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"We"

This came up in another thread where One Brow was asserting the political idealism that our society is fully moldable to rational argument, to the extent that " tiles will no longer look good" if everyone has solar panels on their roofs.

I used to be susceptible to such statist programming myself, and was on the edge of completely losing my selfhood whenever someone advanced some reasonable-sounding ideal of how we should all just be. What I credit as saving my soul was a book by Eugene Zemyatin, called "We".

Evgenii Zamiatin's seminal antiutopian satire "We" (written 1920-1) is one of the most celebrated works of twentieth century Russian literature. Set one thousand years in the future, it is a witty yet terrifying picture of a future society in which reason is all-conquering and mankind has been enslaved by a dictator called 'the benefactor'.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/606616.Zamiatin_s_We_Critical_Studies_in_Russian_Literature_
 
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