The book ends, as these things always do, with a sigh and a stack of annotated pages. I’ve just closed the cover on Zamyatin’s We, and, like a cigarette slipped into the afterword, there sat Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “The Stalin in the Soul“. She wrote it decades later in 1979, but it might as well have been stitched into the same binding. I may write about it in more detail elsewhere.
Zamyatin built the totalitarian city of glass; Le Guin peered into the reflective surfaces. Her “Stalin” isn’t a political leader but the minor tyrant most of us cultivate internally — the censor who edits desire into silence, who rewards obedience with the narcotic of safety. She understood what Foucault would later codify as biopower: that power’s finest trick is to outsource itself. You don’t need Rousseau’s chains when you can teach people to manage their own submission.
Reading it now feels almost indecently prescient. The State of We had surveillance towers; ours has dashboards. Zamyatin imagined a future where citizens surrendered privacy for perfection. We call it good UX. Le Guin warned that the artist’s real jailer was the fear of making art that doesn’t please the market. Foucault, if he were still here, would simply nod and mark it as another case study in voluntary servitude.
We‘s protagonist, D-503, had shades of Dostoyevsky’s in Notes from Underground – only a bit more reliable of a narrator.
As I close this run of readings — We and its prophetic essay appendage — I can’t shake the feeling that finishing the book is part of the ritual it describes: the quiet filing of experience, the discipline of comprehension. Yet finishing also matters. There’s a line between vigilance and paralysis, between watching the gears of power and daring to write anyway.
So yes, the project reaches its line — not a triumphant banner, more a hand-painted sign reading enough for now. Zamyatin showed me the machine. Le Guin showed me the human who keeps it running. Foucault, the analyst of our beautiful cages, taught me not to pretend there’s an outside.
All that remains is to write, while the internal commissar mutters and the cursor blinks like a surveillance light. That, apparently, is freedom.
Ridley Park 