The Dispossessed

[droqen]

There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere.

[droqen]

(I finished the book a while ago. Maybe i need to make a habit of writing a little post-mortem of each thing I finish reading?)

I'll never forget this book. I read it along with Mutual Aid while I was trying to figure out my "structures are inherently amoral" and anti-systems perspectives.

Anyway i came back to this thread because there was this phrase rolling around in my head, 'LOSS AVERSION IN THE AGE OF PLENTY', and in The Dispossessed, Odo (the inciting personality of the anarchists who annexed the moon, the Odonians who became the Annaresti) described excess as 'excrement'.

'LOSS AVERSION IN THE AGE OF EXCREMENT'

There's also a quote from Odo... 'to make a thief, make an owner'. There was another I can't remember at the moment. But, in light of this, the phrase that I always thought ironic -- I have so much yet I am so loss-averse -- seems to be an Odonian tautology. If you have nothing, you can lose nothing. If you have no excess, rather, you can have no foolish sense of loss. It is the excrement which itself creates the sense of losing excrement.

There's no word for this type of loss, but what I mean is the feeling of being attached to something valueless yet not wanting to let go of it. Perhaps it's greed. It isn't greed if you actually need it.

To make greed, make excess.

[droqen]

p.s. here's the quote, from page 139: " 'To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.' [..] "

[droqen]

[pingback "What is to be done about that unfavourable stuff which exists?" in The Nature of Order Book 2]