I want to plug one of her lesser known books, Always Coming Home. It's set among a tribe of people living in the Bay Area way, way after some apocalypse has erased the memory of our civilization. Much of the book is reports from an anthropologist studying the people.
I think a lot of her books are about how many different ways of life and types of society and culture are possible, and this book is one of her best at bringing you in to another culture.
I love that book too, maybe my favorite by her, but have found it to be a polarizing recommendation. It's a very unusual format (the novel is interspersed with creation myths, plays, songs, recipes, etc of the people of the setting) and some people just immediately dislike it.
I also think in some important ways it is not as narratively strong as her best works, a necessary tradeoff for what it does accomplish. It's very interesting to consider her being raised by an anthropologist, and her exceptional childhood exposure to Ishi, whom her father had known and her mother and brother separately wrote books about.
A thread running through all of her books is a deep human interest in the ways of peoples, and how their stories about themselves shape who they are and their relationship to a changing world. Always Coming Home is the book of her that is most, almost exclusively, focused on these concerns.
I love Always Coming Home so much. It's so rich and creative.
For a shorter story (~50 pages), I'd highly recommend Paradises Lost by her. Many people have written stories about generation ships, but this one is absolutely stunning and truly marvelous.
A friend recommended this, and I just recently finished it — my first reading of Le Guin. As a student of history and someone interested in how we record it, it was really something for me. I want to read it again already.
How timely. I just finished reading The Word for World is Forest last night.
Nobody likes a poo-pooer, but, holy moly, I thought it was unbelievable trash. Are her other books better? This one was "noble savages: the book". The Creechies can't even conceive of inter-species murder until Big Bad Comic Book Evil Guy (who just loves being evil) introduces it. The creechies don't know evil. They settle their disputes as all superior noble people would: through art.
I probably just got in my own way while reading. There was a lot of "wait.. they're sending _wood_ through interstellar space?". They have an ecology that can support a supply chain that produces food in excess to perform 40+ year round trips through space, but... they can't grow a tree? A tomato plant? Sure. A tree? Nah.
It might be a good kids book, if not for all the... raping.
The story is 50 years old, and was written less than a decade after the first moon landing. That makes it easy to produce a presentist reading, but not more likely such a reading will be useful.
It's also not at all hard sf. That doesn't impugn its value, but does mean that you're not going to get anything out of it if you try to read it like you would The Martian.
My copy of the book has a foreword by Le Guin where she said something along the lines of being very emotional about current day politics (current at the time of writing) when she wrote the book, and that she was not trying to be nuanced.
That set my expectations for the book and I was able to enjoy it for what it was. It probably also helped that I knew that writing style wasn't typical for her given that I'd read at least seven other books by her before The Word for World is Forest.
In my top five, too. I have two copies right now, the second is a first edition I found at a free bookstore. I've given one other away, will probably send another with a kid when they move out.
It's the dryness, for me. She evokes the setting so clearly and in so few words, it took me by surprise. Also my first exposure to thoughtful anarchist ideas, which has been fun.
That and Wizard of Earthsea. Which is as spare, poetic, and strange as any YA magic fiction book wishes it could be.
I grew up in the Pacific NW, not far from where Le Guin lived, and this book is the clearest picture of the political philosophy of the area I have ever seen. They don't call it the People's Republic of Portland for nothing.
I’ve read most of her books and Forest is definitely the worst. When she wrote it she was mad about Vietnam and about the environment and it is definitely a rant with paper thin characters. Absolutely not representative. I was shocked how bad after just reading Left Hand of Darkness and Dispossessed.
I loved the Left Hand of Darkness, and hated TWfWiF for the same reasons you cite.
Frankly, hero worshipping an author isnt great. Everyone has highs and lows in their creative output. And the cultural milieu that the author is working in plays a part too (how many books about trees being cool, man, got published between 1967 and 1972?)
Dont let TWfWiF put you off LeGuin. She had a lot to say that is worthwhile to read.
Yeah... I've read all of her so-called "Hainish Cycle" (it's mostly short stories, and they aren't all intentionally connected btw) and consider myself a big fan - I agree TWFWIF is kind of awful. (Although I still felt it had some interesting ideas, like the Creechies' concept of gods as new ways of thinking.) It is an extremely unfortunate first choice of Le Guin to read.
I haven't read that particular book, but i've read many others by her.
I find her novels tend to be either great or terrible (e.g i loved the disposed, left hand of darkness, the beginning place, but hated always coming home and city of illusions).
So if you didn't like one novel its definitely possible you might like others. Of course maybe you just don't like her style.
There is TWFWIF, and there's also Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe" which has the core idea of teleoperator somehow transferring his consciousness into the remote android, and there's some of Pocahontas for the resource-extraction themes – which is also why some called Avatar "Dances with Smurfs" for its references to "Dances with Wolves".
----
The pun here being that "mélange" is both the French for a "mix" or "blend" and also the life- and consciousness-extending drug in Frank Herbert's Dune, which itself is a melange of a SF novel and also a roman à clef of the Great Powers-backed takeover of Arabia by the House of Ibn Saud, in which melange represents oil. Oil is the magical substance plentiful in desert Arabia which enabled long-distance movement for the Great Powers of the West, as melange enabled inter-stellar travel for the Empire in Dune.
Jemisin is one of the more visceral and imaginative writers I've encountered in recent years, and she did indeed produce and publish written works, so I do believe she is a real author, yes. I'd certainly be interested in reading and maybe discussing an actual critique, this being a forum where substantive posts are required in the guidelines.
I read The Fifth Season and hated it, but she's definitely a real author. I'd be interested if she has any other books that I might like better.
My main problems with the story were:
- The setting was almost unspeakably brutal, but there seemed to be almost no one interested in fighting those brutal systems. I could understand 1-2 characters being brainwashed to go along with the brutality, or even most, but no one seems to even attempt to go against the system. This made the setting feel unbelievable to me.
- There are two big twists at the end of the book. I won't spoil them, but they didn't feel like well-foreshadowed twists. The timelines for the different chapters weren't clear, which made it hard to guess the first, and the 'clues' felt like bad writing mistakes. For the second, the only clue is what words people don't say.
The plot also hinges on a misunderstanding of how tsunamis work, but that's forgivable to me.
I feel like in real life, that's how things work. People mostly accept the brutality of the society they find themselves in, because its normal. Its just in most books people want to focus on the drama. [Mild Spoilers] The fifth season starts with everyone kind of accepting, the characters are chewed up, and they do try to rebel in the end. So its not like there is no rebelling at all.
