Omelas

 “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.” 

They walk away from Omelas. Why do they walk away? Why do they walk away from their lives full of content, full of happiness, a happiness “based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.” I argue that they simply refused to live in a society founded on the suffering of another. I argue that they saw the suffering of the child, and they felt “disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They [felt] anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.”

This is the premise of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas. The story is set in Omelas, a seemingly perfect city of light and contentment. A city lacking all conflict, yet at the same time a city with few to no laws. “...there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves… As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb.”

Omelas seems perfect. But of course, it sounds too good to be true. Forming the foundation of the prosperity of the city, the happiness of its citizens and the peace of its streets is the incredible and unending suffering of a single child. “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 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 door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes-the child has no understanding of time or interval – sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer.”

The child isn’t a secret. Everyone knows about it. Children are shown and told about it once they reach a certain age. And it horrifies them. And “they may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.”

They hate it. But they accept it. They are incapable of imagining a world without the suffering of the child. They are incapable of imagining a better future. Many parallels can be drawn between the world of Omelas and our own world. Both the people living in Omelas and the people living under neoliberal capitalism suffer from what Mark Fisher calls capitalism realism, or “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it,” (Capitalist Realism, 2).

But then, there are the ones who walk away from Omelas. “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.”

This implies, however, that the only way to defeat the dominant cultural hegemony is by leaving. It implies that the hegemony is so powerful and so all pervasive that there is no way to overthrow them, and that the only possible escape route from the hegemony of capital is a literal escape route, that is, literally dropping everything and leaving. Not only that, but there seems to be the implication that by leaving Omelas one is in some way returning to an older, more primitive way. “They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back.” Some would argue that Le Guin is simply using the word darkness as a way of showing that they don’t know where they are going, and the next few sentences seem to affirm that. But darkness doesn’t just mean the unknown. Darkness is associated with struggle, strife, despair, desperate and futile grasping at the empty air in hopes that something will be found to hold on to. Le Guin could have very easily used darkness’s opposite, light, as a way of describing what these people were entering, for not only does light illuminate, but it also blinds. Light, which is associated with truth, revelation, triumph and progress, blinds, not because it is horrible and grotesque, but because it is bright and burning; it burns away what once was and blazes a path forward, a path to a future so beautiful that we are absolutely incapable of imagining it.

It is in this sense that Le Guin’s story is permeated by the overbearing feeling that there is no longer anything we can look forward to. “This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new…” writes Mark Fisher. “We find ourselves at the notorious ‘end of history’ trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal breach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian,” (6).

It does seem as if Omelas is the perfect society, the end of history. There is no conflict, no war, no economic inequality, no religious discrimination. But Omelas is haunted by a specter, just as modern neoliberal society is haunted by its own specter. The people of Omelas are deadened, not by a lack of awareness, but by an overabundance of it. Le Guin says that “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.”

Le Guin goes on to say that “their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free.”

Personally, I think this is bullshit. They are not hardened by their knowledge of the existence of the child. They are not made better because of it. They are turned into mindless spectators, as demonstrated by the fact that in the story, people will occasionally come to observe the child simply for the sake of observing him; “sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes.” This mindlessness, this obsession with observation and chronic inability to act, defines capitalist realism. “This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man,” Mark Fisher writes. It is a man “who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of self awareness,” (7).

I am not claiming that Le Guin believes that only by returning to an older mode of organization can humanity truly build a just society. That would be ridiculous, and is debunked not only by quotations from the story we are currently analysing, but also by the majority of Le Guin’s work as an author. What I am claiming is that, among many leftists, and especially among anarchists, there seems to be a deep seated, unconscious view that there is an older, better mode of organizing that must be returned to. 

Obviously such a view is also applicable to fascists, traditionalists and reactionaries, but I am not concerned with them. Here, I am concerned with my comrades and those who share my goals. And, though we all believe in working towards abolishing the current state of things, it seems as if there are many of us who still hold at the back of our minds that the only way to improve things is to return to an older social order, whether it be communalism of the primitivists and social ecologists or the Garden of Eden of the Christian (and sometimes even secular) anarchists. It is in this sense that many radicals ignore the material conditions of our rage and fall into blind idealism. Thus in the Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord writes that “from the historical thought of modern class struggles collectivist anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its exclusive insistence on this conclusion is accompanied by deliberate contempt for method. Thus its critique of the political struggle has remained abstract, while its choice of economic struggle is affirmed only as a function of the illusion of a definitive solution brought about by one single blow on this terrain - on the day of the general strike or the insurrection.” (92).

