Submitted by feanor_imc t3_1096m8m in books
thelandsman55 t1_j3yh8kz wrote
Reply to comment by flyingjesuit in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Leguin affected me like few books have done by feanor_imc
I really don't get how everyone's take away from this story is about whether or not they would walk away.
Le Guin is crystal clear from the beginning that The Ones Who Walk Away is a meta-fictional critique of how we think about Utopia and Dystopia. The most powerful passage is in the middle where she writes:
>Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?
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>They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. There were not less complex than us.
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>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 happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
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>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. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time.
The child suffering that is necessary to keep the utopia going and which leads some citizens to walk away in disgust appears when she concedes that we cannot even imagine the joy of utopian Omelas without making it a parable about how things can never be perfect. And the point of the people who walk away isn't that they're morally superior to everyone else, it's that they can imagine and are building a pure utopia that we cannot even imagine and LeGuin cannot even compellingly describe. And we should feel weird about it, why does a fairly realistic take on a post-scarcity world only feel real when we add a single suffering child, what the fuck does a lonely child crying have to do with whether or not the good life is possible?
To be one of the people who walks away isn't to give up your iphone or go vegan or whatever, it's to be able to conceive of and build a future where no sacrifice, no pain, no suffering is remotely necessary. You can have your iphone, and food that tastes like exactly like meat (whether it is or isn't meat is up to your imagination) or maybe even better, you can easily get anywhere and do anything as long as you aren't hurting anyone. But you aren't a protagonist, you aren't special, there is no hierarchy for you to work your way up through, there's no one to lord being better over, there isn't some secret shame to keep you endlessly moving forward. The real test of Omelas is whether you can imagine a world where you are happy even if no one, anywhere, has it worse then you.
flyingjesuit t1_j3ymmyy wrote
Stories can have multiple meanings, the best ones usually do. What I took away from this story was that reader’s are repulsed by the citizens of Omelas for allowing the child’s suffering to go on, meanwhile we are far from a Utopia in our world, but we do have some comforts which are available to us thanks to the suffering of not just one person but several. It’s about exploitation, suffering, and judging others. The idea that art holds up a mirror to society is a bit cliche but that’s what my experience reading this was, a mirror being held up.
thelandsman55 t1_j3yp5l9 wrote
It's absolutely fair to see different meanings in stories. My beef is that there's a kind of vulgar interpretation of the meaning you're taking that directly contradicts and undermines the meaning that I'm talking about.
When people talk about the story like Le Guin is asking them to leave city life, industrial agriculture, technology, meat eating etc, etc, behind, that feels to me like the same failure of imagination Le Guin is critiquing. You are siding with the people of Omelas that comfort and happiness require abominable suffering, and you're choosing instead to suffer yourself, or you're not even getting there and just assuming that if you do everything the people of Omelas don't (IE live like a hermit in the woods) you are somehow not part of that society or your truck or cult or whatever you have with you in the woods aren't also fueled by the suffering of others.
Obviously in the real world there are tradeoffs and someone doing better sometimes means other people have to suffer, but even in our current, broken world, there are a lot of things we could do that would make everyone better off that we sometimes can't do out of a bitter habit of seeing everything as zero sum. Just going off the things in the story, it's totally possible to imagine that we could have dense, walkable cities with good public transit, abundant cheap food and energy, street fairs, orgies, computers, whatever, and to have the continued operation of all of those things not require any suffering.
flyingjesuit t1_j3yzmye wrote
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.
MarzipanMarzipan t1_j3z48mv wrote
I quite enjoyed this exchange of perspectives.
Seismech t1_j3z4q2s wrote
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.
thelandsman55 t1_j3zgdg4 wrote
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.
flyingjesuit t1_j3zicro wrote
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.
thelandsman55 t1_j3zm1ad wrote
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.
flyingjesuit t1_j3zsczw wrote
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.
thelandsman55 t1_j41hjuu wrote
I like the heaven and hell thing you've brought up, it reminds me of the parable of the long spoons, generally I feel like heaven and hell allegories are compelling when they hold a mirror up to the person in them and unsatisfying when they involve externally directed punishment or torture. The most narratively satisfying hells are the ones where you can leave at any time if you simply accept the goodness in the world and god's love, but some people are too broken to do so.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'they can't free or help the child' the child is not particularly guarded, the door to its cell is locked but that's about it, we aren't told who has the key but it seems like many people have access to the cell, hell the cell may only be locked from the inside for all the narrator tells us. No one is externally prevented from freeing the child. No one is even told not to free the child, they are simply told that their way of life cannot exist without the child's suffering.
Actions have consequences, that isn't a constraint on freedom, its simply a fact about the world. If I jump off a tall building, is it a constraint on my freedom that I will fall to my death rather than flying?
flyingjesuit t1_j41l893 wrote
We were talking about agency though, and so like with Pandora’s box or the Apple in Eden they are told not to do it. If I’m not allowed to scratch my nose because if I do a loved one of mine will die, then I’m only really free to scratch my nose in theory. I’m free, but my agency is severely limited.
thelandsman55 t1_j41wl2g wrote
I'm confused by the analogy to Eve eating the apple and pandora's box.
Pandora's story is pretty murky in a lot of retellings, but while someone may have told her not to open the box, it is pretty clear that she didn't know what the consequences of opening the box would be. Hell contemporary classicists aren't super clear on what the consequences of opening the box were supposed to be.
