The Dispossessed
30 Oct 2021 - 28 Sep 2025
- book by Ursula Le Guin
- The Dispossessed was a big influence on me; it turned anarchism from an abstract idea into a living image of a better world. The genius of the book was that it was not a utopia; it depicted an anarchist society struggling against the obvious natural human tendencies towards selfishness and power.
- The vision it painted of a society where cooperation was the norm and competition frowned upon was so attractive to me. Probably it was somewhat harmful – I had to retrain myself for reality, and in a certain sense still am. My later attempts to take in conflict-oriented thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault, and Latour are in part attempts to get out from under the spell it wove. Power is too powerful to be wished away, as idealistic communards throughout history have discovered.
- I might feel misled by Le Guin, and thus resentful, but she wasn't an ideologue, she was a novelist exploring an idea.
- More like heartbreaking; it reminds me of lost youthful idealism, when it seemed possible to have a world in which people were in fact comrades, not strangers, competitors, enemies. Even more so in this era of actual fascism, which is predicated on implacable existential warfare between various groups.
Incoming
- Weird for an anarchist to be honored by the USPS. Picture appears to be from Left Hand of Darkness