I want to start out by saying that I'm not critiquing your reading or any readings of the story. I'm just maundering on about how I've come to view it.
By a Torquemada product, I mean "something constructed to create pain." The options given by the story are complaisance about the mystically effective torture, and the purity of walking away from widespread glory resting on limited torment. (You can of course construct other options by fanficcing the story, in which case you're a deus ex machina dueling deus in machina LeGuin, I suppose.) I don't see a satisfying solution there, in the story.
Our societies can reasonably be characterized as limited glory resting very non-mystically indeed on widespread torment.
As a metaphor for our society, it points out important things that we have no ritual for exposing, but which are conceptually set aside all the time when they aren't brushed off as some sort of necessity. In this light, I think the question is not so much "what would you do?" as "What are you doing?"
Reading in a "What would you do?" way reminds me of the typical use of the story set called the trolley problem as an apparatus for defining ethics. I am considerably influence by "The Good Place," in which it is concluded after a series of visceral examinations of the problem that the ethical fault is in setting the situation. I don't think that LeGuin intended any such thing, mind you. But I myself want to read the story as an indictment of a society like ours (but better) and of the inevitable inadequacy of my efforts to spread the glory and reduce the pain.
So that's what I was saying badly. :D Including, I think, a bad use of the term "usurious."
no subject
By a Torquemada product, I mean "something constructed to create pain." The options given by the story are complaisance about the mystically effective torture, and the purity of walking away from widespread glory resting on limited torment. (You can of course construct other options by fanficcing the story, in which case you're a deus ex machina dueling deus in machina LeGuin, I suppose.) I don't see a satisfying solution there, in the story.
Our societies can reasonably be characterized as limited glory resting very non-mystically indeed on widespread torment.
As a metaphor for our society, it points out important things that we have no ritual for exposing, but which are conceptually set aside all the time when they aren't brushed off as some sort of necessity. In this light, I think the question is not so much "what would you do?" as "What are you doing?"
Reading in a "What would you do?" way reminds me of the typical use of the story set called the trolley problem as an apparatus for defining ethics. I am considerably influence by "The Good Place," in which it is concluded after a series of visceral examinations of the problem that the ethical fault is in setting the situation. I don't think that LeGuin intended any such thing, mind you. But I myself want to read the story as an indictment of a society like ours (but better) and of the inevitable inadequacy of my efforts to spread the glory and reduce the pain.
So that's what I was saying badly. :D Including, I think, a bad use of the term "usurious."