The ideological obstacles to a happy world, indeed, are formidable. For we've learned how to rationalise the need for mental pain - even though its nastier varieties blight innumerable lives, and even though its very existence will soon become optional.

A pain-free world? Why, there's Huxley's soma:

"...Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized. Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug. Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant. All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects. Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology. Stability was practically assured..."

Soma is taken by the brainwashed and manipulated dupes of the ruling genetic caste in Brave New World. A cross between a hangoverless tranquilliser and a non-addictive opiate, soma allows Huxley's utopians to enjoy (episodes of) imbecilic, drug-induced bliss to offset their empty consumerist lives. Soma is a pleasureable cure-all; but it underwrites a static, philistine, loveless society where intellectual progress of any kind has been abolished. Surely we don't want to end up as brave new worlders, do we?