The Limits of Political Ideals
Review of "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin
I was waiting for this book for a while now. It’s name frequently popped up in my talks with ChatGPT, both in ones about Metamodern Fiction, and in my hunt for authentic, healthy dialogue in fiction, which is something I just rarely ever experience. And this is classified as science fiction as well, which I haven’t read as much of: I’ve always leaned more towards Fantasy.
This book isn’t the science fiction I’m used to in Gibson’s Neuromancer, or Stevenson’s The Fall, or the Pantheon series that I absolutely loved. There’s no tech here that inspires a future vision, and there’s minimal space travel. It’s mostly about people living in different social structures—one anarchist planet, one capitalist—and discussing capitalism vs. communism/anarchism while the protagonist moves between them. It’s almost like Dostoyevsky’s Demons in some ways: lots of talk about political ideas between people under different ideological capture, and not much else happening (though Demons does really pick up in the end, brutally).
I loved the focus in The Dipossessed on anti-capitalist sentiment, because a lot of what I see online when it comes to the Eat the Rich hatred, often directed at Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, always seemed oversimplified, and can often be reduced to “daddy please give me all of your money. PS You’re evil and I hate you.” It’s not an argument I find really convincing, as much as I see it as an expression of people’s bitterness and needs, with reasoning ending at pressure via guilt and shame. I know that there’s probably some better literature to support anticapitalist sentiment, but I just haven’t taken the time to read anything more than the rants on X and Threads. And so this book is my first taste of what a non-capitalist society might look like.
What surprised me was: it wasn’t utopia.
The anti-capitalist and anarchist movement, when instantiated, creates a slew of new problems. It’s not just “capitalism bad, other system good!” which is what a lot of cynical, dystopian, and misanthropic content often boils down to. This book offers nuance. Of course, there are many benefits of non-possession, and of relationship anarchy, and there are many challenges and problems that emerge. No system is perfect. All systems creak and groan under stress.
I started to wonder if this book is less about anti-capitalism and more about Buddhism. It’s dripping in Buddhist language. Possession is impossible. Don’t egoise. There is no means or ends, but only processes: the path is the goal. The spaceship is called Mindful, and we get a clear example of the Zen message that after the enlightenment, you still have to sweep the garden. There’s no happily ever after, ever. Early entry to Buddhist philosophy comes with images of Buddhist monks living blissed out in beautiful gardens. Deepen your practice and you learn that those gardens still need to be maintained. There is no freedom from suffering. It’s everywhere, and inescapable. There’s no escaping from problems. What matters is how we handle them.
The message here seems to be that there’s no perfect future that we can build. Every solution we come up with begets more problems. And one of the problems is often the ideological capture of the youth. The older you are, and the more you work through the fires of your early years, the more you’re aware of the shadows behind your idealism. The young are willing to fight, and to be violent, against ideas that don’t align with their ideologies. There’s even a section where contrarian thinkers are attacked at universities. This book was written in the 70s, with that section still being highly relevant 50 years later. I know that it’s an issue with universities today, when speakers are invited who speak out against mainstream ideologies, and met with violence and protests.
Children of immigrants were told that education is the key to liberation, which is true in one sense, but in another, universities aren’t liberating and educating, but training and conditioning for dominant ideologies. Critical thinking skills are only trained on everything outside of your system and ideology, but rarely on your own system. Education is given to you as a weapon for power and control, rather than for personal freedom.
The Buddhist overtones of the book tickled my obsession for ego dissolution. After being labelled as a narcissist, and viewing that as a major factor in my life falling apart during Covid, I had to get to the root of my narcissism. Buddhism was my jackhammer, and I spent many hours on the cushion disassembling my sense of self, and developing a non-dual awareness where I focus less on myself and more on what’s arising around me. That was a dangerous time of my life of disintegration, while now that I received the message, I’m focused a lot more on reintegration, with myself, with my relationships, and with my community.
