Taking this virtue ethics stance instead -- "utopia" is in the actions you personally choose to do or not do to the people around you right here and right now, not in the imagined future payoff that will make your present actions moot
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
The people of Urras, after all, justify everything exploitative and harmful about their system by what it makes, and dream furiously that someday it will make enough stuff that all the oppression will be paid for They make that case to Shevek as strongly as they can
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
That's why they want *him*, they're thirsting for the magic engine they think his new theorem can create, they can taste the utopia they can build with that tech
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
They aren't unaware of the pain and suffering to all the children in all the closets their system has caused, they're acutely aware of it, they only grow more aware of it the more work they do to hide it, and they push *harder* to try to push *through* to when it will all pay off
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
In this set of stories Le Guin makes it really clear her feelings about omelettes and eggs, I think Anarres' ambiguous utopia is such because Anarres is dirt poor and the people live in relative poverty and yet the system is still worth defending in that poverty
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
It is not the kind of "utopia" where the political and economic system is so productive and profitable it lets the people invent a magic perpetual motion engine, Atlas Shrugged-style Indeed Shevek's story is about how their system works *against* that possibility
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
Le Guin was not a friend to gee-whiz futurism of the kind that characterized old-school Golden Age science fiction (just as Ayn Rand honestly was kind of an ultimate reductio ad absurdum of that mindset) Haber in Lathe of Heaven is kind of an avatar of that ideology
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
And just in terms of his personality he embodies what's repulsive about it He's just such a douche He's gets so *annoyed* whenever you bring up a child in the closet in Omelas "Fuck you, who says there has to be one? Dream bigger man"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
Right; you’re supposed to hate Haber, and love Orr, who insists we’re in the best world possible and is right because he’s in perfect balance.
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Replying to @nberlat @iridienne and
I don't really think it's fair to say the message of the book is that everything is fine and you mustn't try to change anything Taken to its logical extreme that message would equate to saying the right thing to do is lay down and die rather than trying to feed yourself
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I mean, in the normal human sense of the word, Haber *doesn't* do anything He sits in his office and he imagines stuff and he believes by describing what he imagines in sufficient detail it will become reality It's some harsh writerly self-deprecation
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Replying to @arthur_affect @nberlat and
Yeah, I mean, the simplest thing here is that there's an awfully big difference between identifying problems and solving them.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @arthur_affect and
It's not to say that all problems are inherently difficult to solve and require dramatic compromises that leave no good options, etc. But it IS a focus on the fact that those problems exist, and she sets up scenarios where it's really laid bare.
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