The Dispossessed

Process

	Status	Items
Highlights	Done	See section below
Claims	None
Questions	None
Output	None

Highlights

Page 4

The men and women in the crowd argued with her and with one another. They kept crossing the road, and some came inside the wall. Yet they did more or less clear the way. If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them.

✏️ No practice in being a collective.. Just a community. Nothing to protest against in their nature.
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Page 53

The language Shevek spoke, the only one he knew, lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act. In Pravic it made no sense for a man to say that he had “had” a woman. The word which came closest in meaning to “fuck,” and had a similar secondary usage as a curse, was specific: it meant rape. The usual verb, taking only a plural subject, can be translated only by a neutral word like copulate. It meant something two people did, not something one person did, or had.

✏️ Words matter
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Page 54

“Touch and go, brother, that’s the rule. Don’t ever let yourself be owned.”

✏️ It’s page 54, and already such a fleshed out world thru all the snippets. I see it, this world that’s based not on capitalism, but something else. No sense of ownership, no property, no incarceration, work what you want but still have to serve the collective from time to time.
📖 (Page 54)

Page 76

The network of administration and management is called PDC, Production and Distribution Coordination. They are a coordinating system for all syndicates, federatives, and individuals who do productive work. They do not govern persons; they administer production. They have no authority either to support me or to prevent me. They can only tell us the public opinion of uswhere we stand in the social conscience

✏️ No government, but rather administration of some things. Never governing people though.
📖 (Page 76)

Page 95

Decentralization had been an essential element in Odo’s plans for the society she did not live to see founded. She had no intention of trying to de-urbanize civilization. Though she suggested that the natural limit to the size of a community lay in its dependence on its own immediate region for essential food and power, she intended that all communities be connected by communication and transportation networks, so that goods and ideas would get where they were wanted, and the administration of things might work with speed and ease, and no community should be cut off from change and interchange. But the network was not to be run from the top down. There was to be no controlling center, no capital, no establishment for the selfperpetuating machinery of bureaucracy and the dominance drive of individuals seeking to become captains, bosses, chiefs of state.

✏️ Decentralization
📖 (Page 95)

Page 96

you can’t have a nervous system without at least a ganglion, and preferably a brain. There has to be a center. The computers that coordinated the administration of things, the diviably a brain. There had to be a center. The computers sion of labor, and the distribution of goods, and the central federatives of most of the work syndicates, were in Abbenay, right from the start. And from the start the Settlers were aware that that unavoidable centralization was a lasting threat, to be countered by lasting vigilance.

✏️ Can you decentralize, but still share resources and loads and work, without some form of admin center? Is it inevitable and just requires vigilance?
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Page 110

Everybody had the workshop, laboratory, studio, barn, or office that he needed for his work; one could be as private or as public as one chose in the baths; sexual privacy was freely available and socially expected; and beyond that privacy was not functional. It was excess, waste. The economy of Anarres would not support the building, maintenance, heating, lighting of individual houses and apartments. A person whose nature was genuinely unsociable had to get away from society and look after himself. He was completely free to do so. He could build himself a house wherever he liked

✏️ Privacy viewed only in terms of function. Freedom of choice, but dictated by values of the community first, instead of the individual.
The economy dictated such as well.. It would not support meerkat individual lifestyles beyond function
📖 (Page 110)

Page 116

His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.

✏️ Just a great sentence on general and an excellent descriptor in specific
📖 (Page 116)

Page 118

At the clinic they diagnosed his insanity as a light pneumonia and told him to go to bed in Ward Two. He protested. The aide accused him of egoizing and explained that if he went home a physician would have to go to the trouble of calling on him there and arranging private care for him.

✏️ I’m loving the use of “egoizing” as this thing to be avoided and to be called out on.
📖 (Page 118)

Page 121

This is a shockingly understaffed clinic. I don’t understand why the syndics don’t request some more postings from the Medical Federation, or else cut down the number of admissions; some of these aides and doctors are working eight hours a day! Of course, there are people in the medical arts who actually want that: the self-sacrifice impulse. Unfortunately it doesn’t lead to maximum efficiency… .