Generally i liked the fifth season, but i think people think its a bit deeper than it actually is. I find le guin to be a bit more nuanced and leave you thinking a bit more. The fifth season felt a bit more: evil people are obviously evil. The other side is i think jemisin has better developed characters than le guin. A lot of le guin (much like a lot of older scifi) feel very much like idea books where character development & plotting came second.
If you like those two authors, i would really reccomend Octavia Butler, who i think is a bit similar but better than both (lets see if i start a flamewar ;)
No flamewar here, I quite agree! I really enjoyed The Fifth Season (if "enjoy" is a word that can be applied to something so dark), but it did have flaws (I used "visceral" and "imaginative" in my above comment because I think those are her strengths: I really felt immersed in her descriptive writing).
Meanwhile Octavia Butler is absolutely one of my favorite authors regardless of genre. Her work stuck with me for quite a while, as has le Guin's (specifically, Left Hand of Darkness, I've actually had trouble getting into some of her other works, though I mean to try again). Butler to me is a visionary alongside my other favorites in the sci fi canon.
> I feel like in real life, that's how things work. People mostly accept the brutality of the society they find themselves in, because its normal.
For something like modern day police brutality, sure, most people aren't active advocates.
However, I think that really understates the level of brutality in The Fifth Season. The main characters are the oppressed people, like Jewish people during the Holocaust or Black people under Southern-slavery levels of oppressed. Yet there appears to be absolutely 0 mention of resistance fighters or an underground railroad. There appears to be 0 active resistance anywhere, even beyond the main characters. No protests, no riots, no terrorist attacks, no one even suggesting that maybe outright eugenics and genocide is a bad idea and then getting disappeared. It doesn't have to be the main characters getting involved, just a rumor that someone somewhere is doing something. If someone punched me in the face, I wouldn't let them get away with it and then punch myself a couple extra times for good measure.
I think what you're seeing there is Jemisin actively foregrounding and exploring a difficult fact, which is that people who were abused are more likely to turn around and be abusers.
Often times books turn abuse into the catalyst for a noble struggle and cathartic improvement, when in fact that often isn't the case. There's large swathes of human history where oppressive regimes were powerful enough to quickly and brutually suppress rebellions. When violence and abuse are normalized in a culture, it can take a long time and a lot of failed struggles to truly unwind the violence.
I think Jemisin is actively trying to explore that mentality, which is pretty brave because it does make the characters off putting. As the reader you want so badly for them to rise out of the muck and take on a noble struggle, but they're caught up in the cycle of violence.
I say this with respect for your viewpoint, I think you're being very fair about expressing your response, and I completely see where you're coming from.
For me the biggest problem with that series is that it seems to endorse collective responsibility on a scale massive enough that calling it genocide is a no-brainer. Several times, even.
1. There is nothing imaginative about it. A child throwing out random ideas and copying cool scenes from TV shows at random is not "imaginative". It's made worse when every edgy social-commentary trope is forced in.
2. The biggest offense, of course, is the word "science" in her being labelled a "science fiction" author. A 4th grade understanding of the first chapter of a geology book that is immediately violated is not "science fiction".
Of course, I am mainly upset about the destruction of the Nebula Awards by the inclusion of the Fifth Season in the list among authors who actually understand science, computer science, served in the military, and overall have, and further, an understanding of how things work. Jemisin might be on par with that guy who wrote about magic balls catching lightning (Sanderson) in the Stormlight Archive, but neither of them belong on a good science fiction list.
On your first point, you have to at least acknowledge that a ton of people strongly disagree with you. I've certainly bounced off of widely read and highly rated novels before, but rarely do I leave with a complete dismissal of the quality of the work. It seems almost personal to you, calling a widely and multiply published author a "child throwing out random ideas".
On your second point: The Nebula Awards specifically target "science fiction" and "fantasy" genres. I'm quite widely read in science fiction. I took a look at the list of novels that have won or been finalists for the Nebula Awards. It turns out I've read quite a few of them, scattered over the decades the Nebulas have existed. The Fifth Season is far from the only set of books with fantastical elements to have won, and the ones I've read that have won have plenty of world building elements that would be incorrect by a fourth grade textbook (FTL? Reincarnation? Fire breathing dragons?). Yes, the Game of Thrones novels (a Song of Ice and Fire), though quite excellent, are quite firmly in the realm of fantasy, and they were often Nebula finalists! By your criteria, the Nebula Awards were "destroyed" a long time ago. Several books, including some from the very early years of the Nebula Awards, are now called "science fantasy", i.e. science fiction that leans into fantastical elements. The Fifth Season is actually typically labeled as "science fantasy".
If the Fifth Season "destroyed" the Nebula Awards, then you would see more recent winners being almost exclusively science fantasy. I haven't read as many of the newer winners as I have older winners, but two of my favorite novels of recent years won or were finalists: Network Effect by Martha Wells, which is pretty much a core science fiction novel, and Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, which is even more fantastical than the Broken Earth.
One of my favorite recent-years science fiction novels, Children of Time, surprisingly didn't get a Nebula, but it did get a Hugo. Looking at its publishing year though, 2015, I see why! Three Body Problem was nominated, and Annihilation, which I absolutely adore (but can't spell), won that year.
I will acknowledge that people have tastes I don't understand - Children of Time was another collection of filler tripe that contributed nothing to the genre. Definitely put it down when I realized it's "A Deepness in the Sky", without the good parts, just "lol prehistory with spiders."
You brought up Martin - he has a passing understanding of history, combat, and was a veteran (aka is somewhat grounded in reality while writing fantasy), which is why Gemisin and Brandenson should not be used in the same sentence with him, and definitely not with Tolkien.
Le Guin is a fantastic writer. The Lathe of Heaven, The Left Hand of Darkness, and the Eye of the Heron are all excellent and thought provoking novels among Le Guin's other works.
Curious: do you include Earthsea novels in that tier?
Maybe it was just me not trying hard enough at the time (a decade+ ago); I wanted to read LHoD but couldn't get my hands on it. I know it's now available as an ebook more easily, but I remain a bit peeved about how it was the one thing I couldn't buy legitimately at the time.
That combined with not enjoying Earthsea (I read two or three books?), makes me biased to keep reading any online recommendations but Le Guin.
I liked The Left Hand of Darkness and loved The Dispossessed.
I didn't like the first Earthsea novel and haven't read any others. I suspect it's a book that tends to work better for young readers, or older readers nostalgic for things they read in their youth.
Someone recommended that I skip straight to Tehanu, the last Earthsea book, and that was let me get Earthsea. I didn't actually follow that advice, I read all of the books in order, but knowing that I had Tehanu coming made it easier to get through the others.
