“Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is.” – Mustapha Mond

Mond, Resident Controller for Western Europe, and one of only ten World Controllers is introduced in the third chapter as a very important character.

The middle of the book tells the story of how the World State came to begin.

Mond tells the reader how life was like, in regards to reproduction control, child-rearing, and social relations. Mond makes an analogy of emotion and desire to water under pressure in a pipe. One big hole will make a big stream while many small holes will create several calm streams. Mond says that emotions that come from family relationships, sex, and delayed satisfaction of desire go against the World State's idea of stability. Mond says without stability, civilization cannot exist. Mond also says that before the creation of the World State, instability was caused by strong emotions. These emotions caused disease, social uprising, war, countless deaths, suffering, and misery.

Mond tells us that people initially resisted the World State's use of the caste ststem, artifical gestation, and extreme human conditioning. During the Nine Years' War, chemical and biological warfare combined with propaganda and suppression of books weakened all resistence. The World State destroyed importance figures and ideas of the past like Shakespeare, religion, museums and the idea of a family. The World State chose the date of the introduction of the Model T to begin their new era. To assist the World State, a mircle drug, soma, was created to cure the problem of old age.

The end of the book ends in a philosophical argument between Mond and John, the illegal son of the Director. and Mustapha Mond. Before this arguement, they argued about human experiences and what that the World State has destroyed and in the last chapter of the book they argue about religion. Mond shows John his collection of banned religious scriptures, and reads passages from the nineteenth-century Catholic theologian, Cardinal Newman, and from the eighteenth-century French philosopher, Maine de Biran. They say that religious belief comes from the threat of loss, old age, and death. Mond says that in a prosperous environment there is no loss, old age or death and therefore no need for religion. John wonders if it is a inhert response to believe in god, to which Mond responds that people believe what they have been conditioned to believe.

“Providence takes its cue from men,” is the famous line he says that encompasses the entire book.

John claims God is the reason for “everything noble and fine and heroic,” and says that if people in the World State believed in god they would not feel degraded and have reason to feel guilt. Mond replies that no one in the World State is degraded they just live by a different code of morals and belief. Mond says that if anyone in the World State is unhappy, Soma will cure them. He profoundly states that Soma is “Christianity without tears.” In the end, John wants god to help keep himself disillusioned from reality, whereas Mond is more logical and knows that Johns belief in god will lead to unhappiness, which is the ultimate human condition.