Not too long ago, I took advantage of a few free minutes to reach for my phone. I didn’t expect any news, messages or entertainment. A silence appeared and, almost before I noticed it, I moved to fill it.
How much of our lives are spent avoiding the pauses that make our assumptions visible? We inherit loyalties, fears, ambitions, and perspectives. That way, the distraction saves you the trouble of asking if they are true. Plus, there’s a gig economy behind the distractions, digital forgeries are just a click away, and there’s more to be upset about.
An unexpected help was Ursula K. Le Guin, who Harold Bloom credited even more than Tolkien with elevating fantasy to high literature. Her mystery novels were not about predicting the future, but about moving away from the present. She invents unfamiliar worlds to reveal assumptions that are too familiar to be seen.
Nietzsche approached the problem in a different way. He called the passive, comfort-seeking person who has given up meaning the “last man.” The danger was a drama-free surrender, a loss of curiosity, judgment, risk, and inner independence.
The weakening of inherited meanings does not necessarily entail freedom. Responsibility shifts to a leader, movement, organization, nation, or crowd. Distraction replaces attention. A summary can replace a book. Artificial intelligence can generate evidence of thought while overlooking the thought itself. Productivity replaces reflection.
Freedom is reduced to choosing among ready-made options rather than questioning the values behind it.
The culture wars continue because conviction keeps them going. This argument is not about whether or not you believe in God, reason, science, religion, good or bad, or anything like that. It begins when we mistake our understanding for reality, our beliefs for truth itself, and the limits of our vision for the limits of truth.
Eventually, politeness becomes cowardice, compromise becomes rebellion, and everyone becomes a knight of justice, running to destroy someone’s heresy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson found hope in what certainty resists. In “Circles” (1841) he wrote, “People want to be settled, but there is hope only in so far as they are not settled.”
Emerson was not celebrating chaos. A calm mind can become closed. New thinking begins when surprise, revision, and certainty acknowledge unseen possibilities. Anxiety reminds us that neither the world nor the self is finished.
In the old Greek image, the past is in front of us, and the future approaches from behind. We looked back on what would happen next, relying on memory rather than foresight.
Memory is not nostalgia. Nostalgia reconstructs the past to meet the needs of the present. Memory brings back possibilities that the present has forgotten. But history does not give us maps, only warnings, and memory can be blind when we are only aware of the immediate dangers.
You need your imagination to deal with what happens next. Let’s look at the forms of life and the truths hidden by the categories we have inherited.
Le Guin’s left hand of darkness It becomes a work of imagination rather than science fiction. Published in 1969, this Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel sends a human emissary into an unknown world, where he assumes the strangest things.
The novel follows Genry Ai, a human from Terra who is sent to Gethen as an emissary of the Ekumen, a world federation. Believing himself to be open-minded, he invites the arcade into the larger human community. However, he has invisible beliefs.
The people of Geshen are neither permanently male nor female. Their society developed without the fixed gender distinctions that Genry considered natural. He repeatedly misreads his ally Estraven because Estraven does not fit his concepts of strength, loyalty, honesty, and trust.
Genry thinks he is judging Estraven. Instead, Estraven reveals the limits of his imagination.
Politics makes that blindness even more dangerous. Karhide, the first kingdom he arrives in, is shaped by nationalism, fear of outsiders, and suspicion at court. Neighboring Orgolein is bureaucratic and totalitarian, presenting itself as rational and efficient while concealing surveillance, coercion, and oppression. Although the two states are different, both have narrow loyalties until their concern for humanity manifests as betrayal.
Estraven looks further into the distance. Condemned as a traitor, Estraven understands that loyalty to his homeland requires refusing to be ruled by fear. Nations are important, but no nation is the be-all and end-all of humanity. An order that loses sight of truth becomes a different kind of blindness.
During the long journey, Jenry begins to understand. Stripped of political arenas and familiar categories, they must rely on each other. Trust does not come from identity, it comes from attention.
Le Guin surpasses both Nietzsche and Emerson. Freedom is not simply the strength to create value. Openness also doesn’t require abandoning beliefs. It takes humility to realize that some of our deepest assumptions may be local.
The change is gentle because you can finally meet another person without forcing him or her into a familiar category.
The future is still approaching from behind. We cannot address this goal by repeating inherited answers or celebrating independence. We will need memories without nostalgia, beliefs without conviction, and loyalty enough to withstand correction.
Perhaps that’s why free time is important. The reflex to fill the silence may be more than impatience. We, ourselves included, may be reluctant to face things that are not yet decided.
The danger is not only that the powers that be tell us to stop thinking. That is, we can mistake the limits of our vision for the limits of reality. The urge to escape uncertainty paradoxically becomes an escape from life itself.
Le Guin has the last word on uncertainty.
“The only thing that makes life possible is persistent and unbearable uncertainty: not knowing what will happen next.”
notes and reading
paul gauguin Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1897–98). Gauguin conceived of this painting as a meditation on human existence. The characters go through stages of life without resolving the questions posed in the title.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was a major American mystery novelist and a long-time student of philosophical Taoism. Themes of balance, interdependence, restraint, and uncontrolled action, along with a suspicion of mastery and an attentiveness to seeming opposites, shaped much of her work.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Circle” (1841). Emerson’s statement that “Men desire to be settled; and only in so far as they are not settled is there any hope for them” belongs to a larger vision of thought and life as continuous expansion. Readers committed to linear, progressive, or Christian eschatological accounts of time may find the repetitive imagery repulsive. This quote is not used here to deny timeless truths, but to defend correction, surprise, and openness to truths that are not yet fully revealed.
taylor dotson Divide: How fanatic beliefs are destroying democracy (2021). Political polarization arises not only from an indifference to truth, but also from a belief that one’s own facts and values make disagreement unnecessary.
Fact, fiction, and imagination–For Le Guin, fiction is creation, but not falsehood. Wishful thinking escapes reality. Imagination begins with reality and returns to expand reality. Through imagination, we may come closer to knowing the hearts and minds of others. See Crafting a Story by Ursula K. Le Guin words are my problem (2016).
humans are still coming
against the arrangement
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