It's not perfect, but I think where the other books are interesting but simple stories for children, Tehanu feels like it was written for those children as they've grown up - it's basically (without spoiling too much) the retirement and twilight years of characters from the rest of the series. And as a result, it feels like a more applicable or relevant story.
You may already know this, but just in case, Tehanu is no longer the last Earthsea book. It is followed by the collection Tales From Earthsea and then The Other Wind.
For anyone reading this thread, I strongly recommend The Other Wind. It's a wonderfully emotional book about loss and about the importance of everyone in the endeavor to fix the world.
I know about Tales From Earthsea but decided I didn't need to read additional sort stories set in the same world. I didn't know about The Other Wind, thanks for letting me know!
I discarded my copy of Tales From Earthsea, but thought The Other Wind was very good indeed. On the other hand, I didn't like Tehanu, so that might help you decide whether my advice is for you or not.
The stories in Tales From Earthsea are a lot closer to Tehanu than they are to the earlier books, for what that's worth. I get it if they're just not your thing, though; life is short and there's only so much time to read.
Earthsea put me off LeGuin for a while too. It was targeted at Young Adults and though it has its moments it lacks the richness and philosophical insights of her best.
One of the great tragedies of our time is that collectively humans have stopped imagining alternate socio-economic-political systems. In the few hundred years before 1990, there was a lot of imagination of what could be, and many of those systems were attempted. But since then, it seems everywhere we are stuck.
Reading Ursula Le Guin's work is essential because she boldly tries to re-imagine. Not to say any of her fictional worlds should be made reality, but that we need to do serious intellectual work going forward. Surely, humans have explored a few tiny dots in the space of all possible socio-economic-political systems.
Seems to me sci-fi is still as full of political creativity as it always was? Perhaps it's now more diluted. Single books stood out for that. And perhaps it's harder for single SF books to stand out anymore? For sheer quantity?
I mean, it's not like these books were ever taken very seriously as political works either...
compare Lafferty, "The Primary Education of the Camiroi" (1966)
(for that matter, it may be worth pursuing other entries in "Utopian Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography From 1516 to the Present" https://openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia/ )
No the tragedy of our time is that people who use social media love to start flamewars on this topic resulting in very little light and mostly heat. I guess the poster gets to socially signal to the right crowd what side of the issue they're on though.
Hiro's feet go out from under him as the raft moves suddenly; he can see Eliot falling down next to him.
He looks up at Bruce Lee's ship and flinches involuntarily as he sees what looks like a dark wave cresting over the rail, washing over the row of standing pirates, starting at the stern of the trawler and working its way forward. But this is just some kind of optical illusion. It is not really a wave at all. Suddenly, they are fifty feet away from the trawler, not twenty feet. As the laughter on the railing dies away, Hiro hears a new sound: a low whirring noise from the direction of Fisheye, and from the atmosphere around them, a tearing, hissing noise, like the sound just before a thunderbolt strikes, like the sound of sheets being ripped in half.
Looking back at Bruce Lee's trawler, he sees that the dark wavelike phenomenon was a wave of blood, as though someone hosed down the deck with a giant severed aorta. But it didn't come from outside. It erupted from the pirates' bodies, one at a time, moving from the stern to the bow. The deck of Bruce Lee's ship is now utterly quiet and motionless except for blood and gelatinized internal organs sliding down the rusted steel and plopping softly into the water.
Fisheye is up on his knees now and has torn away the canopy and space blanket that have covered him until this point. In one hand he is holding a long device a couple of inches in diameter, which is the source of the whirring noise. It is a circular bundle of parallel tubes about pencil-sized and a couple of feet long, like a miniaturized Gatling gun. It whirs around so quickly that the individual tubes are difficult to make out; when it is operating, it is in fact ghostly and transparent because of this rapid motion, a glittering, translucent cloud jutting out of Fisheye's arm. The device is attached to a wrist-thick bundle of black tubes and cables that snake down into the large suitcase, which lies open on the bottom of the raft. The suitcase has a built-in color monitor screen with graphics giving information about the status of this weapons system: how much ammo is left, the status of various subsystems. Hiro just gets a quick glimpse at it before all of the ammunition on board Bruce Lee's ship begins to explode.
“See, I told you they'd listen to Reason,” Fisheye says, shutting down the whirling gun.
Been so long I can't remember if I noticed back then -- was Mr Ng also the name of the guy with the robo-dogs...? Same guy? (And was he the representative of ex-territorial Hong Kong [or whatever it was] who sold Hiro a citizenship? Time for a re-read, it seems...)
> collectively humans have stopped imagining alternate socio-economic-political systems
...right that's why it never stops being salient on social media like an undead beaten horse and you're talking about it right now.
Maybe one problem is that imagination qua alternatives tends to stop rather short, and idealists too often consider the details and consequences to be an afterthought (everything just gets sorted if only you're rid of Capitalism). Or disregard history in some cases.
It's comforting that the suggested approach by those who aren't fond of State Socialism (e.g. ancoms) is some variation on "do anarchism/syndicalism until communism happens", which seems harmless. They can get the worker-owned coffee shop out of their system.
And perhaps social media doesn't exactly encourage long thought. And cooperating on deeper thought political ideas. Debate and sports education push winning quick by crushing the opponent - not by building a gorgeous final conversation to be revered by the reader years later.
This is such a deeply ingrained part of Anglosphere social media culture that the GP didn't even have to take capitalism in name, but all of us know exactly what fight is being started and what position the GP is taking. I don't think anyone has stopped imagining alternate socioeconomic systems. The problem is that the people that like to discuss this on the internet just want to argue large, abstract ideas instead of the actual details of life under an alternate system. Le Guin herself did a lot of the latter in The Dispossessed. Her book wasn't a flamewar on Capitalism/Communism Bad (TM).
I like Le Guin's novels but if they deserve accolades it's not for "details" of an alternate system. This one depicts central planning, syndicalism as the proxy for democracy, and a bureaucracy that "just works".
It doesn't get into the details of the system, but I felt that The Dispossessed was a good look into what it was like to practically live under that sort of a system. Bureaucracy that was clunky, slow, and led to inefficiencies. Poor living standards even for highly educated people. Time spent doing manual labor despite skills that could be better applied to other things. Yet a sense of togetherness due to the relative lack of class differences and a general welcoming of the other rather than the atomization Shevek experienced off-world.
I was especially struck by Shevek noting that Atro was unique for A-Io in that his behaviour was reminiscent of an Anarresti: the same way all the time, whether public or private.
