As many others have already noted on this blog, Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress involves an incredible amount of hallucinogenic drug use. The story progressed from a dream-like description of the life of Ijon Tichy to a slow realization that most of what Tichy (and the reader) has been experiencing is a product of widespread drug use, both voluntary and involuntarily. In Lem's version of the future, it is nearly impossible for Tichy to determine what is real and what is not, no matter how hard he tries to make the society more transparent.
Drug and alcohol use is a problem today, but I think that the novel was less about the problems associated with drugs themselves, but about the problems of becoming disconnected from reality. Lem used hallucinogenic drugs as a way to separate the people in the future from reality, but our own world is also disconnected from reality in a different way. We have become so immersed in technology--movies, immersive video games, Facebook--that makes us less aware of the tangible reality around us. Instead of being in a constant chemical trance, we are constantly immersed in our phones and computers that distance us from what is "reality", reality meaning what is physically existing around us. Lem wrote this book in 1971 as a vision of the future, and although we (thankfully) are not as reliant on drugs as Lem predicts, we are just as immersed in something equally addicting.
I'm not sure drugs separate the people in the future from reality. It seems like drugs separate people from themselves, meaning they produce a disconnect in the human mind from reality, so that people are living in their own realities. Like the saying, "She's in her own world." It is not that our world is disconnected from reality, but our minds are disconnected from reality. What does Lem mean by reality? I disagree that reality is tangible. Dictionary.com defines reality as a "resemblance to what is real." One has his or her own idea of what is real, but it's hard to grasp others' reality. Lem might be saying our minds are disconnected from the reality of others. When we are immersed in drugs or technologies, we are less attuned to the reality of others. There is certainly a physical aspect to reality because we are shaped by our immediate and distant physical surroundings, but there is a greater intangible aspect to reality because we internalize the world around us at a rapid rate that exceeds time and space, which is what Lem seems to be getting at in the text. Tichy is internalizing the world around him at such a rapid rate that the reader cannot keep up at times and begins to question the past and present. The telling of the novel is akin to the mind's telling of reality.
ReplyDeleteI agree that a central conflict in the novel was humanity’s mass disconnection with reality. With the majority of Earth’s population unaware of the true state of their world due to the hallucinogens they have become dependent on, humanity’s deterioration was unnoticed. This disconnect from reality was a severe problem because it put both planet Earth and humanity on paths towards destruction. However, taking away the hallucinogens that create a false utopic reality was not an option because without them humanity would not be able to endure what it had allowed itself to become due to its ignorance towards the world’s grim state. Therefore, the inability of humanity to reconnect with reality is another central conflict of the novel that illustrates how an innovation with good intentions can be taken too far, which goes along with the themes of several other sci-fi novels we have read, such as R.U.R., I, Robot, and Frankenstein. Furthermore, I also agree that our society’s immersion in technology mirrors humanity’s addiction to hallucinogens in the novel. In this sense, Lem’s Futurological Congress can be regarded as a cautionary tale, which could be applied to warn today’s society about the implications of excessively using technology as a means of escape from reality.
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