On The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

It's not a trolley problem

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is a brilliant short story and I hate 95% of the discourse about it.

Most people seem to interpret The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas as a sort of trolley-problem story: is it acceptable to torture one child to have an entire gloriously happy city? This is very possibly the world’s most boring interpretation. (Unless, of course, it’s in song form.¹) The trolley problem already exists and there is no reason to make up an entire short story about it.

The key to interpreting Omelas is in a paragraph on the first page:

Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children – though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you.

This is not a paragraph you include if you’re talking about the trolley problem.

(I do want to pause for a moment to appreciate Le Guin’s artistry. Each of her words is perfectly chosen for both sound and sense. If you haven’t read Omelas aloud, I recommend trying it—it’s an even better way to appreciate this gem of a story.)

Fundamentally, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is a story about fiction. The narrator is desperate to convince, but knows that whatever they say the reader will find the utopia implausible. Surely the people of Omelas are goody-two-shoes, they think. Shallow because they have no pain and injustice to endure. The revelry is empty, the beauty a facade.

And then we get that kicker of a line:

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

The fundamental question of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is: why is a good society more plausible if it’s powered by a tortured child? “Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible?”, the narrator asks, and judging from the overwhelming popularity of the trolley-problem interpretation the answer is “yes.”

Why does a peaceful, happy society have to have a hidden injustice? Why can’t you believe in a world that’s just… good?

Le Guin writes, with vicious sarcasm:

Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.

Read that paragraph, and then read the first paragraph I quoted again. In this, Le Guin herself commits the treason of the artist. To praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. Torturing children doesn’t make you compassionate or gentle with children. It doesn’t make your music more poignant, your science more profound, your architecture more noble, your happiness deeper, or your life more splendid. Accepting that you are helpless in the face of injustice is not a virtue. The Nazis were not morally improved by running concentration camps.

Why is this a paragraph that so many people read and nod along with? Why does it— in defiance of everything we know about human psychology—on some intuitive level make sense?

Utopia was a recurring theme in Le Guin’s work, from The Dispossessed to Always Coming Home. She returns, again and again, to the question posed by Omelas: can we imagine a society that’s good? To feel realistic, must there be a dark secret?

To some extent, you might imagine this as an artistic question, like How do I justify the Complete Monster trope as a psychologically realistic kind of human to exist? or How much can I get away with before my readers are like ‘okay this magical system has to have any rules at all and can’t just run entirely on Rule of Cool’? That’s a bit navel-gaze-y to be the subject of a short story, much less a novel, and of limited interest to people who are not writers themselves.

But it matters. If we can’t imagine a society that’s actually good in fiction, where there are also Jedi knights and hobbits and the economic system implied by the Harry Potter novels, how can we imagine it in real life? In what ways is our vision of the future limited? Can we imagine living, ourselves, in a society with no dark secrets at all, a society that is actually good?

I’ve always got on with anarchists, assuming they can tolerate my knee-jerk contrarianism and incorrigible pragmatism. The best anarchists—and Le Guin, with her deep thoughtfulness and compassion, certainly was one of the best—are people who believe that the world can be better than it is. We reformist types spend our time arguing about a 2% decrease in the marginal tax on thus-and-such. It’s valuable work and I’m not knocking it. But anarchists, at their best, are people who have a sort of radical hope, people who have their eyes on a world where people are genuinely kind and happy and free.

Prison abolitionism is one of the anarchist beliefs I find most sympathetic. People who want to reform prisons want a world where vulnerable people aren’t raped or beaten or enslaved, which matters. Every single person they save matters. And people who want to abolish prisons want a world where we don’t put human beings in cages, because people don’t do things that mean we have to pen them to keep everyone else safe. Prison abolitionism says: “everyone deserves to be free, and ‘everyone’ means everyone. Every pedophile and every serial killer, every cartel leader and every white supremacist. You were once a child who had the potential to grow up to something better than this, and we’re going to make a society where every child like you were grows up better.”

Anarchists, in my experience, tend to focus on the kind of people society finds most disposable: addicts and sex workers, homeless people and criminals. The kind of people that our society treats like Omelas treats the tortured child. The kind where we're hard-headed and realistic and practical and all agree, in our air-conditioned rooms, that it’s just not possible to make a world that’s good for them too.

To me, that’s what it means to walk away from Omelas. Walking away from Omelas is saying: I don’t think anyone is disposable; I don’t want a society where one person has to be sacrificed for the greater good of all. Walking away from Omelas is saying: as long as there is one person shut away from the joy, we’re not done yet. Walking away from Omelas is saying: I refuse to believe that this is the best we can do.

I am a practical, pragmatic sort, and I am never myself going to be an anarchist. But I think sometimes it’s good for all of us to look out in the horizon beyond Omelas and ask: do I believe that there could be a world that’s just good? Why not? What’s stopping us?

1. I know the Scott Alexander deep cuts, okay.