DOS COLAPSOS PSICOLÓGICOS AOS CIVILIZACIONAIS VAI APENAS UM ESPÍRITO SANTO OU DEMONÍACO PARA O CASO TANTO FAZ...Here I am sitting on a chair and pecking at a keyboard with a monitor and computer in front of me. At least I think so. But what if the sushi I had for lunch was spiked with a psychotropic drug that makes me believe that this typing at the keyboard activity is real? Especially when, in actual reality, I may be strung up stark naked and upside-down in a subterranean dungeon with rats gnawing at my vitals while happily thinking up what

Marcuse accuses capitalist technology of short-circuiting this process by filling up that space with tinsel and baubles (figurative narcotics) in endless cycles of consumption. Art degenerates into advertising: it sells, pacifies, and narcotizes. In Lem's Futurological Congress we have an even more insidious problem. For in Marcuse's thought art is a temporary rebellion against the demands of the reality principle. The fantasy created by art must always end with the perception of a social reality and the natural world. But crytochemocracy induces the illusion that only the unconscious and its pleasure principle exist.
The pervasive hallucinogens, which provide a basis for a pseudo-social contract, produces epistemological problems, such as: how do I know I am not now hallucinating this incident in which I discover that there are hallucinogens in the air and water? The only way Descartes could get out of a similar solipsism was to suppose that since God is good, every natural appetite or inclination has a natural object in which it is satisfied, including of course the need for God. Advertising and drugs, which are ultimately the same thing, make it impossible to differentiate natural from artificial needs. Indeed, Bentham's radical system must reject the difference. If there is only desire and its satisfaction, addiction is unavoidable.
As a Pole, Lem could not elaborate the escape in American life that has been historically articulated by Calvinism in condemnation of utilitarian pleasure. As a cultural outsider, who was immersed in Communist propaganda, Lem would almost inevitably view this alternative view as weak, lost, or hypocritical. Many Americans would agree. But they are hardly disinterested. In fact, they are most likely to be partisans for some mutated version of Calvinism, which is more ineradicable in the American character than Lem recognizes by construing Americans as robots programmed by Bentham's simple digital opposition of pain and pleasure. More generously, we can credit Lem with the intention to clarify this very point for his American and perhaps world readers.
In any case, Lem does offer the escape of moral disgust. Ijon is nauseated by the bourgeois consumption of an endless swirl of cotton candy pleasures. In despair he asks, "is there no hope?" The answer indicates Lem’s concern about the continued viability of a social philosophy formulated two hundred years earlier, during a time when technology was incapable of subverting an obvious recognition of reality. Ijon is told that "A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance." That chance is increasingly provided by technology. If it is true, as Bentham and Freud said, that humans are programmed ineluctably to seek pleasure, then sophisticated technology must offer a gilded suicide. Ijon perceives that "Bentham's dream of the greatest happiness for the greatest number has been achieved," but that it has been achieved at the cost of real , i.e., embodied life. Historical man is finished. Ijon is asked, "What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good?" That is, to repress his selfish desires for the good of the community. Good , Bentham says, is a euphemism for pleasure. And what is socially good , in Bentham’s arithmetic? Because society is a nonentity in itself, the good must be partitioned into individual bank accounts. The only incentive to accept the repression necessary for the social contract is the expectation to derive greater personal benefits than are possible without the contract. But in Lem’s world, technology has liberated us from the physical need of a community. From a consumer view, the social contractual offer is empty. Hence humans are freed to regress to the infantile. "Little boys get patricidol popsicles—throttle-pops—to vent their hostilities." Ijon rebels against "the foulness lurking behind that most elegant, courteous facade!" craving contact with a sewer, because it is the "only talisman and touchstone to reality." The sewer is a fairly obvious symbol for the body: the digestion, urination, flatulence, defecation, sweat, belches, ear wax, nose hair, bald head and stomach rumbling that drags us down from our Gnostic dreams to fly with the angels. As pragmatists know, embodied knowledge is the necessary origin of all epistemological claims. Dreams, illusion, mathematics, and science—all discourse and all perceptions—are launched from the body and its experience. The sewer is the home of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man with his toothache. In Lem’s novel, the sewer as a philosopher's stone brings to mind the monastery hidden in the sewers. But Ijon’s prophet is Bentham. Thus he resolves to listen henceforth to no one, but to "do everything myself, everything myself! Myself!" Fantasy wins over reality.
Near the end of the book, Professor Trottelreiner accepts the necessity of a pragmatic epistemology to account for perception (thereby implicitly criticizing the computer model of the mind as inadequate), telling Ijon that their world has passed beyond narcotics and hallucinogens to use mascons, which subtly falsify experience. The government has been driven to this in order to create the illusion of freedom and dignity and to perpetuate at any cost the right of the individual to pursue happiness. With nearly 100 billion people on earth, the professor says that it was "Out of a deep sense of compassion and for the highest humanitarian reasons that this chemical hoax has been perpetrated." When Ijon, like Dostoevsky, objects that people have a right to the painful truth, which is even more fundamental than their right to happiness, the professor tells him: "You ought to be doing what everyone does, eating and drinking like the rest of us. Then you would get the necessary amounts of optimistizine and seraphinil in your bloodstream—the minimum daily requirements—and be in the best possible humor." As any Utilitarian moralist would say, the mascons work and everyone is happy, "so what is the harm in them?" 
There are even dehallucinides, which "create the illusion that there is no illusion" and thus keep the skeptics happy. 
But Ijon remains disgusted by the hedonism that has destroyed nature.
Ijon discovers that the robots, so prolific and apparently the perfect successors of the working class, 
were in fact only drugged people who thought themselves robots. Repelled by bourgeois hedonism, which is degrading as much as it is an evasion, Ijon resolves to "hide like a rat," the only awakened one who is thus "shipwrecked in reality." At the edge of the ramshackle world, Ijon meets the last successor of Bentham and the Robber Baron industrialists, who keeps what is left of the world running with illusions and baubles. A true utilitarian politician who understands the difference between means and ends, he defends his deceptions by saying, "We keep this civilization narcotized, for otherwise it could not endure itself." Evidently oblivious of his involvement in the destruction of the world, the controller, who could easily be speaking for Adolf Eichmann or some other monster, issues the last obscenity: "If the truth cannot be altered, let us at least conceal it. 
This is the last humanitarian act, the last , moral obligation.
" On this note Ijon falls into the sewer for the last time. Is this a baptism? 
Does he awake to the real world, the natural world perceived in an undrugged state?
 Has all this been only a dream? 
Perhaps, but as Ijon says about another bad dream in The Star Diaries,
  "I told myself, 'For God's sake, it's only a dream!' Somehow that didn't help."