> It was in Le Guin's novel "The Dispossessed" that I first read a convincing account of such a society It's been a minute, but _was_ The Dispossessed a convin

> It was in Le Guin's novel "The Dispossessed" that I first read a convincing account of such a society It's been a minute, but _was_ The Dispossessed a convincing account of such a society? From what I remember, the protagonist encounters academic gate-keepers who effectively control who gets to do teaching and research or what gets communicated to the main planet, centralized systems choose things as personal as what you're named, resources (food) are distributed unequally and untransparently (Shivek is surprised when the big university cafeteria has more/better food?). Coercive hierarchies still develop, but they're cloaked in the dogma of anarchism. I read this as showing that even if you can isolate to an extreme (by being on a resource-poor moon), and have a language and education system which tries to suppress concepts of ownership, and a population goes through the shared trauma of fighting to feed themselves, people will still find a way to limit each other's freedom, and exercise power, and accumulate or control resources.