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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