The Telling (Hainish Cycle, #8)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

It was decent of him, Sutty thought, to keep saying “we,” as if the Ekumen had been responsible for Terra’s intervention in Aka. That was the underlying Hainish element in Ekumenical thinking: Take responsibility.

The mechanisms of control are so pervasive and effective, they must have been set up in response to something powerful, don’t you think? If resistance to the Corporate State centered in a religion—a well-established, widespread religion—that would explain the Corporation’s suppression of religious practices. And the attempt to set up national theism as a replacement. God as Reason, the Hammer of Pure Science, all that. In the name of which to destroy the temples, ban the preachings.

One of the principal bureaus of the Ministry of Poetry is the Office of Book Location. They find books, confiscate them, and send them to be pulped for building material. Insulating material. The old books are referred to as pulpables. A woman there told me that she was going to be sent to another

The caravan passed the facade of the District Prefecture, a tiny, jaunty, jingling scrap of the past creeping by under the blank gaze of the future.

The government of this world, to gain technological power and intellectual freedom, had outlawed the past. She did not underestimate the enmity of the Akan Corporation State toward the “old decorations” and what they meant. To this government who had declared they would be free of tradition, custom, and history, all old habits, ways, modes, manners, ideas, pieties were sources of pestilence, rotten corpses to be burned or buried.

Sutty wondered if Aka was a guilt culture, a shame culture, or something all its own. How was it that everybody in the world was willing to move in the same direction, talk the same language, believe the same things? Fear of being evil, or fear of being different?

Where my guides lead me in kindness I follow, follow lightly, and there are no footprints in the dust behind us.

But these stories weren’t gospel. They weren’t Truth. They were essays at the truth. Glances, glimpses of sacredness. One was not asked to believe, only to listen.

By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead

I know who you are,” she said. “You’re my enemy. The true believer. The righteous man with the righteous mission. The one that jails people for reading and burns the books. That persecutes people who do exercises the wrong way. That dumps out the medicine and pisses on it. That pushes the button that sends the drones to drop the bombs. And hides behind a bunker and doesn’t get hurt. Shielded by God. Or the state. Or whatever lie he uses to hide his envy and self-interest and cowardice and lust for power.

“Well, he is—as you call it—a believer. And as you say, that’s dangerous. Tell him what you told me about your Earth. Tell him more than you told me. Tell him that belief is the wound that knowledge heals.”

“I can carry that message,” Sutty said finally. “Though bigots have small ears.”