Ursula Le Guin’s dangerous philosophy
Humanity has the power to shape our collective reality, but given the dysfunctional patterns of our collective psyche, that’s a very dangerous power to have
The dangerous philosophy of Ursula Le Guin passes a quarter million views.
That’s a lot.
This was the most complex video essay I’ve published on the Science Fiction channel. The text is about 3600 words which I would usually write in two to three days, but this took the best part of a month.
As I’ve said in a few places now, Le Guin is by far the most famous science fiction writer of her generation. But that fame is relatively recent and I can understand why it’s surprising to many that Le Guin is now so renowned.
The essay is an attempt to understand Le Guin’s current significance, and that turned out to be a pretty major intellectual challenge. It’s also complicated by the effort not to offend either Le Guin’s fans or her detractors, while thinking seriously about her ideas.
In an early draft I named Le Guin’s philosophy “Fantasism”, but dropped the name as too easy to misinterpret. But it captures the idea that Le Guin didn’t just happen to communicate philosophical ideas via fantasy stories…fantasy itself was the subject of her philosophy.
If I were to boil down Le Guin’s philosophy to a social media status update it would be something like “Humanity as a collective has the power to shape our reality, but we are yet to find a way to direct our collective will”.
We’re all in a fantasy of our collective making, but it’s not as easy to change the fantasy as some might want to believe.
I think Le Guin was a generation or more ahead of her time. She was in a tiny minority in her own lifetime. But today Le Guin’s philosophy is the mainstream of progressive politics, which its detractors pejoratively call Woke.
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A number of people from all sides have tried to correct my title for the essay, and I’ve had to gently correct people that I very carefully and specifically chose the word “dangerous”.
Not as clickbait or an incitement. But as the most accurate description for where we are. Humanity has the power to shape our collective reality, but given the dysfunctional patterns of our collective psyche, that’s a very dangerous power to have.
But if we can continue to help more people read Le Guin, I’m hopeful we can develop the collective wisdom to make our reality a better one.
