My youth and early adulthood was full of science fiction reading. Somehow I missed the works of Ursela Le Guin. A Medium contributor introduced me to her work a year or two ago.
The Dispossessed is about two planets, Urras and Anarres, which call each other their moons.
Urras is rich in resources and has a human-friendly climate. It has a capitalist nature, with wealthier classes enjoying the benefits of capitalism. The lower classes are “surviving.”
Urras has banned much of its mining to protect its environment. It gets much of its minerals from Anarres.
Anarres is hot and dry, with only a few plant and animal species. While Urras had been mining Anarres for a long time, there was no permanent human settlements.
Two hundred years ago, a revolutionary movement, the Odonians, started organizing on Urras. The belligerent parties agreed to a truce, with the condition that the Odonians were to immigrate to Anarres and set up permanent habitation on this harsh planet. Small cities were built; a new social order was established based on the philosophy of the Odonian founder.
This social order was anti-capitalism. The Anarresti people were accustomed to serving the needs of their state. While they had occupations that suited their talents, they were still obligated to do some physical labor as the software called “Divlab” told them where and when to do their “dirty” occupations. Most Anarresti took the departures from their preferred work stoically.
The main character Shevek is a theoretical physicist. He is working on some theories to speed up space travel. Yet he too must also spend time on construction and agricultural worksites.
Shevek finds an opportunity to visit Urras. He is treated well by the wealthy classes, but eventually realizes this society is out-of-balance. He joins a resistance movement and takes part in a large protest. He eventually returns to Anarres.
This novel was written in 1974, when the Cold War was in full swing. Was the author trying to tell us that neither capitalism nor communism was a utopia? If this was all this book was about, maybe it had its purpose in 1974. But not today.
I needed to finish about 80% of the book before I got to the good stuff. Shevek and his partner Takver are re-united after four years of Anaressti work assignments that took them far away from each other. Shevek starts thinking with this reunion. He realizes how the system he was raised and firmly believed in was not all that humanistic. The author gets into a long argument about how our value systems come from outside of ourselves. And that has value for thinkers in 2024.
One excerpt:
The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
That excerpt should generate an evening of great discussion at a book club.
Anarres was a harsh habitat for humanity. To build a permanent society on this planet, the population had to work hard and consume little. The population were conditioned to believe that this was a rightful way of living, which included the dirty work assignments. While we can argue whether indeed this was rightful, Anarresti society might have crumbled with a more relaxed, humanistic approach. Anarres was a hard planet for humans.
Despite the Anarresti population stoically accepting their fate, especially when the Divlab software put them in dirty occupations away from home and family, there were a few Anarresti somehow finding a way to get out of their dirty work assignments. Egalitarian for 98%, but 2% were above the few Anarresti rules!
I think I need to digress to the Orwell Ratio again. The 2% is a natural human tendency — in any society.
Brave New Worlds
Science fiction writers are great at creating worlds with interesting social structures. However, at the heart of many science fiction novels is conflict. This conflict is often between the protagonist and a corrupt system.
Both Urras and Anarres had corrupt systems. Shevek was a likeable fellow. We could follow his conflict in both worlds.
Someday science fiction writers might envision a social structure where most people get along. We will develop our natural and human resources in a much wiser way. Such an arrangement is likely to create a super-economy where people can live more fully to their potential.
But such a story is not likely to have much conflict. Stories with little conflict don’t sell well. Science fiction writers need to buy groceries and pay rent. Maybe selling science fiction books with conflict is why we have been conditioned to believe that conflict is the normal human condition.
The Dispossessed is about how people accept their social conditioning without much questioning. The Anarresti accepted their dirty work assignments and minimalist lifestyle. The wealthy capitalists on Urras accepted the working people were to be kept on the fringes. The working people on Urras accepted their life of service to the wealthy — until things got too oppressive.
Ms. Le Guin just might be telling us that we too have been conditioned to think in a certain way.
And I say that science fiction writers have been conditioning us that societal conflict is normal — just because science fiction writers need to sell books.
I have been working on an alternative democracy for 27 years. It has gone nowhere. But my system is not about the usual political tools: complaining, blaming, writing internet articles, protesting, and voting. It is not within our current conditioning. We cannot — no, we dare not — imagine that a better democracy is possible. Especially a democracy that could remove much of our current conflict.
Are my ideas really that bad?
Or have we been conditioned not to go in that direction?
Published on Medium 2025
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