This ideal that Debord speaks of is not situated in the future, but rather, the past. To demonstrate this, let’s look to the scientific investigations of one of the most popular and well read anarchist theorists of all time, which would go on to become the foundation of anarchist philosophy. I am, of course, speaking of Peter Kropotkin and his study Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Kropotkin, in his introduction to the chapter on mutual aid among the barbarian societies, writes that “it is not possible to study primitive mankind without being deeply impressed by the sociability it has displayed since its very first steps in life. Traces of human societies are found in the relics of both the oldest and the later stone age; and, when we come to observe the savages whose manners of life are still those of neolithic humans, we find them closely bound together by an extremely ancient clan organization which enables them to combine their individually weak forces, to enjoy life in common, and to progress.” (69).

Kropotkin is, of course, correct. However, he then goes on to say that “as soon as we come to a higher stage of civilization, and refer to history which already has something to say about that stage, we are bewildered by the struggles and conflicts which it reveals. The old bonds seem entirely to be broken.” This, of course, is also correct, but it seems that Kropotkin is implying that the breaking of the old bonds was a mistake, when in reality, it was a necessary step in the progression of mankind, and was going to occur one way or another, no matter how much resistance was put up. Here, Kropotkin seems to think that the old bonds of organizing should be restored, rather than transcended and overcome. 

Kropotkin goes on to analyse the development of mutual aid among the people of Europe after clan rule was phased out and replaced by the structure of the village, and discusses at length the societal developments made by the institution of this structure. At the end of the chapter, he concludes that “the progress - economical, intellectual, and moral - which mankind accomplished under this new popular form of organization, was so great that the States, when they were called later on into existence, simply took possession, in the interest of the minorities, of all the judicial, economical and administrative functions which the village community already had exercised in the interest of all.” (87).

Though his analysis of the development of mutual aid, organization, economy and law under the village model are correct, what Kropotkin fails to recognize is that states springing forth from and seizing control of these developments was not an accident, but rather, the inevitable outcome of such a political and social endeavor. The rise of states was not an accident; it was what was bound to happen had social progress continued the way it did. Thus, Kropotkin’s analysis inevitably falls short, for it fails to take into account that the progress made by the transition from clans to villages created the material conditions necessary for the formations of states, especially the growing economy of money, for, as said by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, “the growing money economy penetrated like corrosive acid into the old traditional life of the rural communities founded on natural economy. The gentile constitution is absolutely irreconcilable with money economy; the ruin of the Attic small farmers coincided with the loosening of the old gentile bonds which embraced and protected them.” (144). 

Such a quick and utter collapse of sacred and enshrined social bonds by an economy dominated by money and the production of commodities to be bought and sold will inevitably lead to the rise of a state whose purpose is to reinforce the authority of the newly constructed markets, which is something that Kropotkin seems to ignore. 

This unconscious idea that has been implanted in the brains of many radicals, that the only way to improve the world is by returning to an older form of organization, is a plague upon our movement that must be eradicated. This complex, the Omelas Complex, must be fought against if we as revolutionaries wish to succeed, for it is not by walking away from Omelas that we find a better world that already exists. There is no better way that has already been tried. We must forge a new path through the flames of revolution. The ones who walk away are not revolutionary; the place they are going to is not unimaginable because it is new and unthought of. It is unimaginable because it will not work, and cannot be imagined to ever work. 

There is only one way to forge a new, better world, and that is by burning Omelas to the ground. And once we have done that, then we can begin constructing a new future, a future unimaginable not because it is based in the darkness of the past, but because its illuminating light is so powerful and brilliant that it blinds our eyes to what it reveals. We must construct a future so new and revolutionary, that if we were to be transported to it at this very moment, it would be completely unrecognizable to us, whose minds are so steeped in the reactionary present. So come with me friends. Let us fan the flames that will one day engulf the world.

Citations

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative ? Zero Books, 2010.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Black & Red, 2016.

Kropotkin, Peter. MUTUAL AID: a Factor of Evolution. BIBLIOTECH Press, 2020.

Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Penguin Classics.