The Dispossessed

I’ve always liked Ursula K. Le Guin, though I haven’t actually read much of her work. Mostly just The Earthsea Cycle and The Left Hand of Darkness. A few other short stories and maybe some books I have forgotten (I read a lot as a kid and don’t remember most of it I’m sure).

I recently listened to a podcast, The Word For Man Is Ishi (a clear homage to The Word for World is Forest ), and it made me want to read some more of Ursula — especially her early works. I’ve had The Dispossessed on my shelf (unread) for a long time. So I opened it up and read it. Ha, ha! Just kidding. I got an audio version from our library (via Libby) and listened to it. I need to get back in the habit of reading instead of just listening…

Anyway, similar to The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed is largely about culture and, in this case, political systems. It’s a thought experiment of what a true socialist utopia might be like. Or maybe it’s a libertarian’s paradise. Or perhaps I should just use the word anarchist, which is what the book itself uses. Now, I’m not a student of political scientist, so I’m sure there are important distinctions between those three philosophies, but the Odonians seem (to me) to share traits with all of them.

Because the name is the thing and the truename is the true thing. To speak the name is to control the thing.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

Anyway, it’s An Ambiguous Utopia, and the part that really stuck out to me was near the end, about freedom or liberty. The people of Anarres have no laws, so they are completely free in theory. They can do anything they want without fear of the government reprisal. And yet, at the same time they have very little freedom in practice because they are bound by shame and social pressure to behave in certain ways. As a simplistic example, I am of a legal age to smoke or drink, so I could do either without any legal repercussions. And yet (because of the culture where I was raised and now live in), I cannot do those things because I would lose the respect of all my friends as well as my immediate and extended families.¹ In fact, the mere act of writing that sentence may cause doubts to form in their minds.

I thought about writing some more about this, since there is much more that could be said about different limitations on freedom, when they are justified, etc. Instead, I’m going to exercise my freedom to stop writing and encourage you to use your freedom to pick it up and start reading (though I won’t stop you from listening if you prefer) since it’s actually much better than I’ve made it sound.

But I will end by throwing out a semi-gratuitous reference to recent pop-culture: the hero of The Dispossessed was modeled after J. Robert Oppenheimer (who was a friend of Le Guin’s parents).