📖 (Page 121)

Page 130

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not admit. he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him.

✏️ Reading economics of capitalism
📖 (Page 130)

Page 136

We’re a lot closer to it, in my country, than these people are. We’re products of the same great revolutionary movement of the eighth century-we’re socialists, like you.”
“But you are archists. The State of Thu is even more centralized than the State of A-lo. One power structure controls all, the government, administration, police, army, education, laws, trades, manufactures. And you have the money economy.”
“A money economy based on the principle that each worker is paid as he deserves, for the value of his labor-not by capitalists whom he’s forced to serve, but by the state of which he’s a member!”
“Does he establish the value of his own labor?”
“Why don’t you come to Thu and see how real socialism functions?”
“I know how real socialism functions,” Shevek said.
“I could tell you, but would your government let me explain it, in Thu?”

✏️ This is fascinating and we’re getting closer to the core here. A capitalist society, a socialist/anarchist one, and a socialist one where govt is everything.
📖 (Page 136)

Page 138

You know what I want, Chifoilisk. I want my people to come out of exile. I came here because I don’t think you want that, in Thu.
You are afraid of us, there. You fear we might bring back the revolution, the old one, the real one, the revolution for justice which you began and then stopped halfway.
Here in A-lo they fear me less because they have forgotten the revolution. They don’t believe in it any more. They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that.
I want the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity. I want free exchange between Urras and Anarres. I worked for it as I could on Anarres, now I work for it as I can on Urras. There, I acted. Here, I bargain.”

✏️ The core act/intent of the protagonist. And an analysis of the three factors
📖 (Page 138)

Page 139

To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.

✏️ Fictional quote by Odo, from her The Social Organism
📖 (Page 139)

Page 148

But what,” Oiie said abruptly, as if the question, long kept back, burst from him under pressure, “what keeps people in order? Why don’t they rob and murder each other?”
“Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things you take them from the depository. As for violence, well, I don’t know, Oiie; would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.”

✏️ Maintaining law and order as human nature
📖 (Page 148)

Page 149

“All right, but how do you get people to do the dirty work?”
“What dirty work?” asked Oiie’s wife, not following.
“Garbage collecting, grave digging,” Oiie said; Shevek added, “Mercury mining,” and nearly said, “Shit processing,” but recollected the loti taboo on scatological words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras, that the Urrasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit.
“Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decad the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work; they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable work posting, or dangerous ones like the mercury mines and mills, normally they’re for one half year only.”
“But then the whole personnel must consist of people just learning the job.”
“Yes. It’s not efficient, but what else is to be done? You can’t tell a man to work on a job that will cripple him or kill him in a few years. Why should he do that?”

✏️ Doing dirty work
📖 (Page 149)

Page 149

Why should he do that?”
“He can refuse the order?”
“It’s not an order, Oiie. He goes to Divlab-the Division of Labor officeand says, I want to do such and such, what have you got? And they tell him where there are jobs.”
“But then why do people do the dirty work at all? Why do they even accept the one-day-in-ten jobs?”
“Because they are done together… . And other rea sons. You know, life on Anarres isn’t rich, as it is here.
In the little communities there isn’t very much entertainment, and there is a lot of work to be done. So, if you work at a mechanical loom mostly, every tenth day it’s pleasant to go outside and lay a pipe or plow a field, with a different group of people… . And then there is challenge. Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there’s no money the real motives are clearer, maybe.
People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can-egoize, we call it-show off?-to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing… . But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake.
It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mightly force.”

✏️ Work ethic when it’s not financially motivated
📖 (Page 149)

Page 150

There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mightly force.”

