Walker Percy, Pharma, and the End of Humanity

The Ethics of Medicating the Masses

In the early nineties, a psychiatrist in a small Louisiana parish noticed something strange: his patients were no longer miserable. Neurotics had not a care; agoraphobics walked the streets with ease; the formerly depressed were presently grinning. Peace was on the earth, at least on his small corner of it, and all without a hint of the Second Coming. Is such secular salvation possible? Turns out, not a chance. What the doctor had stumbled upon was not so much tranquility in the air as tranquilizers in the water. The medical elite were drugging the people out of their souls – or the souls out of the people – with predictably demonic consequences. Not to worry, it’s a fictional account. You can tell that Walker Percy’s otherwise prophetic The Thanatos Syndrome is not true to life, for in it the doctors manipulating the mood and minds of the masses get their comeuppance. In our reality, well, there’s always that Second Coming.

              The novel respects the conventions of the thriller, in which it is necessary for a determined hero to bring the villainous conspiracy to light. Yet what is the true evil that Percy highlights? Do we shudder merely at the neglect of informed consent – or at the horror of a populace drugged into inhumanity? Today’s medical practitioners are confident enough in the rightness of our methods to do away with surreptitious cistern-spiking. That doesn’t mean you’re not being poisoned. The water supply may not yet be fully contaminated, but, if there are four rivers providing for your town, statistics show at least one is overflowing with psychoactive pharmaceuticals. True, the townspeople drink willingly – at least, as willingly as one can consent to a cursory prescription for an ill-defined illness scribbled out by a white-coated authority – but does that make the draught any less bitter?

              Consider this a plea to the medical community to confront, at long last, the societal implications of widespread psychiatric medication use. An awareness of the population-wide dangers of prescriptions is hardly foreign to the field. Stop giving antibiotics for colds, we have (correctly) been lectured for years, unless you want an antibiotic-resistant, flesh-eating superbug to evolve. When the soul, and not just the flesh, is at risk from irresponsible overprescribing, the authorities stay mum.

           Picture your closest friends; take inventory of the ways in which your personalities differ. Perhaps one is funnier, another a better listener, a third the most reliable. Now imagine a new drug, FDA approved, widely advertised, easily available, that artificially enhances one such personality trait. A humor pill, say. Overnight, a new, multi-billion-dollar medical binary is created: people who know the one about the Italian goatherd, and people with humor deficiency disorder. Soon there are only two kinds of Americans: the naturally grinning and the ones on laughing pills. A sense of humor is no longer one of several varied traits that make up an individual’s unique personality; it is now a matter for medical intervention, a quality-of-life determinant to be tracked by your child’s teacher and evaluated at her yearly physical. And all your friends will now be equally hilarious.  

Sound outlandish? True, humor pills remain undiscovered. Obedience pills, however, are here. Where are NPCs made? They are in large part the end-product of pharmaceuticals. When not paying attention to one’s teacher becomes a treatable medical condition, the only possible future classroom is one in which total obedience is the norm.

For all the debate over the ethics of daily amphetamine use on individual children over the years, few have raised an equally important concern: the repercussions of the mass drugging of our student population. Any wrongful conviction is a tragedy, yet Soviet-era rates of false imprisonment are designed as much to control the populace outside the walls as those within.

When students of the past did not fit, there was not that much even the most authoritarian teacher could do about it. If a few good beatings didn’t do the trick, then, well, the child would have to be tolerated to go off and invent the lightbulb or write a symphony or otherwise shirk work on his global warming diorama. Today, however, the choice is starker: do the stupid diorama, with or without the assistance of your friendly neighborhood pharmacist. Conform or be drugged. We used to make dystopian movies about it; now we make our children live it. Why, exactly, are we then surprised that up and coming generations have all the intellectual vivacity of pod people?  

Young adults cannot think freely today because they grow up in schools where doctors pharmacologically compel conformity. There is no way to limit physicians’ prescriptive power to a small handful of ‘bad’ students; its influence will inexorably spread throughout the classroom. A school system that drugs a significant percentage of its students into obedience cannot have free-flowing discussions on the nature of conformity, rebellion, authority, and the like. Imagine the great works of literature, the great debates of history, that have revolved around such questions. Now ask yourself: can a teacher lead such a discussion after she’s personally sent a fifth of the class to the doctor to get a chemical lobotomy because they weren’t captivated by her slides?

Once we have obedience in a tablet – a drug that makes students sit still and attend to whatever faddish nonsense their teacher may be spouting – society as a whole can be independent no longer. By making pharmaceuticals an integral part of the modern educational project, it is not simply the stimulant-taking students who become docile and obedient, but the unmedicated ones as well, firstly thanks to the chastening example of their drugged classmates and secondly because any historical or literary rumors of resistance to authority must be thoroughly expunged from their lessons. In such a world, in our world, to be well read becomes an act of rebellion against one’s own education.

What first tips off Percy’s hero to the trouble afoot, and what supplies the true horror in the novel, is the remarkably generic sameness of the drugged individuals. Diversity is our strength, we are told; a phrase ripe for ridicule when its adherents recoil at any difference beyond the cosmetic. When it comes to true diversity, that which goes beyond skin deep, it is not enough to say that it is our strength. Diversity is us. Without it, we are not ourselves, we are not human. God calls upon us to love the stranger. Drugging the stranger to be like ourselves first doesn’t count.

No two people are the same; nitrogen atoms, however, are indistinguishable. Your Concerta pill doesn’t have a personality, or laugh lines, or pet peeves; only you do. Some might reject discussing the big picture around medicating the masses, arguing that such a perspective belittles the individual nature of medical practice, wherein a personalized decision is made by your doctor for your unique needs. Yet we are losing a great deal of perspective indeed if we consider mass ingestion of sub-atomically identical assembly-line pharmaceuticals to have anything of the personal about it. You might as well be drinking from the same drugged water supply. If you are prescribed the very mind-altering pill that all your neighbors are on, how long will it be before your minds are, like your factory-made medicine, indistinguishable? Despite their widespread use on children for decades and decades, the long term effects of stimulant medicine on the developing brain remain unstudied (if this surprised you before the mandating of pediatric covid vaccinations, it shouldn’t surprise you any longer). Were such a study ever to be performed, however, it would be useless, at least until we have a real life ontological lapsometer. Percy’s imagined stethoscope for the soul would certainly come in handy. You get what you measure, after all, and all we’re measuring these days is our patient’s ability to happily conform to our fallen world.  

Well before the advent of modern medicine, Dostoevsky warned of the dehumanizing dangers of ideology. Brain-altering pharmaceuticals may take a different path to possession than political pamphlets, but, as Percy suggests, the destination appears to be the same. Some outcomes undoubtedly improve with population-wide psychiatric dosing, as they did for his protagonist’s newly pleasant patients, and as they have for some of mine. Yet are more gold stars from teacher, or less angst at the prospect of a purposeless existence, the primary endpoints to pursue? Next time you read that other physician, Luke, as he relates Christ’s encounter with the Gadarenes, spare a thought for the poor, doomed pigs. Is their ultimate tragedy found in the mad rush over the cliff to their deaths, or prior to that, in their existence as an indistinguishable herd of the possessed?