Revolutionary Initiative

If we must all agree, all work together [in lockstep], we're no better than a machine. If an individual can't work in solidarity with her fellows, it's her duty to work alone.  Her duty and her right.  We have been denying people that right.  We've been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority.  But ANY rule is tyranny.  The duty of the individual is to accept NO rule, to be the initiator of her own acts, to be responsible.   Only if she does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive.  We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution.  Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.  "The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere.  It is for all, or it is nothing.  If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin."  We can't stop here, we must go on, we must take the risks. 

-The Dispossessed, Chapter 12 p.359

Cellular Function of the Individual in Society

Shevek had learned something about his own will these last four years.  In its frustration he had learned its strength.  No social or ethical imperative equaled it.  Not even hunger could repress it.  the less he had, the more absolute became his need to be.

He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his "cellular function," the analogic term for the individual's individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society.  A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength.  That was a central idea of Odo's Analogy.  That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary.  With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear.  Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individaul, the person, had the power of moral choice--the power of change, the essential function of life.  The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.

-The Dispossessed, Chapter 10 p.333

Fidelity as a Human Act

His radical and unqualified will to create was, in Odonian terms, its own justification.  His sense of primary responsibility towards his work did not cut his off from his fellows, from his society, as he had thought.  It engaged him with them absolutely.

He also felt that a person who had this sense of responsibility about one thing was obliged to carry it through in all things.  It was a mistake to see himself as its vehicle and nothing else, to sacrifice any other obligation to it.

That sacrificially was what Takver had spoken of recognizing in herself when she was pregnant, and she had spoken with a degree of horror, of self-disgust, because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false.  For Shevek too, there was no end.  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.  All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.

So his mutual commitment with Takver, their relationship, had remained thoroughly alive during their four years' separation.  They had both suffered from it, and suffered a good deal, but it had not occurred to either of them to escape the suffering by denying the commitment.

For after all, he thought now, lying in the warmth of Takver's sleep, it was joy they were both after--the completeness of being.  If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.  Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled.  You will not know what is it come home.

Fulfillment, he thought, is a function of time.  The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal, The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place.  It has an end.  it comes to the end and has to start over.  It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.  

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. 

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act.  Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

So looking back on the last four years, he saw them not as wasted, but as a part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives.  The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted.  Even pain counts.

 -The Dispossessed, Chapter 10 p.333