I'm not sure Dispo needed to go into details; we all can think of analogues to the nations of Urras, and Anarres itself mentions many things reminiscent of 1970s kibbutzim. (when I watched «Карьера Димы Горина»* the work camps also reminded me of Shevek's experiences in the Anarres outback)
* 1961. sometime I need to watch it with subtitles to check how it scores on the Bechdel Test. Cameo by Sputnik.
I'd love to take a 70 year old Chinese victim that lived through the great-leap-forward and culture revolution and to get their honest perspective on this. They managed to live through starvation and wide-spread Maoist violence to witness the end of capitalism only to see the same bozo's re-introduce capitalism forty years later in the form of crony-capitlism...And if they try to speak about any of what they'd learned to their grand kids they're likely to get hauled off to a gulag while their grand-kids bytedance and chow down on Kentucky Fried Chicken.
an amusing fantasy. I'd love to see your western biases shatter when you do just that. do you think it's at all hard to find a 70yr old Chinese person?
> Dialogue cannot be carried on in a climate of hopelessness. If the dialoguers expect nothing to come of their efforts, their encounter will be empty and sterile, bureaucratic and tedious. Paulo Freire [0]
One of the advantages of reading older authors is the sensation of cognitive dissonance inspired by their taking it for granted that monarchies are superior to oligarchies.
I was literally just thinking of this quote 15 minutes ago. Weird to see it at the top of HN.
Capitalism seems to work better than the systems we've tried in the recent past (communism and feudalism are obviously worse in my eyes due to reduced freedom and the huge amounts of life lost in both Russia and China under these systems)
, but it's obviously far from perfect. I'm not sure what could be done better, but Le Guin reminds me it's possible to think of alternatives.
Speaking of alternative ideas..Chesterton was critical of both communism and capitalism. He proposed something that was intriguing and involved focusing on smaller local communities. I'm not sure how it could work towards technological advancement though which in my eyes is important. It seems to have had some popularity with certain Christian movements in the past century. The concept that ownership of the economy shouldn't be concentrated into a small group of people or corporations makes sense to me, but I don't see a way to make that work economically in modern times.
> Distributism views laissez-faire capitalism and state socialism as equally flawed and exploitative
This is also termed "anarcho-communism" within the academic literature and grassroots movements, just FYI (A common misconception of anarchism is that it is a 'lack of law and order' -- it is merely the lack of centralization). The Bolshevik implementation of Communism was called State-Capitalism for a long time by Lenin himself, and many Communist thinkers (I'm thinking of Tony Cliff, who was exceptionally progressive for his time) disagree with the Bolshevik implementation of Communism.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to debate on Communism. I was somewhat aware that many of the proponents have pointed out that the major failings were partially because they were implemented incorrectly. The common counterargument is that despite the very real and good intentions that they would all end up the same as an elite group perverts the goals and makes the entire system self serving. Is that too simplistic though? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
for which, see Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (appearing in [Orwell49])
> "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." —EAB
"Communism" is not like the others in one important sense: all regimes that have been or are called communist derive from the same one source, namely the Russian Bolsheviks. Of all the people who called themselves communist, only they have succeeded in taking power and holding it long enough to entrench. Consequently, every subsequent communist revolution elsewhere was largely bankrolled by them, and they made sure that everyone they supported adopted their ideology - even if there were later breaks over detail, the fundamentally authoritarian core of Bolshevism always remains. This is, of course, quite different from capitalism, which has evolved organically in many places in parallel.
(It should also be noted that whether "feudalism" is even a thing that can be meaningfully defined is contentious, and many modern historians consider it a largely nonsensical retroactive attempt to fit very diverse systems and patterns into a single category.)
In general, look up "libertarian socialism" - it is an umbrella term for left anarchists of various stripes as well as more moderate socialists who don't shy away from some degree of centralization but still place a lot of emphasis on avoiding any kind of authoritarianism as crucial to success of any such political system. I would particularly draw attention to Murray Bookchin and his "libertarian municipalism", not the least because Le Guin herself did in later prefaces to her books.
For real-world examples, something along these lines (but less, shall we say, theoretically pure - which shouldn't come as a surprise!) has been practiced for a while in the Chiapas in EZLN-affiliated communities, and more recently also in AANES (Rojava). As you rightly note, the real question there is how well it all would scale to a modern industrialized society - Chiapas are pretty rural, Rojava somewhat less so but still hardly comparable to what first-worlders are generally used to. It's also interesting to note that the Rojava take on it is a milder version where e.g. cooperatives are encouraged but there are still plenty of privately owned businesses.
Yes, I was just thinking of Distributism in this context. Communism says the means of production is owned by the state, Capitalism says the means of production is owned by those with capital (so in practice that means in a few hands). Distributism says let's distribute the means of production as widely as possible. I recall an article in Make magazine about 15 years ago on distributism - they made the case that things like 3D printers could be the technological enabler to allow distributism to work.
> communism [is] obviously worse in my eyes due to
Death squads, Banana Republics, indefinite US embargo and coup attempts, Pinochet & the Chicago Boys, risking the US military invading you in order to avoid the Domino Effect.
> Speaking of alternative ideas..Chesterton was critical of both communism and capitalism.
Distributism as described in that article is socialism modeled on the ideal of the small-time craftsman or whatever of that time. That would probably be called naive by normal socialists (certainly by communists like Leninists) but it has some similarities with socialism. On the other hand it seems to outright reject anything like the modern capitalism that we are dealing with in the present.
> Regardless, I'm really interested in these kinds of niche ideas if anyone has others to share.
Riffs on socialism, an idea which is over two-hundred years old and has adherents all over the globe.
Fought against and repressed is not the same as niche.
I'd lean pretty heavily towards capitalism in a contest with communism or any other authoritarian system strictly based on personal liberty. It may suck at times, but I do have a choice. I'm thinking about Hayek's well known road to serfdom here that explains how well meaning systems like communism inevitably end up.
I think you may be splitting hairs with regards to terminology. I said niche as in unpopular and not well known. I think it and many other systems match that description and are interesting to talk about.
> I'd lean pretty heavily towards capitalism in a contest with communism or any other authoritarian system strictly based on personal liberty.
Freedom to form death squads, Banana Republics, establish indefinite [US] embargo and coup attempts, help out Pinochet & the Chicago Boys, freedom to invade countries just because they are communist.
First of all you respond to my really-existing-things-that-happened/happen by asking about a hypothetical what-about for the other side. I’ll just note that.
Second of all, where is the symmetry? The common thread here is that some countries wanted to self-determine and use their resources for themselves. But then America/American corporations didn’t want that because they wanted those things for the corporations. National-level socialist ambitions thwarted by corporations. Is then the supposedly (hypothetical) evil of a Soviet Union thwarting upstart capitalist corporation in its backyard? Hmm, if that makes sense to you, whatever.
