Walking Away from Omelas

The late fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin’s most famous short story is ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ (1974), which is so disquieting that many readers have, since its publication, written alternative fanfiction versions of the story that are more reassuring or comfortable.

In the story, Omelas is described as a utopic, harmonious paradise for its citizens. Le Guin was highly skilled at writing vivid, clear-sighted descriptions of imaginary environments. In the second paragraph of the story, she writes of the processions that dance through the streets of Omelas:

“Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows’ crossing flights over the music and the singing.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but that sounds quite different to the cities in England (and, briefly, the Netherlands) where I have lived, where people largely spend their time in public 1.) Waiting antsily in queues 2.) Ingesting stimulants that makes them even antsier 3.) Buying stuff that fails to make them happy 4.) Looking at things on their phones that actively make them unhappy. When there is music, it is usually jealously guarded on headphones or muzak broadcast over a shop’s public address system designed to be anodine as possible. Only the socially ostracized and TikTok users dance and sing; few are merry.

However, a terrible price is paid to keep Omelas a civilised paradise (LeGuin informs us that the people of Omelas were “not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians”). In a cellar beneath one of the homes or public buildings of the city, a small child is imprisoned. Le Guin renders the child as pitiful; wretched:

It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

The splendour and contentment of the lives of the people of Omelas are contingent upon the suffering of that child.

Finally, Le Guin relates how a select, small group of people walk away from Omelas and never return.

This has proved to be an insufficient ending for a lot of people. On FanFiction.net one can read stories in which the people return to Omelas to rescue the child; in which the gates of Omelas are stormed; in which the experience of reading the story inspires Harry Potter to leave home, etc.

On the Rite Gud podcast episode on the phenomenon of what they term ‘squeecore’ – contemporary sci-fi/fantasy writing that combines a cozy YA venacular with snarky humour and liberal values – Raquel S. Benedict informs the listener:

There have been many, many response stories to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. None of these stories are going to be remembered as long as Ursula Le Guin’s original story; and most of these responses are terrible because they just take it as a surface-level plot, going “I’d rescue the kid!”, and not saying, no, it’s the trolley problem, it’s not a Rubik’s cube; the purpose is it’s a philosophical question to make you think about who you are, and what your values are, and who you are in society. It’s not like, “oh, I’ll just, I’ll save the kid!” And also, you wouldn’t want to save the kid. You will not save the kid.

American society (and, more broadly, Western European society) is far, far, far worse than Omelas; we inflict far more suffering for paltry gains – hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of enslaved children living in conditions as grim as those described in the story in exchange for a largely anesthetised happiness. If you look at American, British or Israeli society right now we see economies kept churning by a multinational industrial war machine, maintained by billions of words of propaganda in form of near-relentless advertising and journalistic blather.

And for all of that I’d say our societies are pretty mediocre. Compared to Omelas and its one tortured, starving child, we have built a plastic Kinder egg toy on a mountain of corpses. I am grateful for central heating and clean water; sometimes the sheer selection of different breakfast cereals, juices and chocolate bars in the shops cheers me up; there are a lot of great indie horror games on Steam. But many of us are miserable, work bullshit jobs and don’t spend as much times with our friends and families as we would like. We’re not even a pale shadow of Omelas, we’re a metastised reflection.

Public domain photo of Aaron Bushnell’s vigil by Elvert Barnes.

But there are those who walk away. One of these few was Aaron Bushnell who protested against the genocide being committed in Gaza by committing self-immolation last Sunday (the news link shows an image taken just before the act and is distressing to read). I do not personally believe self-immolation on a small scale can achieve political change in a society of spectacles, yet I respect Bushnell’s sacrifice as an act of defiance, solidarity and mourning rage.

I do not believe it is the only way to walk away from Omelas. A writer I follow on Substack, Gregory Pettys, abandoned academia to move to an eco-village in Northern Thailand from where he writes about post-activism in the anthropocene. I see Dorothy Day as someone who managed to leave Omelas without actually leaving America.

I think many of us have moments, fleeting glimpses, in which we are possessed of the courage to leave our own shameful and diminished Omelas. For me, I’d count them on one hand – getting arrested with XR; calming down a man with a knife; a handful of other interactions – actions which are dwarfed by all the times I have been complacent, solipsistic or, at best, made a donation to some organisation or person to quell my conscience. I want to increase the worthier moments; maybe the more they stack up, the more habitual they become, until you permanently have the strength to leave Omelas for good.

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Someone I read about who strikes me as having – at least temporarily – left Omelas, is Yocheved Lifschitz, who shook hands with her Hamas captor when she was returned from captivity. Australian news broadcaster and substacker James Macpherson cites the BBC News story about Lifschitz and her experience as evidence of the BBC’s desperation to humanise Hamas. On the other hand, I see it as evidence of the BBC’s bias towards the Israeli government. In spite of the fact that Lifschitz stated that most of the hostages were “treated well” and received medical care and regular food – and the fundamental fact that she is a peace activist who clearly wished to humanise her Palestinian captors to the press – the BBC still titled the article with the headline “I went through hell, says elderly hostage released by Hamas”.

Either way you choose to read the story, I think Lifschitz’s message of “shalom” to her captor is evidence of humility and I respect both her and Bushnell for trying, in different ways, to advance peace.