The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin continued

I find it interesting how Haber is trying to use Orr’s reality-altering dreams to try and recreate a better world for humanity. As his first attempt, he tries to use Orr’s dreams to solve the problem of overpopulation. Unfortunately, the solution Orr dreams up is a plague that kills billions of people, and, consequentially, wipes 6 billion people out of existence altogether. Haber appears—or at least tries—to convince himself that it’s for the best, but Orr seems to consider it as mass murder. Next, Haber attempts to end the war in the East. The war ends, alright, but only because all the world powers had to join their forces in order to stave off a global invasion from aliens created from Orr’s subconscious. Every time Haber tries to fix one of mankind’s problems by altering reality, it ends up making things worse. At one point, in the reality before which the novel takes place in, humanity’s situation had escalated to a point where Orr had to suddenly dream up a whole new world in order to escape death himself. Who knows if, in that past life, somebody else had tried to do the same thing Haber is doing right now, if somebody else had tried to use Orr’s dreams to manipulate reality, and ended up destroying it. I fear what will happen if Haber continues to change reality like this, to control the world’s problems. At this rate, this reality could possibly end up the same way the last one had, that things could become so bad that Orr will end up having to rewrite the world’s history in order to save it. One cannot solve humanity’s problems by simply changing reality. Our problems are more complicated than that, beyond a simple solution. Changing reality won’t solve them. Every time Orr changes reality, things always get worse. Because reality isn’t the problem. It’s humanity. Humanity is the one who create the problems in the first place, within any given reality. If overpopulation and lack of resources is no longer a problem, then they focus their energy on Isragypt and the war in the East. If its not one issue, then there is always another. It never ends. Unless we can change ourselves, change this reckless pattern we set for ourselves, things will always inevitably grow worse, until they can no longer get any worse.