years—more than thirty years—I’ve been interested in the psychology of religion pretty much as a disciple of William James, who was really the first outstanding psychologist of religion, who tried to understand what is going on when people have religious experiences. And he concentrated finally, and rather particularly, on a certain class of religious experience. There are experiences of visions which people have, revelations—they see Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, Krishna, Buddha, or who have you—but these are, in a certain way, less interesting than the experiences in which the individual has a sudden transformation of his sense of being alive.
These experiences occur sometimes quite spontaneously—to children, to adolescents, or to anyone—at almost any time of life. Sometimes they occur as the apparent result of a discipline, as if you practiced yoga, zen meditation, or catholic contemplative prayer. And sometimes they occur as a result of certain ingestions of chemicals.
The interesting type of this experience is when the individual is brought to realize something that we’ll have to describe from a number of different points of view. The experience itself is extremely simple. The only thing that is complicated is when we start to try to describe it in language.
The experience itself, in its utmost simplicity, was once written down by somebody who took nitrous oxide and had a sense of total clarity about all the problems of life. And as he came to out of the experience, he had his pencil poised over a sheet of paper to write down what was the real nitty-gritty about this. And he wrote it down.
He really got the point. Then, when he returned to normal consciousness, he looked at what he had written, and he saw that what he had written was: “Everything in this universe is the smell of burnt almonds”—over which the academic community had a good laugh and said, “Well, obviously this was a perfectly frivolous enterprise.” But upon mature consideration, everything in this universe is the smell of burnt almonds. That is to say: take any particular experience, such as the smell of burnt almonds, or looking into the eyes of the person you love, or eating a steak, flying an airplane, lying on the beach in the sun—any experience.
There is a way in which that experience implies everything else in the universe. The word “implies” is probably better than the word “is.” It’s to say there are certain states of consciousness in which you experience that everything is interconnected: everything “goeswith” everything else. I knew a woman who got in an accident in an elevator.
She hadn’t taken any drugs. But in this accident she was pinned with her leg caught in the mechanism, and she was there for half an hour before anybody could get to her rescue. She was having agonies.
But she knew that she simply had to wait. There was nothing to do about it. So she completely accepted her situation.
And she said that in that time she realized—to put it in her own words—there is not a single grain of dust in this whole universe that is out of place. In other words: that peculiar, painful, unwanted situation was somehow made acceptable and alright because it fitted in to a harmonious arrangement which involved everything that was happening, that had happened, or that ever would happen. And whether you approve of this kind of experience or not, whether you think it’s rational or not, it keeps happening spontaneously—through discipline, or as a consequence of chemical agencies—to thousands of people.
And it is, of course, one of the generating forces in the things we call the great religions of the world. Obviously, Jesus Christ had an experience of this kind, which brought him to the feeling that he, as a living organism, was an expression of what he called (in the language available to him) “God the Father.” “I and the Father are one. He who has seen me has seen the Father.” That was an absolutely unacceptable pronouncement to his contemporaries, and so he got crucified.
We are, I hope, a more tolerant age. And we are, I think, really in need of experiencing the relationship of the individual to the physical world in a way that is more positive, more constructive, more friendly, more close than that which expresses itself in a hostile technology bent on the domination and the conquest of nature considered as something alien to the human spirit, mechanical, thoughtless, and stupid, that surrounds us as the mere featureless energy behind the galaxies. If indeed it were possible for many of us to have a sensation of not just merely belonging in this world, but being it—if we could feel that our separate individuality is a coming and going expression of what it is that is happening through all the cycles of time and generations of cosmoses—we’d be able to cool it a bit and not be so frantic in our pursuit of survival.
It might be a very good thing. And that’s simply giving an explanation of why I personally have been interested in exploring the psychology and the conditions of this kind of experience for so many years. Now then, in the middle 1950s, a British psychiatrist by the name of Humphry Osmond persuaded a British novelist by the name of Aldous Huxley to take a dose of mescaline.
And in the thought that, at the time, this was a drug which induced states of consciousness similar to schizophrenia, Humphry Osmond realized that Aldous Huxley was a marvelous master of words, and therefore it might be a good idea to see: if this experience were given to a man who could describe things in a wonderfully accurate and vivid way, we might learn something about what it does. Aldous Huxley didn’t simply deliver a private report to the doctors, he rushed into print and published a book called The Doors of Perception, in which he said, in effect, that he felt from his point of view that having taken mescaline gave him an experience which he could not but identify with the great mystical experience of Man’s integration with the universe, which of course had been known through all history. And when I read this as a student of the psychology of religion, I was naturally fascinated, but unbelieving it.
I thought, you know, Aldous sometimes goes off the deep end. I knew him very well, and i know he had a kind of enthusiasm for all kinds of novelty. He had foreseen, in his novel Brave New World, that there might be a way of drugging human beings into sort of perpetual contentment and happiness so that they would give no further trouble to each other.