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Study 017 - The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Patreon)

Published:
2022-11-03 17:52:39
Imported:
2026-06
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Join the conversation as we discuss The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin!

Special thanks to our reader, Miya Kodama!

And Lovecraft fans, don't forget to tune in to The Horror at Martin's Beach - a new podcast presentation of this classic tale in honor of its 100th birthday!

Comments

McLawrence Ebuen

This story reminds me of the Angra Mainiiu story from Zoroastrianism

Jack Hughes

I LOVE Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest moved me in ways I cannot put down in words.

Matt Heerdt

Wow this brought back memories! I took a philosophy class in college where the professor posed this exact scenario and asked if the child’s suffering was worth it, never mentioning it was based on a short story. I always wondered where that thought experiment came from, but at the time was just like Chris and kept wondering at the mechanics behind the situation. “How does the suffering mean happiness for everyone else!?!” I didn’t do well in that class. 🤷‍♂️

Mandy Reznor (She/It)

So I think an underlying fact about Le Guin that informs this tale is that she's an anarchist. In the real world, when people fall back on the idea that life cannot exist without great suffering, they're excusing *exploitation.* Take Chad's example. Other nations aren't "underdeveloped," they're overexploited, constantly battered to and fro by the cultural, economic, political, and military whims of more hegemonic nations that want something out of them—a disposable workforce, cheaply manufactured products, cropland to grow sugar or cocoa or whatever else. Even if the particulars of how Omelas benefits from the child's suffering is nebulous, the fact is they are extracting their prosperity from *someone* who has to suffer the great dearth that's left by that extraction. The ones who walk away from Omelas can't endure the knowledge of what their society is built upon and seek another way—one that many of them have been raised to regard as unthinkable.

Jason Thompson

Can’t wait to hear you do more Dunsany! LeGuin writes a lot about his influence on her: sometimes making fun of his style, but other times praising him.

Jason Thompson

BTW, among living authors, NK Jemisin did a sort of tribute/critique story based on Omelas: “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”

Viking Guitar

This was an exceptional episode, and I found the discussion about the theme and message of the story to be particularly insightful. That being said, there was a connection that you both missed that I thought was pretty important. It kinda kills me, because you were SO CLOSE to hitting on it. You were discussing two specific elements in close proximity, but didn't think to associate them. Luckily, the community is here to help out. "Huey Lewis and the Drooz."

Professor Murder

Was a touch amused that the low hanging fruit was not grasped at. The story reads as a sledgehammer-subtle indictment of capitalism.

Ethan Cordray

One of the reasons why this story is so effective as a philosophical hypothetical is that it can be approached from multiple directions. For people of a pro-utopian, romantic and optimistic bent, they can get mad at Omelas and admire the "Ones that Walk Away" in search of a different, better way. Somewhere, there must be a way to make an alternative to Omelas, where there is the same happiness and flourishing and pleasure, but without the need for someone to pay for it. People of a more tragic or pessimistic outlook can consider it in a different light: that Omelas is an inescapable reality, that suffering and oppression is an inevitable consequence of human life and civilization, and that this does indeed delegitimize and ruin any theory of an idealized utopian civilization. You can "walk away" only into death. Or maybe there are religious perspectives that are outside of both the optimistic and pessimistic perspectives: perhaps one can "walk away" not into death, but into a rejection of the desire for happiness and pleasure for oneself. Or perhaps one can hope for an outside intervention to destroy Omelas, some avenging judge that can save the suffering child and condemn those who acceded to its suffering. Or perhaps one can neither judge Omelas nor walk away, but instead desire to become the suffering child oneself, not to save Omelas but to take the child's suffering onto yourself. All this to say that Omelas is about the general phenomenon of suffering, and about the equally strange phenomenon of *not* suffering, and about the possible moral relationships between the two. This is such a fundamental subject of human experience that there are countless ways to think about it.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

I'm glad that the discussion veered toward the trolley problem and its complications because we can really do the same thing with the child in this story. Some may, of course, accept that the abuse of the child is right and proper. To save the child would be to doom other children - not just one, but hundreds or thousands or millions or billions. How could it be moral *not* to torture this one child? Others would refuse. They simply cannot be complicit in abuse no matter the resulting horrors. But. Would they feel the same way if they never had to see the child? - or if they never had to see the child and the child didn't live in their Omelas? - or if they were absolutely sure that the child would grow up to be another Hitler if allowed freedom? A serial killer? A rapist? - or if it were not a child, but a dog? A cat? A gnat? Perhaps we prefer Peter Singer's thought experiment. You're on your way to work and you see a child drowning in a pond. Do you leap in to save that child, knowing that you'll damage your nice work clothing? Of course you would! What's a few hundred dollars worth of work clothing compared to the life of a child? But what if that child is in another country and your few hundred dollars could save their life? Why does our conscience not immediately demand that we send off that cash? Are we okay with children dying preventable deaths so long as we don't see them on our way to work? I do love me some Ursula K. Le Guin. She has a knack for making the uneasy go down easy.

