I’m re-re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. So much wisdom and foresight and humanity, it should be required reading if anything ever should be. And I come across this passage which seems so pertinent in today’s world:
“His speeches were long and loud. Praises of Karhide, disparagements of Orgoreyn, vilifications of ‘disloyal factions,’ discussions of the integrity of the kingdom’s borders, lectures in history, ethics and economics, all in a ranting, canting, emotional tone that went shrill with vituperation or adulation. He talked much about pride of country and love of the parent land, ….I decided that he wished to arouse emotions of a more elemental, uncontrollable kind. …He wanted his hearers to be frightened and angry. His themes were not pride and love at all, although he used the words perpetually. As he used them, they meant self-praise and hate. He talked a great deal about truth also, for he was, he said, cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization. It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer or paint or plyofilm or whatever, hiding the noble reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural, that it is the opposite of primitiveness. Of course, there is no veneer. The process is one of growth and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things you have either one or the other. Not both.”
