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Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies

(angadh.com)
129 points surprisetalk | 4 comments | 17 Nov 25 14:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.615s | source
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greekrich92 ◴[17 Nov 25 22:09 UTC] No.45958934[source]▶
Just want to echo someone else's sub-thread: Adderall is not at all similar to Huxley's description of Soma. Soma was about feeling good and not having to think of the evil things that make the BNW society possible, not efficiency.
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Melatonic ◴[17 Nov 25 23:27 UTC] No.45959659[source]▶
That's also what I thought - Wasn't Soma more of a way to make people question less and just remain in a blissed out but maybe sort of out of it state at all times ? Seems very different than amphetamines
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1. phantasmish ◴[17 Nov 25 23:33 UTC] No.45959699[source]▶
The link (including the transcript of Huxley’s lecture) doesn’t seem to be about Soma, unless I’m missing something. Huxley produced a lot of work outside of Brave New World, lots of it concerned with drugs and altered states of consciousness (so much so that personally I don’t think I’ve done enough drugs to understand his perspective, as I find him distinctly, and almost uniquely among such high-profile authors that I’ve tried, unreadable)
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2. Melatonic ◴[17 Nov 25 23:34 UTC] No.45959709[source]▶
Guess more of us should have read the link more carefully..... oops !
3. angadh ◴[17 Nov 25 23:39 UTC] No.45959748[source]▶
You are vey correct—the talk and link have nothing to do with Soma.

I can only presume, based on timing of the talk being 1960, that his thoughts here link to mescaline and the practical utopia he talks of in Island, whose inhabitants make use of a local psychedelic. So whatever he must have said here had more to do with his later perspectives than his feelings around the island.

4. greekrich92 ◴[18 Nov 25 02:23 UTC] No.45960702[source]▶
Fair enough, but I have read Island, The Doors of Perception, and BNW, and none of those books described using uppers or anything about efficiency. Island was psychedelics (fantastic book in my opinion).