Ben Gilbert

The Rule of Names is a Le Guin story set in the Earthsea world (a world of apparently nothing but islands). It’s a good way to check out Earthsea without diving into the novels, being completely separate from the plot and characters of those books.

Jeppe Mulich

Ursula Le Guin is one of my favorite authors and I love this story. I'm sure it's because of what I work on in my research, but to me it is hard to read the story and not think of chattel slavery. For some perspective, the use of enslaved African labour in the British Empire lasted roughly 215 years. It took ~160 years for an organized abolitionist movement to emerge in Britain. Even when the transatlantic slave trade was finally abolished because of the inhumane conditions onboard slave ships, slavery itself would last another ~30 years. This at a time when there was no shortage of information about the lived experience of slaves available. People will come up with a lot of excuses, rationalizations, or fantasies to keep the most heinous of exploitative practices in place if they are convinced that these are needed to sustain their society or prosperity. Whether or not the child really does, objectively, need to suffer to keep the rest of society going is, I think, less important than the fact that people around it are convinced of this fact, and therefor (for the most part) allow it to take place. PS: Of course one does not need to look to chattel slavery to find other parallels in our current day and age, not all of which are merely unintended consequences of complex systems.

Tom Král

This has nothing to do with this story but I came back to the Dream in the Witch House episode after I've seen the HORRIBLE adapatation found in the Cabinet of Curiosities miniseries. In the last of the 3 episodes Chad jokes about how the Twilight movie is a horror story that uses latest physics discoveries. What a coincidence now when the Twilight director filmed the Dreams in the Witch house adaptation now in 2022! We really do live in a simulation haha

Jeffrey Kahrs

The key is in the name. It is not those who bitch about Omelas, or who have a plan to make Omelas better, or who will post on their Instagram about Omelas. Your choice is to live or walk away. There is no compromise

Matt Shank

I walked away from my own Omelas. I was raised in a very fundamental evangelical sect of Christianity. From a young age I was taught about heaven and hell and how all the people who accepted Jesus would get to go live with him in eternal paradise while anyone who didn't would suffer for all eternity in hell. The idea of hell terrified me all through my childhood. I won't get into all the emotional issues it caused, but suffice to say, it was on my mind regularly throughout my childhood. As I came into adulthood and started to become my own person, the idea of hell continued to trouble me, but in a different way. I would wonder to myself, "How can an omnipotent, loving god allow such a place to exist?" Eventually, I couldn't accept the idea of hell any longer, nor a religion which taught it's existence. I walked away and never looked back. As you guys were reading this story, my own story of leaving my religion came rushing back. For me, that's what this story was about, and I think like both of you, I cannot accept suffering as a prerequisite for paradise.

Jack Saul

I think about this story from quite a Marxiat perspective. Almost every single thing we own and produce exists because someone had to do horrible labour in order to get it. How was the aluminum in you fork obtained? The cotton in those curtains? The child being a single child makes it feel like an accute choice to force suffering on a person which we can kid ourselves it insnt when its a whole class of victims. - It also reminds me of the attitudes you see in the founding fathers who owned slaves- Washington & Jefferson were totally able to articulate what was bad about slavery but were totally unwilling to walk away from it as their lifestyles were wrapped up in it. But they could have? It transpires something else was possible

David Wetzel

I don't often post here (unlike Chris' other podcast where I am habitually annoying), but I have been meaning to drop a comment that I'm glad you've refocused the podcast and expanded the material you cover. And here you are with one of my favorite authors Ursula K LeGuin. Great choice.

Jake Wilson

I love it when you guys dig deep into the meanings of and emotional reactions to a story. Strange stories and weird tales are kind of like the experimental jazz of literature, leaving out explanations and details, messing with expectations, to leave us peering into the gaps and wondering what's there. That hazy mystery is satisfyingly unsatisfying because it provokes stimulating, intelligent questions. Thanks for voicing them so well.

David Halstead

Makes me think of Heaven and Hell. That there's this paradise full of happy souls who are all fine knowing there's another place where souls get tortured endlessly is a concept I never felt comfortable with. Also, I'd go to church and hear about the end times when all non-believers get killed off, leaving only the chosen people on earth, and I realized the people there wanted this to happen. Some people actually seem happy when other people get hurt, like it gives them a feeling of superiority.

