The revolution begins in the thinking mind

My Review on The Dispossessed

A spark of euphoria came over me when I found this book after searching for it across the shelves in the bookstore with only a whit of hope. It is one of Ursula Le Guin’s books I have been wanting to read after finishing one of her short stories. The idea of going to planets and bridging philosophical differences between people (because heck you never know when you might need that!) and exploring the inevitable suffering you have to go through to accomplish what you’re meant to do in the world seemed interesting. Deep stuff.

What is this novel about? It’s about the best physicist in the universe named Shevek and his quest to establish connection and communication between his world and the other worlds. Why? Because it is one way to reduce human suffering. This is hairy though because the people in one planet believe in having stuff and the other does not. He must go through all the political and philosophical excrement to do this and take risks.

One lesson I got from this novel is where man’s greatest happiness comes from, that is, having a home to go back to and a loving family. I also found this theme in The Midnight Library, Fathers and Children, and A Clockwork Orange. Le Guin explores this in a more unique way by putting the characters in a world where you can’t own anything. How does this even work? You can’t even live with your kids? Not even your wife, or your mother!? And it is not even your mother, it is the mother – because you’re dispossessed, willingly. How do families look like in that stuff?

Overall, the best thing I got from this novel is a new perspective, something I often get from science fiction. This novel gave me an idea of the trade-offs of both anarchism/socialism and capitalism and I got more convinced that even though socialism might be an idealist’ utopia, it has more problems than benefits. It seems I have started to become interested in political stuff because of this novel!

My Favorite Quotes

Kimoe’s ideas never seemed to be able to go in a straight line; they had to walk around this and avoid that, and then they ended up smack against a wall. There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them.
p. 15, Shevek’s thoughts on Kimoe. Tags: Psychological blindspots

But in a sick organism, even a healthy cell is doomed.
p. 41, Bedap argues against Tirin on Urras’ society. Tags: Politics

Women… women think they own you. … But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned. … What a man wants is freedom. What a woman wants is property. She’ll only let you go if she can trade you for something else. All women are propertarians.
p. 49-50, Vokep on women. Tags: Feminine, Masculinity

Suffering is a misunderstanding. … It exists… It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exists, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
p. 56-57, Shevek on suffering and happiness. Tags: Human existence

The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity. … Love is the true condition of human life.
p. 57, tall, soft-eyed girl. Tags: Love

It is the nature of ideas to be communicated, written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
p. 69. Tags: Discourse, Freedom of speech

Paradise is for those who make Paradise. He did not belong. He was a frontiersman, one of a breed who had denied their past, their history. … He was alone, here, because he came from a self-exiled society. He has always been alone on his own world because he had exiled himself from his society.
p. 85. Tags: Interpersonal relationships, Solitude, Loneliness, Community, Mental health, Social isolation

Surely freedom lay rather in openness than in secrecy, and freedom is always worth the risk.
p. 104. Tags: Freedom of speech, Freedom of choice

It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative.
p. 120

There’s a great deal that’s admirable, I’m sure, in your society, but it doesn’t teach you to discriminate – which is after all the best thing civilization teaches.
p. 134. Atro to Shevek. Tags: Anarchy, Socialism

He began to hate them and, realizing that, abruptly ceased accepting their invitations. But to do so was to accept failure and to increase his isolation. He wasn’t doing what he had come here to do. It was not that they cut him off, he told himself; it was that – as always – he had cut himself off from them. He was lonely, stiflingly lonely, among all the people he saw every day. The trouble was that he was not in touch. He felt that he had not touched anything, anyone, on Urras in all these months.
p. 136. Tags: Social isolation, Loneliness, Solitude

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
p. 155. Bedap to Shevek. Tags: Freedom of speech

It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed.
p. 158. Bedap to Shevek. Tags: Comfort zone, People pleasing, Fear

“What’s wrong with pleasure, Takver? Why don’t you want it?” “Nothing’s wrong with it. And I do want it. Only I don’t need it. And if I take what I don’t need, I’ll never get to what I do need.” “What is it you need?” … “I need the bond. … The real one. Body and mind and all the years of life. Nothing else. Nothing less.”
p. 169. Takver and Shevek. Tags: Interpersonal relationships, Marriage, Satisfaction, Love

“You saw in me, then, what I’ve seen in you this last four days?” “I don’t know. I can’t tell. It wasn’t just sexual. I’d noticed you before, that way. This was different. I saw you. … It just that I knew what I saw in you was what I needed. Not just wanted!”
p. 170. Takver to Shevek. Tags: Intellectual Connection, Relationship Compatibility, Interpersonal relationships

It was now clear to Shevek, and he would have thought it folly to think otherwise, that his wretched years in this city had all been part of his present great happiness, because they had led up to it, prepared him for it. Everything that had happened to him was part of what was happening to him now.
p. 172. Tags: Causal Reasoning, Rom-08#v28

“If you can see a thing whole, it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives … But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death. … All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal.”
p. 178. Shevek to Takver. Tags: Big picture thinking, Perspectives, Perspectival Knowledge, Tuesdays with Morrie (book), Four Thousand Weeks (book)

“So you threw out all the do’s and dont’s. But you know, I think you Odonians missed the whole point. You threw out the priests and judges and divorce laws and all that, but you kept the real trouble behind them. You just stuck it inside, into your consciences. But it’s still there. You’re just as much slaves as ever! You aren’t really free.”
p. 206. Vea to Shevek. Tags: Conscientiousness

But the choices of the social being are never made alone.
p. 252. Tags: Freedom of choice, Socialism

You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
p. 281

It isn’t changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It’s getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it.
p. 289. Tags: Boredom

Well, this. That we’re ashamed to say we’ve refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it.
p. 308. Tags: Conscientiousness

… the revolution begins in the thinking mind.
p. 311

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home. … Fulfillment … is a function of time. 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.
p. 312. Tags: Satisfaction

When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.
p. 331

Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.
p. 335

They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?
p. 359, Ketho to Shevek. Tags: Eccles-01#v9