I took a completely different message from the story.

To walk away from Omelas - to walk away from a paradise where you feel no pain - is to go to a place where things aren't as perfect, where your life will be worse in some way.

It is a conscious decision to shoulder some of the pain on yourself because you inderstand that it is morally wrong to dump your suffering onto others.

Everything in life has a cost. Sometimes, but usually not, that cost is in dollars. Usually it is in time, energy, physical or mental discomfort, or even pain.

The people of Omelas lived in a place where the cost of their happiness was paid for by someone else. To walk away is to recognize the inherent injustice of this, and to refuse to be a part of it.

Reminded me of the scene in The Brothers Karamazov where Ivan talks about the hypothetical little girl locked away in the shack, praying to God to save her. Incredibly emotionally moving stuff.

If you liked The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, you might really like her novel The Dispossessed as well. She plays with a lot more ethical and sociopolitical questions there too.

It’s a question of what’s more fair, consolidating suffering to one person or spreading it out unevenly across many. The other thing with the guilt line for me is I’ve always kicked around this idea in my head that the cities of heaven are filled with those who live without regret. And so are the cities of hell. The first meaning that being able to move past your regrets and being forgiven is a heavenly reward and that when we’re not carrying it around we can be better to one another and if people are better to one another there’s less to forgive and forgiveness is also easier because we’re not resentful of not having received forgiveness. The second meaning is that there’s another kind of person who lives without regret and this is a punishment because while you can indulge in any pleasure or violence you want, so can everyone else and all the evil inclinations bad people have get amped up when they get sent to hell and they all punish one another. So with respect to the story, I see them as the kind who see themselves as having nothing to feel guilty about and nothing to regret, so that’s the moment we should know it’s a dystopia, not the invention of the child. It’s also an exception to your meta-narrative because everything prior is almost like a coloring book where we’re given a framework but can customize it, but then we’re told there can’t be guilt, she’s certain of it. That line kind of exists outside the commentary on writing a Utopia.

If they can’t free or help the child they don’t have perfect agency, that’s pretty straightforward imo.

Blimey. That is one damn good excerpt.

Such a great short story!! It really touched a chord in me in high school

My point about the guilt line occurring before the dystopia concession has to do with how I read the story as a meta-narrative. The first part of the story is about a utopia and a meditation on why writing utopias is hard. Everything in the first part is true of Omelas, but it should also be true of a different utopia, or maybe even of the place the people who leave Omelas go. This section ends a little after the part I quoted when the narrator decides to concede a dystopian flaw to the reader, who she believes hasn't been able to suspend disbelief or enjoy the story up to this point.

You can read the free of guilt line as a ban on guilt along the lines of guilt about what happens to the child, but I think its also worth noting that the surface reading is that the world LeGuin wants, the one without child torture, would also be free of guilt. Perhaps the people of Omelas should feel guilt and shame, but it matters that the people who leave should be rid of guilt and shame when they get to where they are going.

I do think people in Omelas have both perfect freedom and perfect agency, everyone that is, except the child. What's brilliant about the child is that freeing it is not something anyone would do for themselves, its something they think they should want to do for the child, but they don't because to do so would also be selfish in terms of exposing a much greater number of people to suffering.

If you violently invade Omelas to save the child and kill/punish those most complicit in the child's suffering (so they don't just put a new child in the dungeon), you just replace the salvation through one suffering soul narrative of the child with salvation through the much greater suffering of the people killed and maimed by your invasion. You can leave Omelas any time you want but there is no way to change Omelas that doesn't produce greater suffering.

I think it’s a pretty clear use of juxtaposition of presence and absence(guilt being the absent thing) and possibility and certainty, so I think her intent is to draw our attention to a lack of guilt, even if it takes us reading it a second time to make the connection. It doesn’t matter when we’re told it’s a dystopia, we can and should look at the text as a whole.

When talking about free will I also like to discuss agency. How free/able are we to realistically enact our free will. Sure, women can ride the subway after midnight, but they don’t have the same agency to do it as a man because of a greater threat to them. Not sure I get your break things that are perfect line because freedom can be breaking things that just are. So, do the people of Omelas have full agency to go along with their free will? It’s like a lot of mythology, Pandora’s box, tree of knowledge. There’s a rule that can’t be broken or else. So long as you don’t break it, everything’s great, perfect even.

Some of my best students have suggested kidnapping the child, finding allies, and invading Omelas as opposed to simply leaving.

I like your free will question and your undergrad thesis sounds super interesting, but I don't think your readings of the guilt line is supportable, as narratively that aside is before the narrator concedes that Omelas is a dystopia, and is mostly in the context of whether the summer festival would have orgies. People in Omelas are free and that freedom includes freedom from any system of morality or social mores that would feel oppressive or cause them to feel guilt.

I think you're onto something about Omelas and free will, but I would flip it around. We tend to think about free will in terms of the ability to fix things that are broken and break things that are perfect. If you can't do both, you aren't free. Ask us to picture a perfect world, and we can only imagine it as some sort of cage, but Omelas is just imperfect enough for people to not just like, murder each other to rattle the bars. Staying in Omelas is a constant, free, uncoerced choice of their comfort over their integrity. You get to live an almost perfect life in total certainty of your own free will.

