or: The Ones Who Walk Away From “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”

I’m always amazed at how rare it is for people to actually understand Le Guin’s point in “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”.

Her point is not that most people, if presented with a happy utopia powered by a forsaken child, would choose to live in it, and that folks who walk away from Omelas or who want to rescue the child and destroy Omelas in the process are both rare and more moral than ordinary people. If anything, this is the exact opposite of her point.

It’s that we do not, cannot believe in the existence of a utopia at all. We refuse to accept that a place like Omelas could exist unless we imagine that there’s a forsaken child who powers it.

We walk away from Omelas because we convince ourselves that suffering is inevitable, that happiness comes from suffering, and that if the people of Omelas are happy then someone else must be suffering in order to maintain that happiness.

If a place as happy as Omelas existed, but with no forsaken child, we would invent rumors of a forsaken child and then use those rumors as an excuse to tear the place apart, looking for the imagined sin, until the happiness were outweighed by the suffering caused by our own actions. We would walk away from our own happiness, and deny happiness to others, because we believe happiness without suffering is too good to be true.

That is her point: it is a fault in our human imagination that we find it impossible to imagine good without bad, even though imagining bad without good is second nature to us. And this fault limits us, tricking us into disbelief in those moments when good without bad is achievable. We sabotage ourselves, then comfort ourselves in the aftermath by saying that the pain was inevitable.

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a lament from Le Guin that she is forced to include suffering in her writing, not permitted to write about utopias and unalloyed hope, because her readers cannot accept it.