by Ursula K. Le Guin
““`But what’s the good of this sort of ‘understanding,’ Dearri said, 'if it doesn’t result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn’t it?' 'You ask questions like a true profiteer,' Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction.”
“`But what’s the good of this sort of ‘understanding,’ Dearri said, 'if it doesn’t result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn’t it?' 'You ask questions like a true profiteer,' Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction.”
““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 al 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 al men’s acts, even the terrible became banal.”
“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 al 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 al men’s acts, even the terrible became banal.”
The dispossessed centers on two planets, one is an independent anarchist society free from hierarchy and personal belonging, the other is a rich ea...
