4 ideas
Hawkers spread a pill carrying the doctrine of the Malay philosopher Murti Bing, and it dissolves the anxiety of whoever swallows it. Takers become serene about the approaching Chinese army and lose interest in unanswerable metaphysical questions. Surrender stops feeling like defeat because the capacity to suffer the loss of meaning has been removed chemically, so no argument is ever needed.
Witkacy argues that as society mechanizes toward collective, organized contentment, individuals lose their sense of the strangeness of existence (the 'Mystery of Existence'). Religion, philosophy and art are the organs of that feeling, and they wither first. A fully socialized society would be comfortable and happy, and spiritually dead.
Read a late culture's excesses as a craving to replace lost metaphysical experience with ever-stronger sensation. In the novel's elite, the insatiability shows up as sexual obsession, drugs, grotesque art and ideological fads. Each dose has to exceed the last because none delivers what it replaces, and the resulting exhaustion leaves the culture ready to accept any outside order that promises relief.
Genezyp Kapen, son of a brewery magnate, is sexually initiated by the older Princess Ticonderoga. He becomes an adjutant to Kocmołuchowicz, the charismatic Quartermaster-General who holds Poland together as a bulwark against the Chinese communist army. Genezyp slides into madness and murder and ends as a hollowed-out functionary.