![]() The roaring 20s saw an explosion of carpe diem pleasure-seeking in response to the horrors of the first world war. ![]() Hedonism has also fuelled some of literature’s greatest works, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium-dream poem Kubla Khan to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 60,000-word novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which he allegedly wrote during a six-day cocaine binge in 1885.īut perhaps the greatest hidden virtue of hedonism has been its role in catalysing social change. When Franciscan missionaries first arrived in Mexico, they witnessed Aztec rituals that began with the eating of a black mushroom, probably Psilocybe cubensis, a hallucinogen. We should welcome hedonistic pleasure-seeking into our lives because of our brain chemistry and because, for centuries, it has been an incredibly enriching ingredient of human culture.
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