Whenever this story is brought up almost everyone seems to interpret it as a moral dilemma, asking the reader: Would you want this child to suffer for the collective happiness? But IN MY OPINION, I think that’s not even close to just what the author is trying to ask. If not it would pretty much just be an upscaled version of the trolley problem. I think in actuality the story is a deconstruction of the idea that joy can only come with pain, that a society that doesn’t rely on someone’s suffering can’t exist. And I also think the story is trying to hold a mirror up to the reader to show us how ridiculous it is that we think a society without major pain isn’t possible.
Here is something the author points out near the beginning of the story: “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 […] We can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” She then keeps describing this heavenly town before saying this: “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.” Most people are conditioned to believe that someone needs to suffer for this world to go round. So she adds in this child that needs to get tortured for the citizens to keep their joy. Suddenly the story is more believable to us, and we are more easily immersed into this world. I think this is the first question the story asks us: Why is a society with only happiness more unimaginable to us than one where a child needs to get randomly tortured?”
I think the people that walk away from Omelas aren’t abandoning society to live in the woods Ted Kaczynski style, they’re leaving because they envision something most of us can’t: a better city, where all the same joy is possible, but no child is tortured. At multiple points she describes somewhere where there is only joy as “unimaginable”, and again at the end she says this: “The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
So all in all it kind of bothers me when people jump to saying that they would stay in Omelas. Because most of the people who say this seem to accept at face value that this child needs to get tortured for the collective happiness. And while this is certainly true for the city of Omelas, the story also hints very strongly at there being other, better cities where there is no pointless suffering.
Obviously there is a clear parallel between Omelas and our world. In real life there are people that suffer to make other people’s lives easier. In real life there are some (capitalism enjoyers, perhaps) who know about child labor, slavery, exploitation, but they don’t try to change it, because they think that it’s the best system possible, and that this immense suffering is necessary, They’ve seen the child, and they choose to stay in Omelas. But here is where the metaphor gets blurred for most: In real life you can’t really “walk away” from society. So I think the way that walking away from Omelas translates to real life, is those who try to make society better, those who envision a system where children don’t have to suffer and exploitation doesn’t need to take place. But this type of change (revolutionary, perhaps), is certainly less assured than the stable mix of pain and pleasure we currently have. As the author puts it: “They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back.” And the way I interpret it, they might either find a wonderful new city where all the same joy is possible but no one has to suffer, or they will find something worse than Omelas, but it’s probably worth a try.
by ItsMeSharpy
1 Comment
I don’t think most people are wrong in saying the story is mainly about the moral dilemma that each citizen there had to face. It leaves the ending open to further analysis, but don’t spend further time or words on it.
But I agree with you that there are additional interesting issues that the story asks, such as that which you bring up.
I enjoyed the following take on the story too.
Why don’t we just kill the kid in the Omelas hole, by Isabel J. Kim:
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/