Steve

Story without conflict is description, like much poetry.

Steve

All your arguments against the premise of the story show that you value some people above others. It is inevitable through your actions. We all do. Billionaires value themselves over millions of others through their actions. We keep the suffering of others at arm's length and out of mind. Change is good or bad, but if you're poor you cannot cope many more changes. You can't get new shoes, you can't pay your rent increase. Hypothetically a fairer world is possible if enough people want it. But they don't. As AOC likes to say, the existence of billionaires is a failure of policy.

Steve

And of course, some might walk away from Omelas because they don't believe there are enough children suffering in basements. They think some people deserve more resources than others, because of an accident of birth or luck and they can't stand to see less worthy people getting the same as they who deserve more. Actually, that's much more like our world.

Aaron La Vene

We have some great readers on this show. We love our readers. This was an absolute stand out though and I hope y’all can get her again. Had me immersed immediately from the beginning. She is awesome!

KateSherrod

Now that the Horror Daddies have popped their LeGuin cherries, if you want to do a whole Ursula K LeGuin month, her novel (which I think is her finest but they're all magnificent) The Lathe of Heaven is perfect for SSSS. It starts out in a dystopian overpopulated future but things start changing fast when an unscrupulous psychiatrists gets his hands on a patient whose dreams come true *and can be controlled* so the changes are, sort of, chosen rather than haphazard. Oh geeze, excuse me, I think I need to go hunt up my battered paperback copy from college (we studied it in a literature class at Bard College) and read it again. There was also a neat PBS adaptation in 1980, with a guy we're used to seeing as a villain playing the hero-victim.

Tia Solita

"I'm so busy with my architect redesigning my kitchen" will FOREVER be my excuse when family asks me why I'm not dating😂❤️

Stefan Larsson

For me I think this story was a victim of its own success. Although I did not recognize the title, after I had read a page or two I realized I have had this story summarized for me about a hundered times in the past. Sort of like when there is a movie you haven’t seen, but everyone tells you is so amazing, again and again over a long period of time. When you do get around to watching it, there is no way it can live up to the way it was hyped up to you by well-intentioned enthusiasts. It just sort of deflates. My response to this was pretty much ”Oh, it’s this one. Shrug.” I suspect I may have had a very different reaction if I had been able to come to it fresh and unspoiled, so to speak. Though I _do_ dislike when stories speak directly to the reader (referrering to the reader as “you”). That kind of fourth wall breaking annoys me for some reason.

nils hedglin

The Very Bad Wizards podcast, where a philosopher and psychologist cover a variety of topics, discuss Omelas and it's moral and societal implications in episode 163. https://www.verybadwizards.com/163

Jason of the K

While I agree with most of the comments here, I think there is a deeper meaning to the story for me. Omelas is, while pleasant at the expense of one child suffering, STAGNANT. It does not seem to progress or even want to progress, So I would interpret this story that suffering enables innovation and by offloading suffering they trade away elation as well, everyone is just...content. They live in quiet horror at the requirements of their lifestyle.

Cat Wilson

I don’t think that it has to be a deity that has forced this… because the other option is not suffering for all in the society but suffering like in the real world, indiscriminate but neither all bad or all good.

Philip Cowan

That’s one hell of a story: a little kid kept prisoner alone in the dark and filth. Not that long ago since there was one about a kid dying because two other children played surgeon on his leg and sawed it off. Maybe lay off the child cruelty for a bit?

Michael Littlefield

While I wouldn't call "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" a story, but rather as a thought experiment. However, there is one thought that I kept coming back to each time I reread this piece and listening to the episode: What happens to those who leave? On the one hand we would like to think that those who leave Omelas are abandoning Omelas to find something new and better rather than remaining in a stagnant civilization or holding on to the old narratives we tell ourselves (however you want to interpret Omelas). Yet a part of me keeps on coming back to how those who leave Omelas seem to know where they're going (north and west beyond the mountains) and I find something chilling about that. Here's how I interpret it: they're not escaping Omelas, but spreading it, just like how we cannot truly let go of the culture or narratives we were raised in as they become ingrained in us so to those who leave Omelas can never really escape it as they KNOW it. For better or worse those who leave Omelas take it with them. There's something in how LeGuin describes them as leaving alone and in silence and not heading to the bay to take the ships to other parts (what are those places like I wonder), that strikes me as being somewhat Vampiric or viral. As for the whole question about suffering being necessary, my take is this: we only mature, grow as people, and gain wisdom from our experiences. All too often we only learn from those experiences that hurt us.

