The Dispossessed

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 17 Jun 2023 08:29
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    • 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 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.