EDIT: I realize now that this is another commenter. But the same applies.
"Christian anarchist" seems like a contradiction in terms. "God" is the ultimate coercive authority and the Church the ultimate hierarchy, and most of the evils of government have been done in the name of both.
I think we should be careful about the word Christian. It has different meanings to different people. Christian anarchism seems quite consistent with the words and actions of Jesus as written in the gospels. But if looked at from the perspective of American evangelical christianity or traditional Catholicism, yes it seems absurd.
There are also other conceptions of God beyond the coercive demiurge. Again I think we should be careful when throwing around words like God as though we all agree on the meaning.
> the word Christian. It has different meanings to different people.
«
“All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral—a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next. That's the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that's the way it's headed right now. But there have been several efforts to deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C., driven out of their homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, but eventually it just devolved into empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus—that one was hijacked by viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by the Catholic Church, but we're in the middle of a big epidemic that started in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since.”
It's been a while since I read him, but I believe Tolstoy, like Jesus (or for that matter, Brian), was pretty anti-Church. I mentioned him specifically because his justification for anarchism was all the love & peace & everything in common (or at least eye of the needle?) hippy biblical stuff.
The Buddha was also anti-Church, I believe. (and St. Francis was fonder of animals than his fellow clerics?)
There's an excellent conceit in Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) in which the diagnosable mental disorders have their corresponding roles in society: the paranoid form the military, the narcissists the political class, etc. Hebephrenics provide their religious prophets.
Jesus was not anti-church, he founded the early Christian church and established Peter as its leader. Catholics are often heard saying to Protestants that God did not give his people a book, but he did give them a church.
The cleansing of the Temple isn't evidence that Jesus objected to combining spiritual with temporal power. Jesus didn't object to the existence of the Temple, he objected to its' corruption by the presence of the merchants and moneychangers. He was still traveling to Jerusalem and to the Temple, and he referred to it as "my Father's house." He was a Jew preaching to Jews and claiming to be the messiah of the Jews. All of that presupposes the legitimacy of the extant temporal Jewish hierarchy and the Temple itself as a holy site. By my reading, Jesus wasn't an anarchist, he was a reformist.
Also Matthew 16:18, where Jesus declares Peter as "the rock" upon which his church shall be built, is well known. You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_Peter
Although personally I would claim the modern church owes more to Paul (for better or worse) than Peter.
I'm not religious myself anymore, but try to keep an open mind to alternative ideas. My assumption is we still haven't figured out an optimal system...and may never escape bouncing from one idea to the other.
Fortunately the options aren't merely some form of marxist communism or capitalism! There are whole branches of (anarchist/federalist) socialism that actually predicted what would happen in the Soviet Union while Marx was still alive and writing and had very different plans themselves (Bakunin and Proudhon), and there were also distinct forms of socialism that predated Marxism, and forms that came after it, so even if we were to restrict ourselves to socialist schools of thought that have existed for round about 200 years (a very narrow slice of economic systems), there are a lot more options to try than "bureaucratic oligarchy, with a top down centrally planned economy and a fundamentally authoritarian ideology" and "a system designed to give some power over others via absentee property ownership, and facilitate the concentration of that power through the concentration of property due to the right of increase and profit."
Capitalism appears to have worked optimally around the 1960 to 1990 time interval.
After 1990 a consolidation process became more and more obvious and it has accelerated greatly after 2000. The long sequence of mergers and acquisitions has resulted in the fact that most markets have become dominated by quasi-monopolies, which some times resemble more the monopolies that existed in the industries of the countries dominated by communists than the multitude of competing companies that existed in USA or in Western Europe a half of century ago.
Because unregulated capitalism is just property and trading.
Hard to imagine sentient beings without the concept of property and trading.
You have to kill all humans to end capitalism.
What everybody hates is crony capitalism where business leverage their government connections to screw everyone - but that's just socialism with extra steps.
Property and trading existed for most of the history of humanity, but capitalism is a much more recent phenomenon.
Capitalism specifically requires private property rights on capital (i.e. means of production) - hence the name. And it requires those rights to be unrestricted in a sense that anyone can freely trade capital, and thus it is possible to amass and concentrate it, thereby creating a class of those who have it distinct from those who do not, which in turn allows the former to collect economic rent from the productive work of the latter.
It's a massive error to conflate capitalism and commerce like this. Capitalism describes a specific structure of organizing ownership of productive resources and allocating their surpluses.
Capitalism is not the only thing that exists nor is it inevitable. It's not hard to imagine systems with property and trading that use another method of allocation. In fact such systems do exist both in history and currently.
I don't think capitalism and the concepts of property and trade are synonyms. It is also not clear that historical understandings of property or trade or universal amongst human civilizations and I'd be wary of dismissing other civilizations as having been made up of unsentient beings.
I had a similar experience -- I did enjoy it, and some parts genuinely moved me, but the last quarter or so was a bit of a slog.
I will say that I enjoyed her short stories a lot more! They are fairly deep but entertaining, with great twists and surprises
The Wind's Twelve Quarters is a good anthology -- in that one, I liked The Rule of Names, Semley's Necklace and The Word of Unbinding. In another anthology (I think), Direction of the Road -- phenomenal. Most of these can be found standalone online
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas I enjoyed less, but it's a short read and fairly important culturally. NK Jemisin, who wrote the Broken Earth trilogy (highly recommend it), wrote a sort of tongue-in-cheek short-story in response to it called The Ones Who Stay and Fight -- also worth reading.
I fully support the recommendation of Le Guin's short stories! Too bad they are easily forgotten over her novels. (I guess a novel, as a product, is easier to review and to advertise?)
My favourite collection is "The Birthday of the World", especially the stories "Solitude" and "Paradises Lost". (Maybe skip "Old Music and the Slave Women". It builds on other books and is incomprehensible without them; or at least it was to me.)
I've only read two works from her, both short stories: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", and "The Building" (in the "Redshift" anthology). Both were absolutely terrible, shockingly so. I really don't get why people like her work so much.
I had a really different response to that Jemisin story. If you’re going to invoke comparisons with another work, your work should be on the same level. For me it was a bit like Sharknado making a Jaws reference.
The whole reason I started the novel was because I listened to The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas on Levar Burton Reads. I'll give the other short fiction a shot, thanks for the suggestions!
I feel exactly the same way. The Dispossessed was both one of the best and one of the most boring books I've ever read. There are a lot of things I appreciate about it and I'm glad I read it, but damn was it a slog to get through.
