In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, the leaders of the World State Society have supposedly created a civilization where no one ever experiences suffering. Citizens go to their jobs during the day, jobs they have been conditioned to enjoy from infancy, and they spend their off hours playing sports, watching “feelies,” having sex, and dancing to synthetic music. Whenever they feel any strong negative feelings, they are encouraged to take some soma, an opiate that dulls the senses and gives people a false sense of calm and happiness. One of the aims of Huxley’s book is to show readers the emptiness of a supposedly happy life that is happy only because of the absence of hardship rather than the presence of true joy and peace. Often, when we seek to avoid suffering, we look to our own forms of soma to dull our senses and help us check out from the suffering we encounter. We need to look to Christ and to our Christian communities instead to support us in our suffering and show us true joy.
