the shrewdness of apes

"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol...There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality...But they used to take morphia and cocaine...Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized in A.P. 178...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...It only remained to conquer old age...All the physiological stigmata of old age have been abolished. And along with them, of course...Along with them all the old man's mental peculiarities. Characters remain constant throughout a whole lifetime...Work, play–at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking–thinking!...Now–such is progress–the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think–or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to …"

- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World