Bottling Up Emotions

holidays from reality

The modern world is enthused with drugs. We take them to fuel our mornings, to heal and protect our bodies, to visit other worlds. We take them to ease our minds, to calm our thoughts, to excite our nerves, to ease our pain. We take them alone and with friends. We take them in the office without anyone knowing. We take them on recommendations and hearsay. We take them on prescription.

Society is very clearly ‘on drugs’—a multitude of drugs with a dizzyingly diverse array of effects and, remembering to read the fine print, side-effects too. It makes for a high-stakes game. In the exogenous chemical mediation of the everyday world, individuals, organizations and governments wrestle to supplant one another’s narratives and ultimately determine the material circulation of substances. 

This is especially true today for psychedelics, which have the public gaze upon them once more. A recent article by Zoe Cormier, for instance, neatly sums up psychedelia’s current critique of mainstreaming practices: high-valuation corporations, extraordinary patent claims, and the proliferation of poorly regulated private clinics. In short, the ‘corporadelic’ world.

Underlying Cormier’s fears is a suspicion that the drugs just don’t work as billed, or that the dangers of their side-effects are minimized. That it’s ultimately profit over people. However, there’s something even more insidious hiding in this suspicion, and to my mind it’s in the way psychedelics are very often billed, rather than the particularities of the economic model.

The common refrain, found in corporate, non-profit, and advocacy writings alike, is that we are living through a unique ‘mental health crisis’. For example, Sara Gael, therapist and former Director of Harm Reduction for MAPS, recently summed it up perfectly in an interview:

We are experiencing an unprecedented mental health crisis on this planet, which cannot be extricated from the larger systemic issues our society is facing on social, political, and environmental levels.

Leaving aside the veracity of today’s society having bigger mental health issues than previous ones—as a historian of the Victorian age, I remain sceptical—the claim itself nonetheless has an extraordinary air of the utopian, and implies that psychedelics are a universal panacea. Not only for individual mental health, but for all of society’s ills! Praise be.

Cormier’s article is titled, ‘The Brave New World of Legalized Psychedelics is Already Here: And so are the profiteers. Get ready for Psychedelics Inc.’ The nod to Aldous Huxley is telling, if not a little misleading. Huxley undoubtedly recognized the danger of profit over people, but his critique of a chemically-mediated society, struck a more sinister, nuanced note. Namely, that his drug, soma, was not simply for money, but for control. In other words, utopia over people.

What then is Huxley’s Brave New World? And is it in fact here? To understand this, and how today’s world of mainstreaming might be unfolding in relation to it, it makes sense to delve into a few examples from the literary history of drugs and society. What this reveals is the curious place that our emotions take in formulating society’s chemical landscape in both the literary and medical imagination, and moreover how utopian thinking might form a potentially unhealthy relationship between psychedelics and society.

MacGuffins, Magical Elixirs and Utopiates

Michel Parry, who anthologized several remarkable collections of speculative and science fiction short stories about drugs, argues that the genre’s literary substances fit into one of three categories: as a MacGuffin, magical elixir, or utopiate. MacGuffin, coined by Angus MacPhail and popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, refers to an object which drives character motivation and plot, but which is insignificant in itself. Imagine a drug heist story, for instance.

Leaving aside the concept of the MacGuffin for the moment (I will return to it in the conclusion), the relationship between the latter two categories presents an interesting conundrum. For writers it’s an imaginative leap from a magical elixir, which bestows extraordinary effects or powers on its individual user, to a transformative utopiate that re-engineers the very make-up of society. Indeed, over the twentieth century, writers have moved from one to the other.

Take the eponymous drug in HG Wells’ short story ‘The New Accelerator’ (1901): a newly synthesized substance that accelerates the nervous system, allowing the lucky recipient to experience seconds as minutes, and physically move at such great speed that one’s clothes are scorched from the friction. An extraordinary trip in itself to be sure, especially for the small seaside town of Folkestone where the story is set, but Wells also recognizes his elixir’s social ramifications, and slips them into his narrator’s concluding remarks like a post-party aspirin.

The narrator, an honourable and reliable gentleman no doubt, informs the reader that he has in fact written his account of the New Accelerator’s effect on him while again under its influence. It took approximately six minutes, he tells us, adding that this included time for a well-deserved chocolate snack break. In other words, the drug, above all, gave him time in an otherwise busy day’s schedule. As such, its potential lay in efficiency by super-charging the individual; collateral scorching aside.

However, potentialities are almost limitless. At the story’s climax, with the drug already going into full commercial production, the narrator casually mentions that, ‘its use renders a great number of very extraordinary things possible… even criminal proceedings may be effected with impunity by thus dodging, as it were, into the interstices of time.’ Yet, deciding that it was purely a matter of ‘medical jurisprudence’, they would press ahead with manufacturing it regardless, and ‘as for the consequences—we shall see.’ A fine example of Edwardian-era mainstreaming.