✏️ The main “law” at play really. The private conscience and the social conscience.
This sits at the core of things. followup
When one defies it, they have to move on. The society gets tired of them, make fun, get rough, or just take them off things like meal plans. One will have to survive on their own.
📖 (Page 150)

Page 156

Learning centers taught all the skills that prepare for the practice of art: training in singing, metrics, dance, the use of brush, chisel, knife, lathe, and so on. It was all pragmatic: the children learned to see, speak, hear, move, handle. No distinction was drawn between the arts and the crafts; art was not considered as having a place in life, but as being a basic technique of life, like speech. Thus architecture had developed, early and freely, a consistent style, pure and plain, subtle in proportion. Painting and sculpture served largely as elements of architecture and town planning. As for the arts of words, poetry and storytelling tended to be ephemeral, to be linked with song and dancing; only the theater stood wholly alone, and only the theater was ever called “the Art”-a thing complete in itself. There were many regional and traveling troupes of actors and dancers, repertory companies, very often with playwright attached. They performed tragedies, semi-improvised comedies, mimes. They were as welcome as rain in the lonely desert towns, they were the glory of the year wherever they came. Rising out of and embodying the isolation and communality of the Anarresti spirit, the drama had attained extraordinary power and brilliance

✏️ Learning centers and arts and craft
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Page 165

“No. We have no government, no laws, all right. But as far as I can see, ideas never were controlled by laws and governments, even on Urras. If they had been, how would Odo have worked out hers? How would Odonianism have become a world movement? The archists tried to stamp it out by force, and failed. You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing! Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can’t, he prevents you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn’t any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn’t any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind.
Public opinion! That’s the power structure he’s part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind.”

✏️ Power and control thru ideas and social conscience instead of laws
📖 (Page 165)

Page 256

While he got hungrier, while the train sat hour after hour on the siding between a scarred and dusty quarry and a shut-down mill, he had grim thoughts about the reality of hunger, and about the possible inadequacy of his society to come through a famine without losing the solidarity that was its strength. It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.
The passengers’ resentment of the townsfolk got bitter, but it was less ominous than the behavior of the townsfolk-the way they hid behind “their” walls with “their” property, and ignored the train, never looked at it. Shevek was not the only gloomy passenger; a long conversation meandered up and down beside the stopped cars, people dropping in and out of it, arguing and agreeing, all on the same general theme that his thoughts followed. A raid on the truck gardens was seriously proposed, and bitterly debated, and might have been carried out, if the train had not hooted at last for departure.

✏️ In any society or system, what happens when survival is on the line? How does your system address survival and desperation?
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Page 269

She awaited his decision.
It was his to make; and the options were endless. He could stay in Abbenay and organize classes in physics if he could find volunteer students. He could go to Rolny Peninsula and live with Takver though without any place in the research station. He could live anywhere and do nothing but get up twice a day and go to the nearest commons to be fed. He could do what he pleased.
The identity of the words “work” and “play” in Pravic had, of course, a strong ethical significance. Odo had seen the danger of a rigid moralism arising from the use of the word “work” in her analogic system: the cells must work together, the optimum working of the organism, the work done by each element, and so forth. Cooperation and function, essential concepts of the Analogy, both implied work. The proof of an experiment, twenty test tubes in a laboratory or twenty million people on the Moon, is simply, does it work? Odo had seen the moral trap. “The saint is never busy,” she had said, perhaps wistfully.
But the choices of the social being are never made alone.

✏️ A view into how, even in this anarchist society, where he technically knows he can choose what he wants, the social conscience has become so strong that it overrode that instinct and pushed him towards work
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Page 305

Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains… and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. “You call that organization?” he had inquired.
“You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency-a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?” This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and the weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. “But that only works when the people think they’re fighting for something of their own-you know, their homes, or some notion or other,” the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so.

✏️ The nature of armies and how you need hierarchy to override the instinct to not shoot unarmed people.
The difference between armies and guerilla warfare too.
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Page 330

“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. We don’t cooperate-we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing.
We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don’t believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he’s a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminal!
We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We’ve made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can’t see them, because they’re part of our thinking.

✏️ The creation of social laws and crimes in a society that’s built about having no laws
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Page 359

You see,” he said, “what we’re after is to remind ourselves that we didn’t come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we’re no better than a machine. If an individual can’t work in solidarity with his fellows, it’s his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. ‘The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.’ We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.”

✏️ The duty of the individual.. The idea that revolution is the main obligation and hope for a society’s evolution. If you prevent ideas and individuals, you prevent growth and adapting.
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