Jeffrey Kahrs

there is a piece to be written comparing Omelas to Jesus' conversation with the rich young ruler. Both confront us with the need to sacrifice everything and our unwillingness to do so

Michael Cunliffe

Perhaps it is my cynical mind, but I interpret this as a choice - you can have a utopian existence, if you are willing to accept the suffering of a single child. There is no freeing the child though, the whole society agrees that they should be there, and so if you reject that concept you can only turn your back on utopia and walk away. It feels to me like a very sophisticated response to the more common narrative of uncovering and overthrowing the dark narrative behind the utopia. When we discover that the mobile phone in our hand was the result of child labour, damaging environmental practices, and endangering human lives, we don’t go on an Arnie-style mission to take down Apple - the world doesn’t work that way. More likely we just decide not to upgrade (this year) and use that phone to sign some online petitions before watching kittens on YouTube

Eldritch Golem (JPM)

I'm a little late listening to this episode but I would go one deeper here in questioning the underlying moral assumptions of Le Guin's premise. Obviously Le Guin intends for her readers to be appalled by the suffering of the child whether we side with those who stay in Omelas and accept the child's suffering as a necessary evil or those who walk away because they just see it as evil. But what if you don't think it's evil at all? Chris touches on this when he brings up the philosophy of utilitarianism. A true utilitarian would see the child's suffering as a good thing because of how much it benefits the people of Omelas. Much like a true malthusian sees the good in letting the disadvantaged starve, to bring it around to Chad's example. Considering that both Chris and Chad are fathers chances are they are unlikely to be able to bring themselves to the position of seeing child suffering as a net positive, which is fair, but as someone who neither has nor desires children and is committed moral relativist it's not a hard position for me to imagine. Really listening to this story and Chris and Chad's discussion of it reminded me of a great deal of the last stanza of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's song "What Keeps Mankind Alive?" from The Threepenny Opera (1928) which comes pretty close to summing up my feelings on the necessity of human cruelty... What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions are daily tortured Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance In keeping its humanity repressed And for once you must try not to shrink the facts Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts And that's about the size of it. The world is a cruel place and in order to survive we often need to be crueler. But people are bad at accepting that fact. They want there to be a reason for cruelty or a way out of it, but there isn't in either case. And honestly this didn't immediately occur to me but after reading some of the above comments the entire idea of a suffering child trapped in a tool closet being the explanation for how the world works sounds like the lunacy of a QAnon devotee.

Giselle Wampler (GisyAngel)

I loved this episode. I love Chris’s unwillingness to accept the premise because is simply beyond him. Listening to you guys since 2013 in the podcast and I promised myself I’d become a Patreon as soon as I could because you were always the podcast I went back to (got me thru nursing school, a divorce, being a nurse during covid, so much more, thank you).

Citizen Cain, PhD

Great episode and some great intro discussion on utilitarian ethics. I'll point out that the real twist with the trolley problem isn't adding factors like knowing the people on the tracks, but rather how immediately responsible you are for the consequences of the decision. Some basic results from experimental philosophy (yes, problematic as it is, it's a real thing, look it up) reveal that more people are likely to behave like utilitarians (be causally responsible for one death to save five) if there's a mechanism in place, i.e. the switch that changes the tracks. Fewer people are say they will make that exchange if, say, they have to push a really obese person off of a bridge in front of the train to stop it from running over five people. Suddenly, when they have to get their hands dirty, lots more people are against sacrificing one to save many. Strangely enough, if you design the thought experiment so that the large person is standing over a trap door and pulling a switch will dump them onto the tracks, the number of people willing to be causally responsible for ending a human life goes up again.

Ravewolf

My own interpretation of this classic story has generally leaned into the concept of moral courage - if an injustice anywhere really is an injustice everywhere, does one really feel that in one's bones enough to reject an evil that has benefits. It's a troubling question and I can't for the time being really know where I fall on it. It's interesting to me that, like The Masque of the Red Death (also covered on the show), this story has almost no dialogue and lacks many of the usual character interactions, yet still manages to be moving just through provoking thought about how a society operates under certain circumstances. The story's consideration of the possible lack of need for conflict in a narrative is intriguing, yet it almost seems to serve the purpose here of lulling the reader into a false sense of security right before revealing the horror at the heart of the story. - "Oh, but by the way, actually, there IS going to be a source of potential conflict here though, and here it is..."

Anonymous

so cute ♡ ♡ ♡!