1971 Novel Warns Against Climate-Driven Authoritarianism
Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Lathe of Heaven" highlights the risk of messianic technocrats
Ursula K. LeGuin was a brilliant author. Her sci-fi and fantasy novels are wildly original and beautifully written. Although she was genuinely concerned about climate change and overpopulation, she had a prescient suspicion that these risks would be used to justify authoritarian oppression.
This suspicion is vividly expressed in LeGuin’s “The Lathe of Heaven,” a gripping novel about a man whose dreams change reality - an unspeakable power self-righteously exploited by a scientist who harnesses it to indulge his megalomania.
While LeGuin's story assumes that social and environmental issues would result in global catastrophe by 2002, it challenges the premise that such crises could be mitigated by central planning, and suggests that the surrender of personal freedoms to the whims of technocrats - no matter how well-intentioned they might be - would only make a bad situation worse.
In the book, a mild-mannered draftsman named George Orr becomes addicted to drugs in an attempt to suppress his inexplicable ability to transform the world through dreams he can not control. He is judged to be delusional, and under court order is assigned to the care of Dr. William Haber, a charismatic sleep scientist.
Haber quickly discovers that Orr is not delusional, and begins using hypnosis to alter Orr's dreams - both to benefit Haber himself, and to further his collectivist ethos: “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Each change is intended by Haber to be utopian, but the unintended consequences are inevitably dystopian. Haber’s goal of solving overpopulation results in a plague of cancer that decimates the population; his ambition to end racism turns everyone's skin the same shade of light grey; peace on Earth is achieved when the world's nations unite to fend off an alien onslaught from space.
With each of Orr's dreams, Haber becomes more powerful and society becomes more terrifying. Eugenics programs are implemented, with every citizen empowered to administer a lethal injection to any other citizen who appears to be ill, infirm, or otherwise a burden on society. Aliens destroy major cities and trigger the volcanic eruption of Mount Hood. Millions of people either die or are retroactively erased from existence.
Although the book is fantasy, it underscores the very real danger posed by those who claim the authority to act on behalf of humanity. As George Orr learns, self-proclaimed saviors with unrestrained power are far more dangerous than any threat they might use that power to address.
Today, as both governments and NGOs suggest extreme measures - such as the genetically-modified mosquitoes that the Gates Foundation released in Florida, the European initiative to restrict travel to 15 minutes from home, or the World Economic Forum's proposal for “space bubbles” to block sunlight from the Earth - LeGuin's warnings are even more timely than they were a half-century ago.
The surreal imagery in “The Lathe of Heaven” provides a salient reminder that ostensibly well-intentioned actions can have devastating consequences, and that social and environmental risks must not be used as a pretext to override the right of the individual to be safe from the whim of the collective.
Writing to us across the decades, LeGuin challenges the notion that personal freedom must be surrendered in the pursuit of utopian ideals. Instead, she proposes that the centralization of power must be opposed at every turn, and that liberty is actually the only foundation upon which a better future can be built.
Thanks for the recommendation! I'll give it a read.
Apparently those that govern the citizens of the United States have taken to zealous misinterpretation of the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution to control population, with the guidance of the gun manufacturers' lobbying. I'm not sure which is scarier, those with guns with no purpose but to own guns or those enforcing their religious beliefs on everyone else through the courts and legislation. I look forward to spending my time equally in and out of the "greatest country in the world" because to be in is to be in constant mortal danger almost anywhere and women almost everywhere here are in grave danger if they should try to help reduce the over population problem.