I tend to think of intentionally breaking the social contract as revolt, which is why it's interesting that no one takes up arms against the injustice, or gets thrown out, or starts a fight over the child. The people who leave either leave immediately after learning about the child or go through a few days of deep contemplation and then just walk out. Just as importantly, they aren't just leaving, they are going somewhere. Probably they are disgusted by the suffering of the child, but there is something deeper than that that actually motivates them to leave.

Don't forget Brando Sando!

I love the story as well. Brilliant writing on the choices and perspectives of a so-called "ideal" society.

This reminds me of a terrible David Brooks (establishment hack, a useful idiot for people who consider themselves more sophisticated observers of the news, for context) NTY article that used a Those Who Walk Away From Omelas reference to defend all sorts of modern atrocities and injustices in the US and abroad. He completely misunderstands the story on purpose just to push propaganda for the US empire, he's pathetic. It's like Brooks couldn't ever become a real writer on his own merits and so he had to resort to cobbling together some distorted parodies of other people's great works like Omelas.

He literally tried to justify the US invasion of Iraq by saying that not walking away from Omelas was not only perfectly reasonable, but necessary, and so we have to just put up with all sorts of heinous shit in order to tell ourselves this is a good and just and free society. I cant believe he held a job at the NY Times for so damn long. Fuck David Brooks.

It's a lovely story; it and Omelas bring a tear to my eye each time I read them. It would be best to read it after reading Dispossessed so you know just who Odo is and what a change she made in her world, but it's a treasure on its own.

Edit: I'm re-reading it now, and this jumped out at me as relevant to the theme of Omelas:

>There would not be slums like this, if the Revolution prevailed. But there would be misery. There would always be misery, waste, cruelty. She had never pretended to be changing the human condition, to be Mama taking tragedy away from the children so they won't hurt themselves. Anything but. So long as people were free to choose, if they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so long as it wasn't the business of Business, the source of profit and the means of power for other people.

I think part of the problem for me, at least, is that I don't see any significant moral difference between Um-Helat and Omelas, yet they're presented by Jemisin as if they're somehow different. The only difference I can see is the number of sufferers, and Jemisin seems, in the end, to present Um-Helat as desirable, but the suffering of the child in Omelas as undesireable.

I used to teach that story alongside To Kill A Mockingbird. Teenagers found the question it raises really interesting! How much suffering are you willing to assign to the vulnerable in order to stay comfortable?

That's certainly ringing some bells, so I think you're bang on. I've only read The Direction of The Road, and Omelas, so my wider LeGuin knowledge is pretty thin. Must have over-egged the connection in my head. I'll have to give that a read all the same now it's got my attention.

That's only compelling under a utilitarian ethic, though.

The ones that walk away haven't alleviated the suffering. Being disgusted does not make them superior. If they/we imagine that it somehow makes them better, then they/we are still vampires feasting on the child's suffering.

It's possible that you could be mixing it up with her story The Day Before the Revolution that describes Odo, the woman who started the anarchist revolution at the heart of The Dispossessed. In her introduction to the story in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, LeGuin describes Odo as "one of the ones who walked away from Omelas." (Though she clearly means that in a very figurative sense; it's not at all set in the same world as Omelas.)

I quite enjoyed this exchange of perspectives.

Also in the introduction to the story in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, where she ties the origin to James's The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. She quotes this paragraph:

>Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

Right after that she quotes another bit from the same essay, which I've always loved:

>All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.

She goes on to say "The application of those two sentences to this story, and to science fiction, and to all thinking about the future, is quite direct. Ideals as "the probable causes of future experience" - that is a subtle and an exhilarating remark!"

Edit(s): typo(s)

Absolutely, thanks for sharing!

Interesting but not really relevant tidbit: Omelas = Salem O(regon) backwards. I believe the story is that she saw a road sign in her rear view mirror and said to herself that that would make a good fictional town name.

I think of it more in terms of the social contract, the ones who walk away are doing so out of disgust for this city’s social contract. It’s definitely a moral situation, we’re told “one thing there is none of in Omelas is guilt.” After a litany of things that might constitute aspects of Omelas we get this one grain of certainty. It’s because anyone who experiences guilt ends up leaving. Guilt and Omelas are contradictory, they cannot coexist. Like you suggest, they might leave in order to build something better because they can conceive of it(forgive me if I’m getting your take wrong, not trying to put words in your mouth), but there’s almost certainly an element of morality guiding their decision. They would prefer to go without all these pleasures because they become hollow in light of the child’s suffering. At least in other places, there’s an element of free will behind people’s suffering, choices they’ve made that led them there, but the child is innocent, arbitrary even. I did an undergraduate thesis called Utopia, Dystopia, and Catharsis(wish I’d known about this story at the time but I didn’t) and the premise was that the reason the Utopia that actually turns out to be a Dystopia is such a popular story to tell and to hear is that there’s often a lack of free will or a lack of morality. Seeing these perfect places lack these things makes us feel better because even though our world has poverty, starvation, war, injustice etc., at least we have free will unlike those characters, or at least we try to be moral unlike those characters.

I always tell them they're hurting the child more. The child is still suffering the same, but there is less return on happiness.

[removed]

Aye. Jemisin’s story seems, for lack of a better term, mean spirited, as though she were personally offended by Omelas.