There are certain stories that I reread every few years that I believe to be foundational to my personhood. I find new ways to relate to these books each time I do this. One story in particular, a sci-fi book called The Dispossessed, helped radicalize me as a teenager. After reading it again recently, I’m shocked with how relevant its narrative is to my current predicament. Let’s just say that I’m thinking about quitting my job and living as a vagabond again.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is a story about an anarchist society that exists on the barely-habitable moon of a planet similar to our own. More specifically, it is a story about a man’s journey from an anarchist society to a stratified, capitalist society. The story’s main character, Shevek, is the moon colony of Anarres’ first visitor to the planet Urras in almost 200 years, back when his ancestors left the corrupt, hierarchical society to forge a society free from rulers and private property.
A speech Shevek makes within the book resonated with the very depths of my anarchist soul:
“if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself.”
I have always sought a life of freedom in which I can do as I please when I please. For as long as I can remember, I’ve hated the idea of having power over others and people having power over me. I have bucked most attempts people have made to pressure me into acting a certain way, earning me the title of “wild child” by my relatives. My behavior as a child became more and more unmanageable until I became a teenager.
My adolescence in foster care was filled with psychologists telling me that I was mentally ill due to childhood trauma. It was filled with psychiatrists giving me pills to control my unruliness. For a time, I was zombified by those pills. I had everything that made me bright and beautiful taken from me by men and women who claimed to be helping me.
What those people were actually doing was forcing me to conform to the same rules and systems that they’d bought into at some point in their lives; rules of domination and submission. I’ve never believed in such things. When my mother was beating me nearly everyday when I was only a toddler because I did not speak in a way she liked, I knew that what she was doing was wrong. There was no amount of abuse that would force me to believe that others had any right to coerce people into shapes that the abusers deemed acceptable.
Shevek, too was unruly as a child. He questioned things a bit too much and in a manner even his fellow anarchists thought was unacceptable. That questioning nature led Shevek to become a theoretical physicist, one of the best to ever live, even. I also wanted to become a scientist whose efforts led to breakthroughs in our collective understanding of the universe. But in a world like ours, my bucking of convention and authority hobbled me in ways that most people wouldn’t imagine.
I’ve always been academically gifted, but the compulsive nature of school made me very anxious. I barely found respite from the bullies that tormented me severely in elementary and middle school. I didn’t have the freedom to not associate with them. Picking and choosing what type of people a person has to deal with is perhaps one of the greatest things people can do for their mental wellbeing. Sadly, it is a freedom that is only afforded to those with money and power.
College could have been an escape from these things, but it was yet another thing that was forced onto me. I was not ready for the decisions that my high school guidance counselor made for me. I had so many stressful things occurring to me on a daily basis in high school, not to mention that I was hiding the fact that I was in foster care from all of my friends. She truly believed that she was doing something amazing for me and never missed an opportunity to brag about it to others.
Dual-enrollment stated when I was a junior and became another burden that I felt compelled to carry. I’d always been told that college degrees promised higher lifetime income. At 15, I already knew that money could get me the freedom that I’d always longed for. But the degree program that was chosen for me, the one that gave me a full-ride, wasn’t even something that I truly wanted to do. Insult was added to injury when I learned how little money the career offered out of college.
When I graduated a few months before my 19th birthday, I decided to finally live freely. I hitchhiked from Florida to Maine over the course of four months while most of my high school friends were still partying in college. It was an incredible adventure that nearly killed me, but also showed me how kind the average stranger really is. I was constantly being offered to start a new life with people that picked me up, sometimes to even become a part of their families. But I would always keep moving, never staying somewhere longer than two weeks. I was a man obsessed with being free not just from capitalism, but from social obligations.
By the end of that trip, I’d lost 30 pounds off of my already slender body and had only a backpack full of essentials. I was tired and physically weak, but I finally felt good about myself. I ended up going back down to Florida to escape a harsh winter and figure out where I wanted to travel the next spring. I lived in a long-term shelter in Miami where I was abandoned by a cruel man that I thought loved me.
I then went into the Air Force. I went from one extreme to another, as hurt people do. It was almost like I was testing my belief in my own freedom. Let’s just say that the military was one of the most awful experiences I’ve ever had. I got out at the first “honorable” opportunity.
Life since then has been a fight between living with convenience vs living authentically. Convenience has won out more often than not. Living on the streets in an increasingly psychopathic society gets harder and harder to manage. Add aging and failing health to the equation and it becomes clear why I’ve continued to seek out “the easy life”. I am currently still selling my time for money so that I can keep myself well-fed and comfortable.
***
As I write this, I’m grieving the death of a man whose name I will probably never know. It may be cliche but I’m met with a sense of my own mortality. I was the numbest I’ve ever been in my life before this man’s demise. I went from feeling like I’d genuinely helped save someone’s life to hearing that he’d passed away in a hospital as a John Doe. Shevek had a similar experience in the climax of The Dispossessed, shortly after he’d made his speech. It shakes everything you’ve believed and accepted about life and yourself to the very core.
I hate my job. I hate my city. I hate my home, and I may even hate myself. I have become a person who has traded his essence for comfort and convenience. I am a person who has surrounded himself with people that reinforce that lifestyle, who actively discourage me from abandoning it even when they see how much it is killing me. Each week at my job is spent turning away more people in need than I can actually help. I have gained 30 pounds and my health has fallen off a cliff.
While Shevek is living on Urras, he is wined and dined by the elites there. He too gains some weight as he feels the poison of their cruel culture seeping into his being. They wish to own him and the ideas in his mind. They bribe him with money and possession, wishing for him to become a property-owner like themselves. But when he finds people on Urras who long to be free like his own people on Anarres, he joins them in the streets even when his own life is at risk.
I have also helped groups that share my anarchist beliefs, but it feels so futile to work within a vile, psychopathic system that resists and even absorbs any attempts to subvert it. Shevek arrives at the same conclusion. After several months of increasingly dramatic experiences amongst the “propertarians” of the planet, Shevek returns to his home on Anarres. He doesn’t take anything back with him from the planet except for his experiences and a renewed appreciation for and an expanded understanding of his culture. Anarres may not be a utopia to Shevek but it is better than the hellish “civilizations” of Urras.
Shevek sees how futile resistance against the hierarchical structure of Urras truly is when its governments can simply mow down resistors en masse. He realizes that if freedom exists, it only exists independent of those governments and free from their greedy, violent hands. Anarres’ people have their own unspoken social order that feels stifling at times. Anarres doesn’t, however, have groups of people with so much power that they can order the deaths of thousands on a whim.
It has always felt like I was born on a distant anarchist colony. There is the ideal that exists in my head that feels almost as real as a physical place, but that ideal cannot provide me with food and shelter. My beliefs cannot sustain me like a friendship can, like a community can. I wish that I could throw everything I have away and live with empty hands, relying solely on other people. But there is no Anarres in our universe; not one that I can get to, anyway.
In The Dispossessed, Anarres was born from the writings of a revolutionary thinker. I guess I’ll start there.
Disciple of the Vault 