Think not what people might do with your drug, Wells’ narrator appears to believe, think about what your drug can do for you. Wells at that time was just embarking on a furious period of writing about social problems, and exploring utopian ideas. He even briefly joined the inveterate bastion of technocratic, middle-class socialism, the Fabian Society, from 1903. Their belief that individualism equalled anarchy certainly hints at the narrator’s flippant approach to the drug’s release.

Not thinking what the drug might be used for is of course more than likely to conjure unintended consequences, especially, I would argue, if the magical elixir is instrumentalized by more powerful forces—be they medical, industrial, religious, or indeed, a matrix of them all. One World War and a Great Depression later, the emergence of state totalitarianism in Europe began to demonstrate that just such a synthesis of power was possible—and such a state-of-affairs would certainly need a drug.

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Brave New World

Indeed, just such a substance, one utilized by a centralized matrix of power, is precisely what Aldous Huxley devised in Brave New World (1932). The ingeniously named ‘soma’ was the result of a burgeoning World Government subsidizing two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists to create the ‘perfect drug’. It took them six years, and soma had, ‘All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects’ and one could ‘Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.’ What did this amount to though?

As a magical elixir, soma endows its user with the ability to temper and control one’s emotional state via its myriad of psychoactive effects—stimulant, soporific, hallucinogen: ‘there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a weekend, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon.’ However, the drug is primarily a utopiate designed not by an individual, but according to the schematized Weltanschauung of a social elite, who designed it to paradoxically impose a form of emotional self-control on the population.

The pithy secularized religion of Huxley’s world, Fordism, also promotes soma as a transcendental elixir, which neatly illustrates how its power lies outside its user. On ‘Solidarity Service’ days, twelve chairs are arranged in a circle, with ‘Twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their separate identities in a larger being.’ Hymns are then sung to Ford, soma is passed around, and people chant ‘I drink to my annihilation… I drink to the Greater Being’.

All of the young Huxley’s interwar suspicions about the world emerge in this ceremony: organized religion, mass industry, loss of liberty, and finally science, in this case soma, placed in the service of mass propaganda. What makes his puzzle between magical elixir and utopiate so enthralling, however, is the emotional heft that bridges the two—an uneasy relationship founded on the tension between what constitutes the liberation or subjugation of someone’s emotions.

According to Oscar Wilde, ‘The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.’ The scientifically-devised soma manipulates an individual’s emotional life, freeing them from discomfort, and making them more ideal, productive citizens. Therein lies a Faustian pact. In the Brave New World, the constant focus and management of emotion constantly leads individuals astray from realizing the fact of their lost liberty.

You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.

Soma is the perfect utopiate. It synthesizes the individual and society and, as part of the technocratic make-up of the world, it helps collapse any distinction between society and the State—they become for all intents and purposes indivisible. While it certainly mirrors and anticipates totalitarian developments in interwar Europe, Huxley’s satire purposefully struck a more homely note. This is precisely the matrix that Wells, and his Fabian compatriots, idealized: a fully socialized State.

Huxley, like Wilde before him, was no passionate advocate for capitalists, or industrialists. Yet he also saw the folly, and the danger, of all social relations being subverted to a single State. Brave New World is a deeply insightful exposition of this utopian thinking.

In early 1930s Britain, the notion of pharmacratic control—which we might recognize today as reified through socialized Public Health and corporatism, and marketed to the individual through designer drugs—was still largely confined to the literary and political imaginations. Yet, as with so much in Huxley’s novel, science (and politics) soon more-or-less caught up.

It’s Been Emotional

After the Second World War, the pharma-management of moods and emotions was a new frontier in medicine which saw an explosion of psychopharmacology as a discipline. A plethora of new substances started flooding the doctor’s toolkit, and established barbiturates and amphetamines were joined by new classes of anti-depressants at the prescription party.

Treatment with antidepressant drugs—particularly selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) like Imipramine—is associated with forms of ‘emotional blunting’ in patients: less empathy, crying and happiness, a loss of motivation and the enjoyment response. The extent to which this emotional blunting is experienced positively or negatively is measurably different depending on the person, but the side-effect on society as a whole is extraordinarily difficult to ascertain, outside what we might imagine.

In English author EC Tubb’s sci-fi novel, De Bracy’s Drug (1953), the eponymous doctor believed global suffering was rooted in unstable emotion, so he devised a remedy that permanently eradicated emotional experience. Why would anyone take it though? ‘People had reached their breaking point, they sickened of the constant fear of potential war, starvation and poverty,’ and in that desperate state when hope had apparently disappeared, they were offered De Bracy’s treatment. It was billed as giving ‘them security, utter and final security, and they took it.’

