Leaving Omelas

By Christopher Kanski

Chris Kanski, “a reluctant yuppie who dances often and writes sporadically”, encounters Omelas for the first time.

In amateur philosophy, thought experiments try to get to the core of questions, usually ethical ones, by stripping them of context; the trolley problem that’s taught in high schools has faceless victims and no perpetrator and you, the imagined agent at the lever, have no context for your being there. I think they’re useless. I think every thought experiment I’ve ever encountered makes an assumption that stripped context isn’t a context itself. What you would do in the imagined, ‘pure’ scenario is relegated to that scenario; whatever conclusions about ethical choices you come to become largely null and void when presented with the countless variables that real-life context provides.

None of us, ever, will find ourselves in a context where we make an ethical decision based purely on rational thought with a total lack of feeling. But when I was young and coddled by private school and a loving, secure home life, I didn’t have much use for deep feeling and, spurned at the time by both girls and boys, I felt my intelligence grew far beyond my years if I chased exactly that kind of unburdened rational thought. Which is why if I’d stumbled across Ursula K. Le Guin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, as a young teen, I’d probably have trained my critical thinking skills a little, and if my musings about that trolley problem didn’t impress my peers I would’ve dropped the pretences and told them that I’d read a story that had sex and drugs in it, and that would be that.

That isn’t how I first experienced the story: I heard its synopsis over a breakfast table and then, weeks later as I was shopping with a friend and she asked me if I eat pork, I saw the Omelasian child in front of me, whimpering and bleeding and moaning –  a feeling of guilt that I’ve been nurturing for years was given imagery. I knew then in the supermarket, even before reading the story, that I’d write about it and give expression to the pain of complicity that affects me daily, to tide me over until the pain boils up again and demands repeated expression with new words or through a new medium.

In “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, the city of Omelas is a utopia; throughout the story Le Guin breaks the fourth wall to explicitly point out the fiction of it and encourages us as readers to flex and bend certain aspects of the utopia to our own preferences. She tuned in to our base, perpetually unfulfillable desires of comradeship, sex, highs, and joys and it’s intoxicating, when reading, to be asked to participate in constructing Omelas with exactly the building blocks most of us strongly desire. It makes the twist that much sharper: our utopia which has made our hearts swell and sparked our carnal desires, Le Guin tells us, is only made possible because of a single child’s suffering. Le Guin isn’t the sole architect here either, the choice of where the child’s tiny cell is held in the city is the reader’s choice. What’s cemented is that for the utopia to exist, the child must exist with open sores untreated and exposed to its own shit forever. The sacrificial child is vividly, disgustingly described in its perpetual state of suffering and we’re horrified not only by its pain but by ourselves, as at this point in the story we’re invested in the fantasy of our utopia that we helped build, our heads are still fuzzy with ideas of art, sex, feasts, and dance; we’re already wondering soon after the first glance into the cell if we’d let the child suffer for our perpetual comfort, ecstasy, and happiness.

The citizens of Omelas ritualistically visit the child when they’re young to be told the truth of their utopia. They often take years of their lives to think the conundrum through: they desire to help the child, there’s no suppressing that instinct; but helping that one child will plunge other citizens of Omelas into suffering. Most make their peace with this and live in happiness, as prioritising the happiness of so many at the expense of one makes, in a purely utilitarian way, rational sense. I imagine that when deciding whether or not to secure permanent happiness for yourself, your family and everyone in your society, a potent utilitarian argument can be just the nudge a citizen of Omelas needs. 

For some in Omelas, pity can’t be argued away or suppressed, so they mollify their distress by paying penance to the child. They ensure the happiness of their own offspring so that the child’s abject misery does not occur in vain. 

Others leave.

I thought of Omelas when my friend asked me if I eat pork by way of thinking about pigs, and here my throat tightens in a way that it didn’t when I read about the fictional child. Le Guin may have masterfully made me care about a child that doesn’t exist in only a few pages but just a flash of empathy for countless industrially bred pigs, who are raised in their own faeces, forcibly inseminated, tortured, and brutally slaughtered evokes far more feeling in me because it’s an atrocity that’s real and ongoing.

Despite being far from a utopia, our world is built similarly to Omelas with another crucial difference, which is that our world’s suffering is not relegated to a single child held physically underground; instead we bury the knowledge of the immense scale of suffering deep in our conscience with deliberate ignorance and emotional suppression. Educating myself on our “developed” societies’ daily and historic mass atrocities that allow the lifestyles of all of us in “developed” countries to exist and nurturing my empathy with those who suffer en masse has brought me great sadness; a cocktail of pity, guilt, and despair, and a yearning to leave, in an Omelasian sense.

Almost every article of clothing I wear carries a tag showing it was made in a country that utilises sweatshop labour. My leisure is funded by my employers in the advertising industry which, I don’t think I’m risking my job by saying, is one entirely built on pushing far more product than the planet can sustainably produce, pushing people to purchase what they don’t need as we push the planet beyond its capabilities. The electronics I use daily, including that in this laptop I write on, fuck that, including the electric cars that are the alleged saviours of the “developed” nations that are staring down the barrel of climate collapse, contain cobalt mined in atrocious conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, aided and abetted by Western corporations. The whole industrial revolution, which has gotten us in the “developed” world our comforts, has been at the expense of countries that we have historically enslaved and genocided and exploited and, if the hundreds of climate scientists are to be believed, even at the expense of our children’s futures. 