I would say the first few chapters (or rather the first few chronological chapters dealing with his childhood) were a uphill climb. But after that its quite fascinating, and I felt the story was pulling me along forward.
I can't understand this perspective! Even now, just flipping through random pages looking for a quote, I keep getting sucked back in!
> He thanked her, with the simplicity of one who does not look behind the offer for the offer's motive. She studied him for a moment, her eyes shrewd, direct, and quiet. "I heard your speech," she said.
> He looked at her as from a distance. "Speech?"
> "When you spoke at the great demonstration in Capitol Square. A week ago today. We always listen to the clandestine radio, the Socialist Workers' and the Libertarians' broadcasts. Of course, they were reporting the demonstration. I heard you speak. I was very moved. Then there was a noise, a strange noise, and one could hear the crowd beginning to shout. They did not explain. There was screaming. Then it died off the air suddenly. It was terrible, terrible to listen to. And you were there. How did you escape from that? How did you get out of the city? Old Town is still cordoned off; there are three regiments of the army in Nio; they round up strikers and suspects by the dozen and hundred every day. How did you get here?"
> He smiled faintly. "In a taxi."
----
> "I was not to be near the powder mill. I was to be kept from the populace, to live among scholars and the rich. Not to see the poor. Not to see anything ugly. I was to be wrapped up in cotton in a box in a wrapping in a carton in a plastic film, like everything here. There I was to be happy and do my work, the work I could not do on Anarres. And when it was done I was to give it to them, so they could threaten you with it."
> "Threaten us? Terra, you mean, and Hain, and the other interspatial powers? Threaten us with what?"
> "With the annihilation of space."
---
How can you not want to read more!? I remember this, such a moving scene, from reading it many years ago. The entire story is rife with tension, in my view. How will the destinies of all these many billions of people unfold from the actions taken in these few moments by these few people?
The most interesting part of the book is how at the start you think "this is going to be a book about how Capitalism sucks and is bad for people", but it turns out that the Communists also sucked although their suck was spread out more evenly among the people.
> And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people —TDJP
This is the first and only book of Le Guin that I have read. And I just couldn't grasp what was all the hype about this book. It could be because I was expecting a "typical" science-fiction book. Or maybe I was not mature enough when I read it. Maybe I should give it another shot now that I am older :).
I'm with you. I read it a year ago and found a lot of it dull as dishwater. And the ending very predictable. It was ok. I, like you, just don't understand the hype.
Yeah I've always found this one out of place when listed among other big classic sci fi books. It's tonally very different, slowly paced, focused on different concerns than is typical for the books it is usually grouped with. It's a great book in its own right but not a great introduction to her for people coming from or looking for sci fi.
Interesting. I've made it a point to try to make my way through the canonical sci fi greats over the years, and I'd put Left Hand of Darkness near the top. It's kind of because of that tonal difference: there's something about the way it's written (sort of anthropological / travelogue style) that makes me feel truly immersed in the culture and world being described, in a trance-like way, even though the book itself doesn't have particularly exciting events in it.
It may be that it hit me at a particular time in my life: I read it in my early teens and the way gender was expressed in the novel, the sort of tidal shift between masculine and feminine based on circumstance, really spoke to me at a time I was figuring all that out in my own psyche. I wonder if a lot of the gender exploration in the book may seem more trite and typical now.
I mean I think it's an incredible book, in exactly the ways most "great" sci fi is weak. But I've come across enough people bouncing off of it to put some thought into why and this is my most charitable take on why so many sci fi fans don't love it.
Huh. Every few years when I pick it up, the writing just pulls me straight through.
Not saying there's anything wrong with your experience (certainly it's taken me active effort to read some highly recommended books, and sometimes I've quit), just that this is likely a YMMV thing.
I had an opposite experience. I read it in my 30s and loved it so much. My only sadness was that I didn’t get the chance to read it when I was a young adult.
The calm writing style of John Wyndham is something I like about his stories. Not much in the way of action or excitement, no vast space opera with many winding threads. World changing ideas, writ small.
Trouble with Lichen is about the discovery of a genuine anti-ageing compound, but we don't see anyone super old or the social consequences. We see the people who discover it and what they choose to do next.
The Outward Urge is a family with several generations of spacemen in it. Nothing really happens, we see a few snapshots of their lives through the decades as human activity out in the solar system increases.
The Midwitch Cuckoos is perhaps the most unexcitingly told story of its kind (no spoilers) but not worse for it.
Web is a nice weaving of ancient curse and modern (1950s) civilisation into an imminent end of the world.
exactly the opposite for me - i love pretty much everything she has written, but the earthsea cycle is by far my favourite. it captivated me from book 1, and just kept going from strength to strength (the second trilogy is somewhat different in feel from the first one, but just as good in its own way)
I read ULG's 'The Dispossessed' and while the writing is great, it more feels like social commentary with a mild flavour of sci-fi.
I suppose am struggling to articulate this better.
To give you a contrast, take Arthur C Clarke, a contemporary of hers. Consider his book 'A Fall of Moondust' (one of my favourites).
In ACC's book, there is some core peculiarity of the fundamental nature of the world that the story is entirely based on. The possibilities stemming from that one oddity is interesting from a scientific perspective.
Having said that, the characters in that book are nothing to write home about. They serve the necessary function for the plot but nothing too memorable.
ULG's plot on the other hand has no distinctive scientifically interesting peculiarity that it seems to be built on. It might as well have occurred on Earth just as it does in 'Anarres' or 'Urras'.
It feels like ULG's book is more about people/political theory/social commentary/human condition than any scientifically intriguing theory.
It's still a good read I guess, but it didn't scratch my sci-fi itch.
> It feels like ULG's book is more about people/political theory/social commentary/human condition than any scientifically intriguing theory.
Agreed that on the spectrum of politics/society to scientific theory/gizmo, Le Guin leans heavily towards politics/society.
Whether that is one's cup of tea is a different matter. It sometimes is for me, and sometimes not; depends on the mood. For an author who was also into societal issues, I prefer James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon), because she injected more of the alienness/weirdness I tend to seek when reading scifi.
I do like Ursula, don't get me wrong! I'm just not always in the mood for reading her, while I'm almost always in the mood to read more James Tiptree Jr!
(On that note, I just realized back in 2019 they renamed the "James Tiptree Jr Award" to "Otherwise", for disappointing reasons. Oh, well)
Those commenting on LeGuin's heavy-handed The Word for World is Forest might like Brightness Falls From the Air, when they get to the end. (Tiptree herself did have at least one Forest-grade cringy polemic short story, Morality Meat, paired against Phillip K Dick's The Pre-Persons. Maybe writers can't help themselves, but editors should know better.)
