Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception: Doors in the Wall lyrics

That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives, at the worst, so painful; and at best, so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape,the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. Art and religion, carnivals and Saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory--all these have served, in H.G. Wells' phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private, for everyday use, there have always been chemical inxoticants. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow squeezed from roots--all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial. And to these natural modifiers of consciousness, modern science has added its quota of synthetics--chloral, for example, and benzedrine, the bromides and the barbiturates. Most of these modifiers of consciousness cannot now be taken except under doctor's orders, or else illegally and at considerable risk. For unrestricted the use, the West has permitted alcohol and tobacco. All other chemical Doors in the Wall are labelled Dope, and their unauthorized takers, Fiends. We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from selfhood, and the environment they inhabit, is within everyone at all times. The urge to do something fo rthe young is strong only in parents, and even they are only so concerned during those years in which their children go to school, for nine months out of the year. Equally unsurprising is the current attitude towards drink and smoke. In spite of the growing army of hopeless alcoholics, in spite of the hundreds of thousands of persons annually maimed or k**ed by drunken drivers, popular comedians still crack jokes about alcohol and its addicts. In spite of the evidence linking cigarettes iwth lung cancer, practically everybody regards tobacco smoking as being hardly less normal and natural than it's antithesis, breathing. From the point of view of the rationalist utilitarian, this may seem odd. For the historian, it is exactly what you'd expect. A firm conviction of the material reality of Hell never prevented medieval Christians from doing what their ambition, lust or covetousness suggested. Lung cancer, traffic accidents, millions of miserable, misery creating alcoholics--these are facts even more certain than the torment awaiting sinners in The Inferno, during Dante's day. But all such facts are remote, unsubstantial, compared with the near, sensual fact of a craving. For the here and the now, release or sedation, drink or smoke. Ours is the age, among other things, of the automobile and of rocketing population. Alcohol is incompatible with saftey on the roads, and its production, like that of tobacco, condemns the virtual sterility many millions of acres of the most fertile soil. The problems raised by alcohol and tobacco cannot, it goes without saying, be solved by solely by prohibition. The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old habits for new, better ones. Some of these other, less harmful doors will be social nd technological and nature; others religious and psychological, others still, dietetic, educational and athletic. The need remains, still, for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings. What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in he long run, than it does god in the short. Such a drug must be potent in minute doses and sythesizable. If it does not posess these qualities, its production, like that of wine,beer, spirits, and tobacco will interfere with the raising of indispensable food and fibers. It must be less toxic than opium or c**aine, less likely to produce undesirable social consequences than alcohol or the barbiturates, less inimical to heart and lungs than the tars and nicotine. On the positive side, it should produce changes in consciousness more interesting, more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess, delusions of omnipotence or release from inhibition. Mescaline is almost completely innocuous. Unlike alcohol, it does not drive the taker into the kind of uninhibited action which results in brawls, crimes of violence and traffic accidents. A man under the influence of mescaline quietly minds his own business. The business he minds is an experience of the most enlightening kind, which does not have to be paid for (and this is surely important) by a compensatory hangover. Of the long range consequences of regular mescalin taking , we know very little.