Le Guin’s anarchist planet runs on a principle called “not-egoising,” where people are scolded for being egoic, and my eyes lit up every time it appeared. Here’s a place where the whole planet is encouraged to do what I have been trying to do alone. Brilliant! I expected this planet to be a utopia. Fortunately, Le Guin’s world building is subtle enough to see the limits and restrictions of sacrificing yourself for the greater good.
On Shevek’s anarchist planet, revolutionary thinkers were supported, so long as they aligned with the current revolution. Any question about the revolution was silenced, especially by the ideological youth. I’m kind of reminded of Anti-Woke sentiment, or questions about anti-fascist rhetoric. It’s possible to question the means and message of the revolution, without supporting what they’re fighting against. It’s not a binary of “you’re either for us or against us.” Just because you’re opposed to some form of oppression, it doesn’t mean that every means you utilize against that oppression is justified. Your means of control of power, too, deserve scrutiny. But post-postmodern thought isn’t commonplace yet. And similar to how it is in academic and journalistic thinking, the collective resistance to hierarchy and has become its own form of tyranny.
And this brings me back to my concerns with egoising. I assumed, and the book seemed to echo early on, that the bad actors on this planet were just those that reverted to egoising. But, by the end of the book, the message was inverted: egoising is necessary for development, and not just of yourself, but of your society. If you only hivemind with your world, then you’ll be perpetually stuck in the same patterns and problems. You’ll achieve no growth, earn no development. The old ways will be the only ways. The message I got was that thinking for yourself is important. You can’t continually defer to the group. In Buddhist language, we can’t live in perpetual nonduality.
And, I’ll be honest, that realization stung, because I’ve been trying so hard to kill the ego. But maybe the work isn’t ego destruction. Maybe it’s ego balance. Always easier said than done.
I loved how the book handled different ideologies. “Ideology” is often used now as a label for a system of thought that isn’t our own, and we’re often blind to the ideologies we subscribe to. In this case, it’s not that communism and anarchism are suggested as inherently superior to capitalism; they’re shown to be their own ideology with their own weaknesses as well. That’s such a brilliant move by Le Guin, and one that we deeply know but tend to forget. The grass is always greener, not just on our neighbour’s lawn but also in imagined political states. However, as soon as you flee one tyranny, you’ll find yourself in another. No matter where you go, there you are.
And so, the message here is to pick your poison. No matter what you choose, it’s going to annoy you. If we’re upset about the billionaires right now, and they all somehow are guilted and shamed by the social media priesthood into agreeing to give away their money and somehow end world hunger and every single issue of inequity, then, given some time, some new major issues will emerge that are going to deeply annoy us as well. We’ll find some other scapegoats to marginalize and to whom we can blame all of our problems. We’ll label them as pure evil, and probably even think of our current times as the good old days. There is no escaping the human ability to imagine something to suffer about. Our capacity for creativity is as deep as our capacity for suffering. You will never, ever be satisfied. I’m reminded of a hell of a line from Diogenes Laërtius:
Anaxagoras said to a man who was grieving because he was dying in a foreign land “the path to hell is the same from every place”
In the Central Bureau of Work scene with the young boy who is full of moral righteousness and the older begrudged man, we see that regardless of the language of your idealism—whether you’re speaking about truth or justice or freedom or whatever abstract term you want—all that’s really doing is hiding the underlying translation of valence. Does your body feel good or does your body feel bad? In medieval times we were obsessed with honor and virtue. We soon found those to be empty. Later on, Enlightenment focused on reason and truth, and current Cognitive Science and Epistemology now are really disassembling both. Neither are fully on the menu. Social justice is obsessed with equity and fairness, but thermodynamics show those to be impossible. Every system extracts energy and outputs waste. There is no such thing as a perfect system. I even tend to think that social justice is just a reframing of traditional religious ideas of purity.
Either way, whatever abstract virtue you proclaim - honor, virtue, truth, reason, justice, faith, democracy, whatever - it’s just a fancier way of describing what feels good or bad in your own body. That’s all. The younger you are, the better your body feels, and your interest in abstractions is stronger. The older you get, the worse your body feels, the more you see the flaws in your abstractions and internalized self. Our minds are expert confabulators, and all of our abstractions are downstream from our interroceptive network.
