A classic. Her stories are not only well written, but an awesome radicalizing tool.

I used the Dispossessed to turn my brother in law from a Musk loving techbro into a ‘holy fuck, anarchism is more than a fun word. Maybe there is something to this.’

He isn’t all the way there yet, but I’ll bring him over.

Contrary to what the left-wing media would have you believe, the child in the basement is no angel.

We just need to go back to a simpler time, when everybody was polite to each other and nobody discussed the child in the basement.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words. - Ursula K. Le Guin

this absolutely had to inspire snowpiercer

So, the entire story is poignant and heartbreaking, and its a poor reflection on our world that we have more people in the basement than in the utopia and we still can’t be happy. I wish the people didn’t walk away though, that seems tantamount to suicide when in reality we can’t simply leave the city, I wish they saved the child or died trying. But, one part stands separate from the rest to me and I’d like to talk about it on its own:

“They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.”

I think this is a condemnation of so much #deep media, with the fetishization of suffering and pain. I think the reason I love shows like She-Ra and Kipo is their resolve to hope, to have characters be joyful and loving and that not be naïve. In Kipo it is even shown that loving your enemy won’t always work, but it is always worth the effort. No one is made stronger by their suffering, no one is helped by hate, it is so uplifting. Then I remember ASoIaF and how even the reader’s hopes and wants were used as ammunition to show just how mean and bad the world is. I want more media that dares to hope, to be happy and less grimdark.

I’ve given this story to many a liberal and it’s always the same: “oh my god, I can’t believe they walk away at the end. if it were me, I’d tear the kid free with my own hands.” pointing out to them that it’s an allegory for our world and all the suffering they accept, they to a one grow uncomfortable and change the subject. I’ve never had one willing to discuss the story past that point except perhaps to go back to insisting that they’d free the kid.

to those in this thread lamenting that they walk away at the end: walking away is a rejection of the society, of both its utopia and its curse. those who walk away do so to build a new world. walking away is the rejection of the very premise of the society - an embrace of revolution. perhaps LeGuin’s point, one of them, anyway, is that it’s very easy to say what one would do when put in similar circumstances. it’s another thing entirely to actually act. sometimes, it’s all you can do to refuse. after all, freeing the child is tantamount to ending capitalism. none of us can do that alone. the only choice we have alone is to walk away. and it’s only from amongst those who have rejected this society that you will find the revolutionaries that can band together to do anything greater. but we must each first choose to walk away.