As Stefan Zweig says in Beware Of Pity, “theoretical, imagined suffering is not what distresses a man and destroys his peace of mind. Only what you have seen with pitying eyes can really shake you.” Two things are pointed out in that quote: firstly, the fact that suffering has to fit within the scope of our limited comprehension and capacity for empathy; secondly, that ‘pitying’ is not a default state but something we have to be primed for. It’s why it takes enormous, continuous effort to preserve any event of mass suffering in the cultural discourse and why those efforts usually rely on evocative accounts of individual people’s misery: the willingness for the public to empathise must be nurtured and their empathy must be triggered by individual accounts that they can understand.

Is it any wonder that when faced with the task of carving out some stable happiness for ourselves and our families, most of us ignore the Omelasian child as it exists in the form of billions of people and animals past, current, and future? Even small-scale acts of charity can be physically, financially, and emotionally exhausting. For the most part we content ourselves with the satisfaction of tiredness after having done a good deed, wrapping ourselves up in the warm feeling that comes with trying something. Like Omelasians, those of us with persistent distress can break their spiral into guilt by falling back on the utilitarian argument that we can’t change the way the world works anyway; you can sacrifice everything you have and live in miserable austerity and still have done only the smallest, tiniest dent in alleviating the world’s pain.

But there are others. I’ve crossed paths with them and read about them. They rise up in the face of the world’s suffering by taking enormously difficult decisions: going on strikes and risking their jobs, taking up arms and risking their lives, committing acts of uncivil disobedience or even terror and risking their freedom.

I could mention only those who are easy to agree with: the people who join or form charities, or those who dedicate themselves to research and public speech and writing, all easy to admire in how they often eschew stable lives, financially or emotionally. To be sure, I count many of them among those who leave. But many who leave also do so in ways that we—or at least I—as liberal people who are softened by keeping the violence we live off out of our sights and minds, disagree with out of reflex. We are reflexively against violence that seeks to change and passively accepting of violence that maintains our status quo, so long as we don’t have to see it. I’m not trying to make a case for any of these people in the abstract or particular; I only want to point out that some people leave and I often think of them.

I sense the Omelasian child every day and yet I don’t choose to leave. My life isn’t a thought experiment. In Le Guin’s story, the decision for any one individual is difficult, but it’s a clear one that can be based in rationality: stay and be happy but living off suffering, leave and suffer yourself, but not at the expense of another (hopefully). They’re not even hampered by the effects on their family or community; this is a utopia, we can imagine their parents aren’t sad for long, that their community is largely unmoved by their departure.

Nobody who leaves in our real world makes a pure decision that’s unhampered by context. There is always a deeply complex story to tell for every individual; if a fiction writer was inspired to write about someone in our real world who chooses to leave our imperfect Omelas they would have an infinite amount of traumas, chance encounters, opportunities, conversations, scenarios, and motivations to envisage for only one single character.

Writing about myself and why I haven’t left despite the pain of seeing the Omelasian child each day would take up pages and pages and it would be really fucking hard for me to do, because it would mean grappling with feelings and questions that don’t relate to my immediate concerns. Perhaps that’s the simplest way to put it, and the most universally relatable: I care about myself, my friends, and my family first and foremost; of those around the world, in the past, present, and future that I steal from, I really think of only in flashes, and truth be told, I’ve largely given up on them. 

I think of them and I act on those thoughts by protesting and donating but despite putting effort into making those actions consequential, if even in some small way, there’s an inescapable performativity to them. It’s the same as when I’m buying used clothes; while circumventing the sweatshops I don’t do it with any hope that it’ll turn the tide of suffering, but I want to feel like I did something, even if it’s little more than a tap on the machine’s cogs. In the book I mentioned before, Zweig points out two different kinds of pity, “the only one that counts” is “determined to stand by the sufferer, patiently suffering too, to the last of its strength and even beyond”, while the other is “the heart’s impatience to rid itself as quickly as possible of the painful experience of being moved by another person’s suffering”. My actions often feel like part of the latter, placations of my guilt so that I can return to living.

I think that many who choose to leave, even though they may sacrifice themselves to “the last of [their] strength and even beyond”, feel the same pessimism as I do: often what we take for pure charity is an escape from what is immediately unbearable in their lives, so leaving lightens the burden of their immediate pain. Others, perhaps, have more hope than me, and are unhampered by the paralysis of defeat. Perhaps yet others, especially those who dedicate themselves wholly to individuals rather than causes, I think of doctors in warzones, feel that if their sacrifice can alleviate the pain of a few, no matter the course of the insurmountable tide, then their lives have more direction and meaning than they would find in living for themselves.

As for me, it’s likely that I’ll never leave this Omelas; I content myself with resolving to not have offspring so that the cycle of exploitation in my bloodline ends with me.

Even there I’m being disingenuous, trying to preserve a veneer of humanity: more immediately and importantly, I fear that we are nearing the end and there will be nothing left for my children to steal from.