Epistemic Status: 
Blooming - This book has impacted me and continues to be a jumping off point for ideas around how society could or should be organized. As such, these ideas aren’t fully formed or set in stone.
The Dispossessed is a science fiction book by Ursula K. Le Guin that tells the story of a scientist name Shevek from an anarchist society who live on the large moon Anarres that orbits the planet Urras in the Tau Ceti star system. Shevek is on the verge of a breakthrough that could change the nature of interstellar civilization, but has to take a trip to Urras to finish his theory. The main country on Urras is a hyper-capitalist society where women are second class citizens and they are in a cold war with an authoritarian, supposedly socialist, country.
The book is part of Le Guin’s larger Hanish Cycle that includes such books as The Left Hand of Darkenss.
Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.
~ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossesed
I first read this book in 2019. I brought it with me on a trip my partner and I took to Spain with her grad school friends over New Year’s. Little did I know that that would be the last vacation trip I’d have for a long time.
I reread it again in 2022 not long after we had our son (the child I am the father of, to phrase it like an Anarresti) and I’ve found it affects how I think about child rearing. That along with some of the things that Noam Chomsky talks about in Understanding Power about authority.
There are so many good, thought provoking passages in this book. It really rewards subsequent re-readings. *I’ve never understood people who don’t want to read a book more than once. You probably watch movies more than once. What’s the difference?
An Ambiguous Utopia
The original subtitle of the book was “An Ambiguous Utopia” though modern printings tend to leave it off the cover. My copy is from the Folio Society which doesn’t mention the subtitle except in the introduction.
Le Guin never meant it to be a guide or a description of a perfect world. Anarres might only work as much as it does because the people there broke away from the society of Urras (a hyper-capitalist society, at least the main country anyway), came up with a new language, Pravic, that eschews possessive tenses, and settled on the moon of Anarres which is resource poor compared to Urras, in some ways forcing solidarity and cooperation (as much as anything in Anarrasti society is forced). It’s somewhat telling that Odo, the leader of the revolution, never made it to Anarres.
And Le Guin doesn’t shy away from showing all the ways that the anarchist utopia isn’t living up to its own principles. How as the Sociocracy folks talk about, power pools like water without careful care and planning to prevent it.
I often wonder how things work on Anarres, and whether they would work at all in the long run. Maybe that’s the point of the story. The ambiguity is in that question. Can the Odonian revolution survive in the long run? Anarchism doesn’t imply a lack of order, or “chaos”, as most people might think. It’s most definitely about order, just order organized democratically from the bottom up.
Reading The Dawn of Everything I have some hope that the inevitability of progress and the story of history we’ve been told isn’t all there is. That we aren’t doomed to the chains we’ve made for ourselves.
Who knows. This needs much more thought.