The Ones Who Ignore The Point of Omelas

Oct 2024

Omelas is in the air. You drop the Omelas kid in your post about capitalism, AI, shrimp welfare, whatever; people know you’re a sophisticated ethics thinker and you don’t even have to dust off some clunky Rawls concept. It’s Omelas! The utopia, the perfect city that only works if they torture a kid in a basement forever. Bam. Just like the target of your tweet.

Except that’s not what the story’s about. Or rather, the story is about a kid in a basement the same way that Moby Dick is about some guys hunting a whale. So this is an apologia for Ursula K LeGuin’s 1973 short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, because it’s more interesting than a shorthand for the trolley problem1. It goes like this:

The story

• There’s a utopia called Omelas
• People there are always happy, and they’re celebrating a sweet festival
• The narrator is just sketching it out hypothetically, like: maybe they’ve got antigravity and cures for disease, maybe not, doesn’t matter
• The narrator has difficulty conveying that the city’s inhabitants are not just blissed-out simpletons
• This difficulty arises because people think only evil is interesting, while joy is simple
• To make Omelas believable, the narrator adds a kid being neglected in a basement
• The kid’s been taken from his mother, locked in the dark, he’s afraid, he’s dirty, he’s starving, he’s losing his mind
• Everybody in Omelas has come to see the neglected kid at some point, and they were enraged and disgusted
• The people know that the kid’s suffering is (magically?) necessary to maintain their utopia
• Their understanding and acceptance of this evil is what enables them to feel joy
• But some people walk away from the city
• Their destination is unimaginable: a world that knows suffering, but contains none

Search for “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, read it (it’s, like, five pages long), buy the whole book from LeGuin if it’s enjoyable (https://www.ursulakleguin.com/the-winds-twelve-quarters).

The point

The story doesn’t ask “would you walk away from Omelas?” The conflict in the story isn’t a hero deciding to sacrifice utopia for the sake of one child. The conflict is the poor narrator trying to find a way to describe a realistic utopia. And they can’t! If that kid wasn’t suffering, if the city residents had no knowledge of suffering whatsoever, then they would in fact be mere blissed-out simpletons. People who never ate the apple of knowledge, never understood choice and evil and suffering and guilt, never left the Garden of Eden. Happy animals.

LeGuin’s pointing not at a problem with Omelas but at a problem with people: we can only experience joy in contrast with suffering. We can only be good as long as we contain evil.

And she’s asking whether it’s possible for people to exist in any other way. Is this built into being human? Does this suffering/joy duality work like some synthetic a priori concept, like space and time and math, baked into how the machinery of our consciousness sees the world23? The ones who walk away, is there a destination? Does another utopia exist where people retain their knowledge of suffering and consequent awareness of their own joy? Or do they just disappear into the mountains?

Better ways to name-drop Omelas

So if reducing “The Ones Who Walk Away” to a trolley problem moral dilemma strips the story of its meaning, what are some good ways to flex your good taste and erudition by mentioning it?

• when something is unnecessarily grimdark to convey how Serious and Complex it is, that’s the struggle of Omelas’ narrator!
• when a revolutionary proposal is made to depart from known, safe, imperfect methods of governance to gamble on untried systems, that’s walking away from Omelas!
• when people are Pure and Righteous and Joyful and the streets are clean and no evil exists, that’s Omelas without the basement kid: impossible!

Would You Like To Know More?

A lot of good speculative fiction takes a concept to its furthest extreme to examine it. LeGuin is observing that we all live in Omelas, that people do suffer in our world, and asks whether our joy is given meaning by comparison with others’ suffering. To put the question in its most extreme form, she concentrates that inequality of suffering all the way down onto one kid. This concentration of suffering tradeoff pops up all the time, like the idyllic town in Neil Gaiman’s 2001 “American Gods” where a kobold annually sacrifices kids, or the space whale in the 2010 Doctor Who episode “The Beast Below”, or that guy Joshua from Nazareth in “The Bible” from around 0 who takes one for the team. The obsessive categorizers on TV Tropes have entire literature, movie, television, video game, and of course anime and manga pages for the trope “Powered by a Forsaken Child” (which inexplicably omits Jesus)4.

More broadly, there are lots of scifi/speculative fiction stories that dive into this knowledge-of-good-and-evil, meaning-of-suffering stuff. Some super popular examples are Iain Banks’ utopian Culture, driven by the contrast between its happiness and the suffering among less enlightened civilizations, and maybe also by its hegemonic need to relieve everyone else of that burden; there’s Dan Simmons’ Hyperion’s bonkers metaphysical musings on the necessity of suffering, the collective soul of humanity5, and the purpose of art.

Because everybody knows LeGuin is right - your art can’t be good unless it also has evil. You can’t make art that’s about how happy you are unless your audience already knows about unhappiness.