A Place To Go Towards

An entire city can have any utopia it desires, on one condition. A neglected, malnourished child must sit alone in a dank basement, forever.

That is, of course, the premise of Ursula Le Guin's short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."  In it, she writes of the citizens of Omelas:

"They all know [the child] is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery."

If the child were ever to be comforted in any way, the utopia of Omelas would vanish. When first confronted with this reality, young people of the city feel troubled. Yet, over time, they become inured to, and begin to justify, the child's suffering. The child would never be happy anyway, they think, the child is too stupid.

Besides, the child's trauma enables the artistes of Omelas to make great art. And, they don't want to lose their art. More broadly, to ignore the child's suffering enables everyone else to have their ideal society.

Sometimes, however, people leave. Silently, one by one:

"They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."

Everybody in Omelas knows the horrible truth that one person's pain is powerful enough to prop up an entire society. It's part of the deal. Or, rather, it's part of the deal they have made with each other. The child in the basement had no say.

Le Guin says that those who walk away from Omelas walk "into the darkness." I've thought a lot about that line over the years. Why would they walk "into the darkness" when they're making a decision that ostensibly shows them taking an act of moral courage? Is the darkness the unknown of what a society might look like that didn't ask some people to suffer so that others could be happy? Or, is the darkness the (ostensible) chaos of a wilderness not ordered by human suffering?

I had long thought the story of Omelas to be about bravey. Yet, I see now that I was thinking about Omelas primarily from the perspective of what was lost to those who walked away.

Yet, I now see the story as one of complicity. Why didn't they take the child with them?

And, as Le Guin invites the reader, throughout the story, to imagine what our own utopias might look like, is she inviting us to interrogate the deals we strike in navigating our political lives? Whose lives do we allow to be stifled so that others might prosper?