No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Economic Policy Institute reports: From 2000 to 2007 (the last period of economic growth before the current recession) the richest 10% of Americans received 100% (one hundred percent—all) the average growth of income. The other 90% received none. At this rate, by the time we admit that cancer is not health, that we’re sick, any cure must be so radical as almost certainly to require dictatorial rule, and to destroy more—physically and morally—than it can save.

I have watched my country accept, mostly quite complacently, along with a lower living standard for more and more people, a lower moral standard. A moral standard based on advertising.

When did it become impossible for our government to ask its citizens to refrain from short-term gratification in order to serve a greater good?

Is the red-blooded freedom-loving American so infantile that he has to be promised whatever he wants right now this moment? Or, to put it less fancifully, if citizens can’t be asked to refrain from steak on Tuesdays, how can industries and corporations be asked to refrain from the vast and immediate profits they make from destabilizing the climate and destroying the environment?

I wish the ideals of respecting truth and sharing the goods hadn’t become so foreign to my country that my country begins to seem foreign to me.

The whole undertaking of science is to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis, to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection—not to belief or disbelief. Belief has its proper and powerful existence in the domains of magic, religion, fear, and hope.

Anger points powerfully to the denial of rights, but the exercise of rights can’t live and thrive on anger. It lives and thrives on the dogged pursuit of justice.

though I want to see myself as a woman of strong feeling but peaceable instincts, I have to realize how often anger fuels my acts and thoughts, how very often I indulge in anger.

A brief, open expression of anger in the right moment, aimed at its true target, is effective—anger is a good weapon. But a weapon is appropriate to, justified only by, a situation of danger.

Anger indulged rouses anger. Yet anger suppressed breeds anger. What is the way to use anger to fuel something other than hurt, to direct it away from hatred, vengefulness, self-righteousness, and make it serve creation and compassion?

Cruelty is a human specialty, which human beings continue to practice, and perfect, and institutionalize, though we seldom boast about it. We prefer to disown it, calling it “inhumanity,” ascribing it to animals. We don’t want to admit the innocence of the animals, which reveals our guilt.

it wasn’t built long ago to celebrate and embody spiritual worship, but recently, in dire need, for a specific material purpose.

A real Christmas tree, a cut tree, is a ritual sacrifice.

People love pretense, and love ritual, and need both. Neither of them is counterfactual.

To me what’s awful is not—as it is usually presented—the “loss of belief.” What’s awful is the demand that children believe or pretend to believe a falsehood, and the guilty-emotion-laden short-circuiting of the mind that happens when fact is deliberately confused with myth, actuality with ritual symbol.

Belief has no value in itself that I can see. Its value increases as it is useful, diminishes as it is replaced by knowledge, and goes negative when it’s noxious. In ordinary life, the need for it diminishes as the quantity and quality of knowledge increase.

To see a person who’s lived only two years in this world seeking and finding her way in it, perfectly trusting, having her trust rewarded with truth, and accepting it—that was a lovely thing to see. What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn between our birthday and last day—from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.

But a false attribution on the Internet is like box elder beetles, the miserable little things just keep breeding and tweeting and crawling out of the woodwork.