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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37624
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Working within your premise of "novel as message", very few messages are black-and-white. Most will bring problems if ignored and also if taken too far, or too literally. Humans (and maybe any other species likely to evolve in the real universe) are likely to have difficult and sometimes conflicting motives, including selfish and contradictory motives.

So a message in the sense you mean, may be best done, by showing the worst outcomes of **both** extremes, so the reader can figure it themselves.

A superb example of this in an acclaimed novel, is **Ursula LeGuin's "The Dispossessed"**. In this book, the author posits a protagonist within a world where there are no possessions/private property, who seeks to work with scientists in other worlds that have economies based on possession/property. By the end of the book, she shows (but doesn't _tell_) how in the first world, jealousy and power games play out even without property to fight over, and in the second world how unequal distribution causes harm and power cliques to arise. The reader is left in an unsettling position of being shown the harm both extremes can do, _without_ any hint from the author which side they should end up supporting. The author adds to this by leaving it to the reader to encounter the tension seen through her protagonist's eyes, while doing nothing at all to resolve it for them.

In your case it's worth a read, because it sounds like you want to do is convey a message that something is bad (or must be done), but also, done too much or the wrong way, harm will also result. You want to convince your readers of both of these things, and leave them to take on board the message(s?).

That's exactly what LeGuin did in her book, and is very rarely done. It might help to show how it's possible.

Original score: 6