The story opens with the protagonist, a spaceship commander called Lanson, and his compatriots deep in a bunker under nuclear bombardment by the ‘Logicans’. They are members of the ‘Free Army’, a group of dissidents who refused to take De Bracy’s drug, a substance which had ‘effectively killed all emotion [and] turned a warm, impulsive human race into a collection of robot-like intelligences. Logic ruled, cold inhuman logic, and logic decided that all must be the same.’ A utopiate with some less than fuzzy side-effects it would seem.

According to Lanson, De Bracy’s drug caused a ‘spiritual death’ in its user, and those who did not conform to taking it, ‘pay the price of [choosing] individuality’. Without emotion the Logicans are merciless, for though they are free of misery, they are also free of love. In exchange for their safety people relinquished their humanity, and work on behalf of homogenous, logical ideals. Like soma, the utopiate collapsed the individual and society together, and synthesized an omnipotent State from their emotionless corpses and the space where freely associating communities once dwelt.

De Bracy’s Drug was of course published in Britain during those early explosive years of the pharmacratic menu, although Tubbs would not have been aware of the emotional blunting side-effects, nor the later extent of antidepressant use. It did however coincide with the rapid expansion of the Soviet Union abroad, and the unstoppable rise of Public Health and social democracy at home.  

We still live with a pharmacratic worldview that emerged in practice after 1945, and slowly came to dominate our view of ourselves. Namely, as avatars of public health. One in which health institutions and the (surprisingly not nationalized) pharmaceutical industry found common cause in using psychopharmacology and emotional management to adjust individuals to social demands.

Antidepressants, along with other human-behaviour management drugs, are now omnipresent in Britain. In 2017 alone, 7.3 million people were prescribed antidepressants by doctors in the UK—17% of the population. In just a three-month period during Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, six million people received prescriptions. And of course, in a world promising misery, poverty and loneliness, we can ask the same question as De Bracy’s protagonist poses, ‘Can we blame them?’

Probably not; the promise of freedom from misery is an especially potent force, but it is often, and certainly was in the case of De Bracy’s drug, a double-edged sword. The problem is that underlying extraordinary, benevolent promises may be in fact be lurking the aforementioned Faustian pact between you and the pharmacracy, all neatly wrapped up in a pill. And psychedelics are not immune from this emotionally fraught question of liberty, they are being incrementally tied to it.

As psychedelics get their second bite at the psychopharmaceutical cherry, the question of emotion is also increasingly on the research agenda. Outbranching from talking therapies, the emotional breakthrough is being extolled as a vital component in treatment. Emotions, now materially linked with brain elasticity, are being posited as potentially manipulated with psilocybin for long term changes. There’s also a suggestion that psychedelics increase empathetic functions, promoting social connectedness and prosocial activity: a classic soma-like utopiate reading.

Moreover, like soma, psychedelics as utopiates are tending to a top-down model. It is not Indigenous communities, countercultures, or entheogenic churches that are driving the socio-medical adoption of psychedelics. (Sure, there have been activists trying to end criminality from those quarters, but these communities are hardly evangelical.) It is a self-referential web of celebrities, corporations, health professionals, and increasingly even politicians—in short, social and cultural elites—selling a psychedelic society utopianism on the back of individual salvation.

That is our Brave New World.

Conclusion

There are echoes of both soma and De Bracy’s drug in today’s chemical landscape. However, the discovery of any substance even approaching the extraordinarily uniform efficacy of those devised in the literary imagination is, all initial hyperbole aside, fanciful at best. Yet the utopian impulses briefly explored in this literary history hang heavy around what drugs we do have, and how we frame them. That our emotions are pawns in wider socio-political games should be obvious. 

‘Unlike with an SSRI or an antibiotic,’ Cormier writes, ‘the effects of psychedelics are unpredictable, a person can become angry, weepy, or, of course, psychotic.’ They are, she rightly suggests, dangerous in the hands of the unscrupulous. Yet I don’t believe the profit motive is any more dangerous than the utopia motive, in fact in some cases it might be less so because it’s easier to jettison a local clinic than an industrially-facilitated public health apparatus with a social agenda.

Nevertheless, wherever the utopiate frame is employed, we should remain extremely wary. For if, as I suspect, psychedelics are not utopiates, then those who are selling the idea have in truth reduced psychedelics to MacGuffins—simply a vehicle in the plot of their own agenda. As such, ‘bottling up your emotions’ need not necessarily be a simple idiom about the dangers of not expressing yourself, it could equally be a punchy, albeit sinister, tagline for public health utopians and their allies in the pharmaceutical industry.

The dangers of psychedelics are not mitigated by the utopian pretensions of capitalized nor socialized health outcomes, they are compounded. 

Let us keep remembering that psychedelics are creative, playful magical elixirs with myriad-effects. If we forget, and holiday too long from this reality, then long-existing psychedelic communities are in danger of simply redesignating their marginalized status—and, like the Free Army, will inevitably continue to be persecuted for not conforming to the new Utopia.

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