And so, in the Central Bureau, the young boy isn’t necessarily passionate about freedom itself. He’s young and his body feels good. The old man doesn’t necessarily have a better understanding of freedom. He’s old. His body feels bad. Strip away the rhetoric and you’re left with: does this make me feel good or bad? Am I oriented toward or away from something? Am I saying yes or no? We will keep on taking these abstract terms that mean very many different things to very many different people when all we really need to say is “yummy” or “yucky.”
This isn’t cynicism. It’s just an honest incorporation of our corporeal self, and a rightful examination of our thoughts and abstractions. When the anarchists on Anarres attack “propertarians,” are they fighting for liberation? Or do they just feel physically worn down from a lifetime of gruelling labour and conditions, threatened by difference, and validated by consensus?
Shevek at one point is struggling with his physics, with celibacy, and with creative block:
“I want to get a job done,” he said.
“Does being celibate help?”
“There’s a connection. But I don’t know what it is, it’s not causal. About the time sex began to go sour on me, so did the work. Increasingly. Three years without getting anywhere. Sterility. Sterility on all sides. As far as the eye can see the infertile desert lies in the pitiless glare of the merciless sun, a lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless waste strewn with the bones of luckless wayfarers”
Goddamn what a banger of a line. So dark and heavy. Read out the words “lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless” and feel how much space they demand in your mouth. Each word progressively slaps your lips harder.
Sterility and sourness are body states. These aren’t ideas. His work didn’t stop because his theory was wrong. His body went cold. Many people worry about not being able to keep up with the creation of ideas as they age, when the fires of youth and energy begin to wane. It seems like Shevek is feeling the same.
If valence is all we have, if ideals are just dressed-up body states, then the only honest move is to follow what makes your body sing, even when the collective says otherwise.
With all of my reading lately, my sense of taste for my personal canon are books in which characters are also philosophers. They don’t just speak to each other about what is to be done; they speak about the state of the world, about higher organizing principles, about ideas. Trauma truffling with no wisdom is not my preference, which is why, I think, Solenoid and The Idiot were so deeply disappointing, why I was bored by The Extinction of Irena Rey, and why The Vegetarian angered me. I want authors to share what they’ve learned from their characters, with them, through them. I want to see how characters grow and how they learn.
Shevek grew a lot in this book. We saw what he was learning, how his ideas were changing, how his idealism was evolving. He moves from true believer in anarchism to someone who sees the cracks when ideals calcify into dogma. He learns that both systems—anarchist Anarres and capitalist Urras—are prisons of different kinds. And through his physics work on Sequency and Simultaneity (the book’s dual theory of time, and one shared by Tokarczuk’s narrator in Flights), he’s trying to reconcile the arrow and the circle, the way things advance forward and the way things repeat:
“Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution. It inclues creation, and mortality. But there it stops. It deals with all that changes but it cannot explain why things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time—never of the circle of time”
This is the structure of the book itself. Linear time moving forward, circular time looping back. Shevek’s journey is both progress and return.
I don’t see that kind of character development often in books. The protagonist on the first page rarely differ much from the one at the last, and characters are often flat caricatures of qualities that the author is focused on. That won’t impress me much in stories anymore.
What this book gave me: a way to look at my own ego work differently. A recognition that my ideals, be they about narcissism, about Buddhism, about Political Idealism, about whatever I’m fighting for this week, it all might just be my body trying to feel safe.
Le Guin called this book “An Ambiguous Utopia.” That’s the subtitle. Both systems in the book are ambiguous. Both have light and shadow. And so does ego. And so does selflessness. There’s no escaping ambiguity. We still have to sweep the garden anyway.
And now, I’m off to reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I’m about 50 pages into the book at the moment and not loving it so far, and I’m starting to realize some of the limits and trappings of the Fantasy genre. I’ll keep testing out my ideas and write up a review as soon as I’m done. If you’re interested in more,