Haven't read Morality Meat, but PKD's The Pre-persons isn't great either. I truly love PKD but it's one of his weakest, I-am-on-a-soapbox short stories.
(In the notes for this story, PKD claims Joanna Russ offered to "beat him up" as a reaction, which in itself is an overreaction!)
I feel like the core idea of sci-fi is - imagine the world, but with some specific thing different. What would the consequences be?
Le guin does it with social issues. Someone like Greg Egan does it with laws of physics. The formula is both oddly similar yet totally different.
P.s. i'm not sure i would consider Clarke exactly a contemporary of Le Guin. They certainly heavily overlap, but i think Clarke kind of belongs to the previous generation - at least stylistically wise.
Le Guin is certainly on the softer side of the sci-fi scale of hardness.
That said, there's plenty of sci-fi (and by that I mean books that have been categorized as such for so long, it's generally considered undisputed - like, say, pretty much all of Bradbury and most of Simak) that are much softer.
> ULG's plot on the other hand has no distinctive scientifically interesting peculiarity that it seems to be built on. It might as well have occurred on Earth just as it does in 'Anarres' or 'Urras'.
How bizarre.
My reading -- and I was a kid, it was so long ago -- is this:
Communism is inherently flawed because if resources can be accumulated then some will rise in wealth and power. If that country lacks the resources, then there are other countries from which they can be taken.
But in the Disposessed this cannot happen. It is a thought experiment: how could one set up a communist society that would be stable and work?
If you have a whole planet that has few resources, but it's colonized by another which has many.
But planets are far apart. So instead, it's a moon. Moons are relatively close. Earth humans got there in the 1960s, almost without computers, without microprocessors.
But why?
OK, we have a big rich parent planet with lots of resources, but a troublesome political minority who aren't happy with the distribution of resources. That's certainly plausible.
So they ship them offworld to the marginally-habitable moon. It needs help to get going but it's so bleak nobody wants it. (So no territory need be taken from anyone.) There can be no acquisition of external resources; it's too far away. There can be no emigration back to a better life, unless they build spacecraft. They're stuck there, but they wanted to be, to show that their system could work. (Though the children have no choice.)
So they do.
It's a beautiful carefully and minutely calculated model of how communism could be made to work, and it couldn't hang together unless it were a habitable moon of a more-habitable planet.
It's perfect. It's flawless. It has to be how it is. It couldn't happen here or anywhere else.
She is my favourite Sci-Fi writer! Her works like the Dispossessed and the Left Hand of Darkness are true masterpieces! She wouldn’t like mw to call her Sci-Fi writer she called herself a speculative fiction writer. The fact that she was a woman gave a really new point of view to her writings.
Was just talking to a colleague about The Dispossessed. That book never did it for me. Left Of Hand Of Darkness on the other, erm, hand... wow. Fascinating premise. UKLG also did an interpretation of the Tao Te Ching that is worth a slow, contemplative readthrough.
I had the inverse take. Read Dispossessed and thought the commentary was insightful, so I followed it with LHOD, but I felt like the points it makes about gender roles are blunted by the passage of 55 years, more so than points about capitalism. I am pretty sure I missed most of the ways she tries to contrast the Gethenians against our own society.
In my opinion, Le Guin, Butler and more recently authors like Chambers all live in the same sphere of speculative fiction or "sci fi" if you like that is in complete opposition to Clark, Weir and others which have dominated the genre for a long time now. These stories are less about some interesting imaginary application of physics or the unknown in a vast mechanistic universe and more about how society and individuals relate and imagining the infinite ways these two forces can interact. Often the backdrop is secondary to the exploration of the characters and the society they live in. I think this type of story is really fundamental to our progress as a society and we should all talk more about these authors and the stories they told/tell. It makes me happy to see Le Guin talked about, critiqued and praised on HN today.
I think this is the talk where Le Guin talks about the continuity of this type of story telling and contrasts it with hard sci fi. Definitely worth a listen IMO.
Well really I think that technology and societal/economic structures are deeply related in ways that dont necessarily get enough consideration in many discussions on the topic. For instance our current most successful form of capitalism is enabled primarily by the technologies created in the industrial revolution allowing shipping of goods and services long distances. We have seen it change rapidly and deeply as we developed telephony and computers and I suspect as new and better forms of communication and transportation evolve we will see further evolution of the basic system.
Unknown technologies or applications of the future will likely cause further evolution and possibly revolution in how we structure our economic and social structures and I think its both fascinating and important to think and talk about these things!
My pet favorite is the anarchic utopia of the Culture from Ian M Banks' Culture novels. Obviously impossible without the near infinite processing, energy and matter resources enabled by the Minds and the Ships they control but still fun to think about (and even aspire to value-wise in many cases IMO)
Well not really that modern and certainly the other side of the wholesome spectrum, Margaret Atwood is in the same sphere IMO as the other authors I mentioned.
Also as I mentioned elsewhere I love Ian M Banks' Culture series.
I would love to find other authors like Becky Chambers shes got great prose and is a great antidote to the pessimism of lots of other fiction I read.
You are not at any risk of running into Earthsea every day, that's for sure.
Potter is a goofy lightning speed read. Much of it doesn't even make sense (see Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality for a take on that.)
Some people claim here that Earthsea is aimed at young adults. It's readable by young adults but it's far too slow and calm to be of much interest to most young adults. And there is much more to be found in there by older readers.
No, Earthsea's 6 books plus short stories are a peaceful but sometimes intense, slow, poetic and extremely emotion inducing view of the life of the main wizard character. From young wizard seeking his education in A Wizard of Earthsea, through questing, failing magic, retirement and return of the ex-wizard - and a few tales of other wizards in the same world; plus the old wizard and settling accounts. Magic in Earthsea is not used lightly (at least not by the main character). It is largely about knowing the true name of things. The hero sees the many problems of the world but does not rush to wand them away. Magic is not day to day housekeeping spells and conveniences and practical jokes - but can be applied to influence things that matter.
Earthsea as a whole is a masterpiece.
For a third direction to magic, I always include The Magicians (the book trilogy although the first couple TV seasons are also good) where we have magic as a highly unstable and poorly controlled field of ... physics or something - being taught to angst-ridden but also very sure of themselves teens by instructors who know that this stuff will kill you if you half glance away. And it does. But that same unstable high-power stuff is also the literal gate to entire other worlds - equally irresistible to our, ermmmm, heroes? Just as the language for Earthsea is spot-on, so is the writing style for The Magicians fitting for these completely different characters and genre of magic.