Eve is more cut and dry in that she's forbidden from eating the fruit and is deceived into doing so anyway, but again, while there is a fair amount of hubris in making the choice, the main way in which she lacks freedom in doing so is that she isn't clear on the consequences of making it.
I'm not really sure what you mean by 'agency' either. Traditionally there are two types of freedom, freedom from obstacles and freedom from need. Some scholars extend freedom from need to include 'self mastery' ie being able to control your needs and not have dependence on something others can do without.
It is pretty clear that the people from Omelas have both freedom from constraint and freedom from need, the aside about drooz also demonstrates that self-mastery is fairly ubiquitous in their society although perhaps not universal.
To use your analogy, I would say that if I have been told by some external actor that if I scratch my nose they will kill my loved one, that would impact my freedom from obstacles, a foreign actor is constraining my choices to their own ends, and framing it as forbidden or 'if you do x, y will happen' is just a semantic distinction.
If on the other hand, by some inherent quirk of my and a loved ones physiology, scratching my nose is intrinsically linked to stopping that loved ones heart, that is not a constraint on my freedom any more than not having wings is a constraint on my freedom.
The suffering of the child is foundational and intrinsic to everything that makes Omelas good. And no one is deceived about the nature of the choice to leave the child to suffer. I would say its a pretty freely made choice.
flyingjesuit t1_j43x48z wrote
Agency is your ability to enact your free will. I’d love to drop everything and go visit Europe, but I have to hold down a job to pay bills and feed myself. A billionaire could go visit Europe on a whim because they don’t have the concerns I do. In theory me and the billionaire have the same free will, but when you account for how realistically we can act on it, they have more agency than I do. Same with my example regarding women riding the subway in an earlier comment. So in a lot of mythology, maybe Pandora wasn’t a good example I thought she was told not to open it like Eve being told not to eat the apple, there’s a MacGuffin of sorts where they are free to enjoy paradise or a superhuman ability or whatever so long as they don’t do X. In Omelas they are told they can’t intercede on behalf off the child otherwise it all falls apart. So they have the free will to do it but not the agency. So agency could also be thought of as revealing the extent to which our free will is an illusion. If the people in Omelas were truly free they’d be able to save the child, but the world is structured in a way that ensures that they don’t. Almost akin to structural injustices in our own world which limit the agency of certain people despite them technically having free will.
thelandsman55 t1_j441e6o wrote
I think you are right that in the classic modern version of the story Pandora is told not to open the box although she is not told why, IIRC she's made to think its a present she has to wait to open.
I'm not sure quite how to square your concept of agency (coming from what sounds like a literary background) with my concept of freedom (coming from someone in political science grad school). Having to pay bills and feed yourself is arguably an infringement on your freedom from need. You are subordinated to others because you have to eat and have shelter and those needs create opportunities for exploitation that you aren't protected from. Not being able to go to Europe is arguably an infringement on your freedom from obstacles, but its sort of a gray area, since your ability to get to Europe is presumably contingent on exploitative relationships with others (pilots, airline employees, taxi drivers, etc).
I would also say that beyond freedom from need stuff, most of the greater agency a billionaire has is not per se personal freedom but the ability to compel the subordination of others to his or her will. That is, the additional freedom/agency/whatever you want to call it of a billionaire compared to you is mostly built on other people being less free then they otherwise would be.
And this is where I have a hard time with how your concept of agency relates to Omelas, for one person to have the agency to remove the child without causing social collapse would imply a level of agency that is only possible by subordinating others. You can't generalize that kind of agency since any increase in it for one person is inherently a reduction for someone else, so a society where someone can free the child cannot possibly be more free than Omelas.
hajenso t1_j4esb69 wrote
That last sentence was similar to my immediate thought after finishing the story just now: Never mind the ones who walk away from Omelas, why aren’t there ones who attempt Scapegoat-Child-Rescue Crimes in Omelas? This to me is a major practical problem with the conceit: There could never be a society 100% free of violence and oppression but for a single scapegoat whose suffering is known and accepted by all, because there would always be a few who would try to wreck the bargain by direct action, and now we have a conflict which motivates violence.
One could say "It's part of the premise that nobody decides to do that." But:
- The story already concedes that not everybody accepts the bargain; that's the entire point of having ones who walk away. What's stopping some of them from dealing with those same feelings by willfully violating the rules (child rescue attempt; attempt to remove the scary mops), instead of walking away? I see nothing except possibly authorial fiat.
- If the beings in this story include not even a tiny minority of individuals who attempt a rescue of any kind, then this story is about a different species, not ours.
not-my-other-alt t1_j3zwb80 wrote
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.
hajenso t1_j4erjko wrote
I don't see from Le Guin's commentary on the story that this was something she was mainly trying to convey, but regardless of authorial intention, I think you're pointing out something important to be drawn from the work here. I bet UKL would have agreed.
AdvonKoulthar t1_j40kl15 wrote
I don’t see how anyone can treat that with any weight either, because you already have to assume people will have no conflicting desires. How will you solve a love triangle with 3 monogamous individuals? What if two people disagree on something being right or wrong?
Scarcity is hardly the only cause for suffering, and that’s the only part that can be solved in a compelling way. That’s what makes it feel like tripe, the biggest obstacle to utopia being ignored and being told ‘don’t worry about it’.
At least a miserable child is a veneer to place over the gaping hole in logic, and people wonder why that makes it more believable? Because it’s at least some semblance of an answer in this made up fantasy world(that also only follows the author’s views and does not reflect reality at all)
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