I’ve been thinking and talking a lot lately about Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and the peace and pieces of those who are thoughtlessly sacrificed every day for our comfort and safety.
This is due in part to reading N. K. Jemisin’s collection of short stories, How Long ‘Til Black History Month, which is largely inspired by Omelas and the moral quandary of choosing the comfort of willful ignorance over the displacement and struggle of ethical responsibility.*
The current political climate beats us about the head and shoulders with the moral dilemmas created by our first-worldism and the extreme ends toward which capitalism is hurtling. We need only look as far as the radical inequity of wealth distribution in the US. More and more of us are expected to pull up short and suffer so that a very few humans can experience luxury.
The wealth that today’s one percent have access to is no small benefit, and certainly does not yield the gentle utopic peace of a city like Omelas—no, this kind of wealth is hoarding that confers political and social power beyond what most of us can comprehend.
The existence of great wealth requires great inequity. Extreme wealth depends upon an underclass of poverty and exploitation to fuel its upward progress. Sacrifices to this machine are made each day, although it is possible to be a wealthy person and remain blissfully unaware of this fact. Unlike the citizens of Omelas, to whom the truth is clearly revealed and an informed choice made, the ultra-wealthy are not required to meet the scapegoat; in fact, they are increasingly isolated from the cost of their “success.”
And if we’re being honest, us folks farther down the economic spectrum are pretty checked out from the reality of the global economic situation, choosing to remain comfortably ignorant rather than confronting our own complicity in this situation. We can choose not to visit the child, either.
The story of walking away from Omelas is an indictment of strict utilitarianism—sacrificing the good of the few for the good of the many. A strict, heartless moral calculus might be forced to say that abusing one person is acceptable as long as the benefit is great enough. This is of course problematic (to say the least), and quite possibly unfair to utilitarians.
But nevertheless, when my undergraduates read this story, many of them imagined that they would be among the brave few who chose to walk away rather than stay and benefit from the sacrifice being made. They had a strong sense that they *should* be walking away, that something morally monstrous was happening, and that it would be wrong to benefit from suffering. Ah, don’t we Americans just love to imagine ourselves the hero of the story? Standing up to popular opinion with a firm, Jimmy Stewart-esque “No!”
Many of those same young adults were students in a business college that taught Milton Friedman’s economic perspective as the basis for motivating economic advances. They were being taught that corporations should serve the interests of the stockholders above all else, without regard for actual or possible stakeholders.
Hey guys, you’re not walking away. You’re walling things in.
They are taught to create and re-create Omelas, to camouflage the reality of the sacrifice undergirding the society’s successes and advances using data, stories, and red herrings.
They are taught to rebuild the basement of Omelas with no doors or windows—to conceal the existence of the suffering child, to ensure not only that people do not walk away, but that they are attracted to the promise of Omelas.
They are selling the worst version of Omelas, one fueled by a thousand thousand invisible captive children.
No one is walking away.
- This is one of the best collections of science fiction I’ve read in a long, long time and N.K. Jemisin should be at least as much of a national treasure as LeGuin was.
Crabaghast! 