It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
– Ursula K. Le Guin
I am often assured that it’s never too late…
Like discovering a book for the very first time, even though it’s almost as old as you. Or a short story. A very short story, just four pages long. It is so short that it takes less than ten minutes to read.
That ten minutes has made me wildly excited. Perhaps others have never heard of it, too. That’s depressing! It is as depressing as the middle parts of the story. But it ends triumphantly and leaves you with hope and expectation.
Celebrated science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin published The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas in 1973 (now available freely online). The subject matter has been compared to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s brilliant The Brothers Karamazov. It’s been the subject of endless philosophical discussions for decades. It’s strange and disappointing that I discovered Karamazov early in my life but not the former.
The themes of the book focus on happiness, suffering, guilt and the concept of utilitarianism. It vividly brings to mind the famous trolley meme thought experiments, which challenge you to decide whether to divert a trolley heading toward a group of people on one track onto another track with just one person. The idea is to justify one person’s pain for the good of the many.
In Those Who Walk Away From Omelas, Le Guin describes in the first part of the short story the utopian city of Omelas (she got the idea for the name when she saw a road sign in the rearview mirror of her car in the town of Salem, Oregon and spelt it backwards). In her description, she cannot help taking a shot at capitalism, war, and authoritarian government.
But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb.
Le Guin also allows the reader to imagine the city of Omelas to best suit their own idea of perfection and the pursuit of happiness and ecstasy while continuing to take a dig at war and religion, insisting that it has no place in utopia.
I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint
insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.
Then, we are introduced to the incarcerated child from the city who is deliberately being punished and described as “it.” Various scholars have understood this as an attempt to dehumanize the child to drive home the point that his or her suffering is necessary for the well-being of the greater population.
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room, a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect.
The conditions under which the child is being held in captivity are described in horrific detail. Thereafter, the disturbing purpose for the child’s misery is revealed.
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.
At this point, a real-life situation that has many parallels with Omelas became startlingly apparent.
The state of Israel was created as a Zionist utopia. Off itself, that isn’t so much of a bad thing. However, Israel was created through the forcible displacement and ethnic cleansing of the incumbent Palestinian nation, which has continued unabated for more than 76 years. It’s impossible to deny that the safe space, well-being, happiness and prosperity of Zionist Jews are effectively predicated on the suffering of the Palestinians.
Further, the Western world, through their current unflinching yet inhumane support for Israel, is demonstrably attempting to assuage and launder the guilt they bear for the suffering endured by the Jews before and during the Holocaust.
While this is not exactly one person being made a scapegoat for the happiness of millions of others, as in the case of Omelas, it is hardly different. In fact, it is worse because millions from one nation are being systematically made to suffer so that another nation can have its happiness. Disturbingly, previous polls indicated that there is an appetite among the greater Israeli population to continue the oppression and military retaliation against the Palestinians if it means their own well-being will be ensured.
Had I known about this short story a year ago, when Israel responded with such depravity to the Hamas attacks of October 7th, I would have made the connection immediately. As it stands, the Israel-Palestine injustice is a real-life example of what Ursula le Guin is describing in Omelas.
October 7th lifted the veil on the 75-year injustice being suffered by the Palestinians. Although there appears to be no end to their suffering, change is coming. Israeli atrocities have never been this exposed before. The vast majority of the world now supports the Palestinians. Ursula Le Guin described a similar awakening at the conclusion of her short story.
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. 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.
While many have already walked away from Israel, how much longer will the Palestinians have to wait for the ones who really matter, the ones providing the military, political and propaganda support, to walk away from Israel?
lenny unencumbered 