Misfits had a good one of these its first season

I’m sure it is, I’m just making a terrible pun based on an old terrible pun.

Rhode Island is neither a road nor an island and this pic is neither Silver nor a Lake.

What is this, Rhode Island?

Weird, I was just thinking about Grooveshark earlier today. Maybe not exactly the same as this, but similar.

New Mars Volta album about spirits residing in mushrooms and eating humans to experience hallucinations dropping in 3…2…1

Without discipline it fades, but it can be a good thing

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I love teaching this story. When students tell me they’d walk away I say ok give me your phone and go start making your own clothes to show them it’s easier said than done.

Put this next to a chart of tuition costs over the same time period and ask the question of where all the money is going.