possible reality , within which tradition and modernity would or should disappear under the weight of a culture brought to life by the new social being : the proletariat . By reversing both the origins — culture is born from the social class in power — and the legitimacy — only what comes from power is legit — the socialist realism emerged . It did not need to be deceived , but only to prohibit and to prevent the whistle , and also the laughter , generated by the culture coming from its most authentic source : society . However , the slogan “ within the Revolution , everything ; out of it , nothing ” was the early reaction and the soma ’ s legitimation in advance within the cultural discourse by the powers that be . It was the lyrical expression of that early intuition about the need of some kind of pill in order to control culture from the very beginning , to stop the impulse of an essentially modern nation , capable of reinterpreting and recombining the most anchored traditions . Aren ’ t there priests of Santeria and even masons who are also Catholics ? The truth is that socialist realism was not going and is not going much with us . What ´ s interesting about those limits is that the cultural discourse by the powers that be perfectly recognized , from the beginning , there is a culture beyond and below the revolution , and the only way to coexist with it is to control it through extra cultural mechanisms ( administrative , political and in some cases even judicial ) and above all through a pre-modern action : installing Culture ( in capital letter ), just when no one in healthy mental balance follows ideology as the superior order of social articulation . Herein the pill — the mix of virtues brought by Christian purity and alcohol without their drawbacks — no longer tries to exert partial control over the concrete cultural manifestations understood as aesthetic and spiritual sublimation , as well as their specific relationships with the political power , but to exert it over the whole social coexistence . The intention is to know and to define how this coexistence should be structured in all its expressions . If taking pills is necessary for a conscious deception of reality , taking soma is now necessary to rebuild reality where all other knowledge and social mechanisms failed : soma replaces ideology , replaces the socialist economy , replaces and comes to the rescue of politics , substitutes the culture itself , and co-opts or tries to co-opt the entire past and all possible explosions generated by modernity and civil society . It replaces even the law and the constitutional order , and legitimizes violence wherever it ’ s deemed necessary to preserve order in all its levels of disorder . The soma ceases to be utopian and becomes conservative . Nothing new . Yet already in The Name of the Rose ( 1983 ) we can find the response by the medieval order , controlled by the clerics , against the whistling and the playful laughter of modernity . The dialogues between the key figures of the mentioned novel , William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk , portray some extreme astonishing facts in the late medieval times , where the social knowledges and practices cannot be controlled from themselves : doubt does not accept certainties without further ado , the medieval economy cannot control the modern one , alchemy cannot control chemistry , the priests cannot control the princes , and there is sexual romp at the foot of the abbeys . Against this , the clerics tried to maintain order by enriching themselves , closing access to the forbidden , poisoning the curious , and banning the others — not themselves — from whistling and laughter , both within the churches and convents and in the public and spontaneous spaces . And just
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