The credentialism that permeates discussion in Bolshevik adjacent circles annoys me deeply.
Famous political authors that sold a lot of books don't bring any more credentials to an idea than if I said something in a 4chan post. Argue with the ideas you got from the author, don't keep using them like a religious figure!
So many comments here are just quoting things without pondering if it's bullshit. Sometimes it is!
For irony and fun here's a quote from PhD dropout Natalie Wynn:
There’s also a certain amount of genuine leftist bullshit passing itself off as scholarship. I was once in a comparative literature seminar that I foolishly took in the hopes of getting to read something written with a decent prose style, or at least something by an emotionally competent human being. Boy was I disappointed when on the first day the professor made two allusions to “my good friend Derrida.” Those are quotation marks around “my good friend” because he mentioned that Derrida was his friend every time it came up. Pass the cyanide, honey.
Anyway, the low point of this guy’s endless, beginningless, argument-free impromptu lectures came when he baldly asserted that the poetry of Milton had a direct influence on the workings of ISIS. Yes, this would be John Milton, the 17th century English poet, and ISIS, the contemporary Syrian terrorist organization. And what evidence did the professor adduce in support of this outrageous claim? None whatso-fucking-ever. And the other grad students in the room just sat there nodding knowingly, taking notes like a bunch of sycophants. No one raised their hand, no one said, “Excuse me professor, but what in Jesus’ name are you fucking talking about?” I didn’t even say anything. I had no spine!
The only explanation I can think of for this was that the professor had this reflexive hatred of himself, of English literature, of basically all of Western culture, and so he had to hallucinate that Islamic terrorism is in some way the outcome of over-zealously reading Paradise Lost.
I guess this is what being good friends with Derrida does to you.
The article gives a reading of Ursula Le Guin that falls from one merely political way to see the world (conquest) into another (global warming and human hubris) - plus a heavy dose of corresponding judgementality.
To me Ursula Le Guin's books are different still: I see them mostly as prompts for my emotion and as people living their life. One's life is only loosely tied to the political thought or environment around us. We are allowed to make our life one and the same in a political militant fashion but that is an option, a choice. We don't have to. In the books, we are presented worlds (often through the character growing up in it) and then we are presented the characters trajectories through them. Many sci-fi writers want to present political ideas through created worlds, of course. That is not Ursula Le Guin's dominion. And her worlds are certainly not reaching for "free from harm"! Where in the world does that one come from?!
What I read them for:
1) I love that many of her characters are paying attention. They are not simply surviving passively in the sense of always reacting and living past the current hardship. They are also not just as mindlessly choosing militant action or conquest.
2) I love above all the writing style. Immensely calm. And the language: poetic, smooth and emotion-prompting. Ursula Le Guin stands out for me in that direction. Perfect tone is rare, instilling emotion in me to this degree is very rare.
Just as The Magicians is written in a style that perfectly matches teen angst (as opposed to Harry Potter.)
And I note that Ursula Le Guin's teens usually don't have much angst - unrealistically so - and I'm fine with that - the rest makes up for it.
I highly recommend these books - but certainly not as the one major source of political creativity.
And that's just one book . That one book did find its audience, that's for sure! No contest there! That makes it tempting to judge her entire work through that lens. And that one book is as prominent as The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress: one title that comes up again and again to illustrate political thought / utopias / distopias. By contrast, the Earthsea cycle ended up with 6 books and a few short stories. And Always Coming Home was a massive project.
>Questioning the spear’s phallic, murderous logic,
How many more years before the ideas of Freud are so removed from common usage that we no longer have to deal with their detritus.
I figure another 20-30.
on edit: maybe irritating me more than normal as I recently listened to a podcast where it was all about how, despite nobody believing Freud anymore, he was just so important and central that all ideas related to his incorrect ideas.
There are layers upon layers in culture when it comes to Freud.
Freud was fashionable beyond the reality of his importance, they said.
Then the "Freud as misinderstood" revisionists ruled, for a while.
Then it was fashionable to discredit and mock Freud. He became the
epitome of all that's "unscientific".
Then the neo-Freudians came along and was fashionable to denounce the
rigid, autistic positivists who so loudly mocked Freud.
And so it goes.
Meanwhile his nephew Edward Bernays totally transformed Western culture
into what we see today... a fantasy driven garden of individual Utopian
projects.
And if you bracket the crazy penis-envy unconscious analysis stuff
aside, then "Civilisation and Its Discontents" remains one of the most
prescient discourses on our current condition ever written [0].
There's one great test that a thinker is not irrelevant... that people
are still talking about them 100 years later.
sure, but basically the belief in Freudianism as being a scientifically accurate truth prevalent in the 20th century led to all sorts of these silly phallic metaphors.
I remember one that I read when I was a teen - intro to soft science book supposed that rockets were phallic in shape because man wished to rape outer space.
So every now and then I'm thinking finally done with that codswallop and suddenly it jumps out at you from an unexpected place.
It's quite interesting how much weight humans give to old ideas. Probably a Lindy heuristic. But, man, imagine if I was early to that field and made it so that we had to conceive of all doors as being vaginal (constant testaments to women's obsession with their genitals). Do women like putting things in the trash bin because they have penis envy and want to experience putting a sword in a sheath, so to speak? Why do wives like tidying up? Is it because they like putting things in cubbies, simulating the sex experience?
Wholesale trash thought. Man, even a mildly intelligent teenager has surpassed this level of free-association. But the age of the concept and its Barnum effect explanatory behaviour makes it the home of every mediocre mind. The only risk, I suppose, is that if we end this obvious sign, we remove a clear signal of sophomoric thought.
You can't prove it either way, people are complex and who is to say what sort of associations people have or used to have inside their head. The simple fact is that when Freud was coming out with his ideas they were new they were original. Most of anything we read is recycled. Having a single original idea is incredible and he had many that maybe wrong but eventually did lead to some right ideas.
Oh, indeed, I am a big fan of people being wrong in novel ways that open up new ways of thought. Much of the old philosophers is really their exploration of the space. Searching means looking in the wrong place most of the time. My problem is with those who came after and keep looking in some old place where there is nothing left to find.
If you want to read something actually interesting on the subject of a right-libertarian utopia, Heinlein (Moon is a Harsh Mistress) is where it at. That book can actually be an interesting pairing with The Dispossessed, as both aren't shy of showcasing the downsides of the ideas they put on the pedestal.
Ayn Rand is neither a good writer nor a good ideologue.
I think a lot of her books are about how many different ways of life and types of society and culture are possible, and this book is one of her best at bringing you in to another culture.