by Christopher Hall
The “literary thought experiment” is not a particularly well-explored genre. Ursula K. LeGuin’s short story is of course a famous one; we might say that other examples include Swift’s A Modest Proposal and stories by Borges and Ted Chiang. Like thought experiments in philosophy and physics, these challenge us to see how otherwise abstract ideas would function in a context understandable in terms of the “real world.” But the literary element here means that we can’t simply take the thought out of the language in which it is expressed. LeGuin’s story isn’t merely a vehicle for asking readers “Would you stay within a utopia if a single child had to be tortured to maintain it?” Trying to treat LeGuin’s story as a kind of Trolley Problem-with-extra-steps does a disservice to the care and craft with which she has created the statement of the problem itself.
That doesn’t seem to stop people, though. John Smith is concerned that the Ones Who Walk Away might be virtue signalers:
The walkers are not heroes. They are, at best, people who have chosen to feel better about themselves at the cost of doing anything useful. At worst, they are moral narcissists who would rather preserve the purity of their own conscience than remain in the one place where they might be able to justify their flourishing. And the near-universal instinct to lionize them reveals an unflattering truth about how most people think about ethics: we worship the gesture of moral refusal and almost never ask whether it accomplishes anything at all.
“Moral maturity,” in Smith’s view, comes from accepting the presence of suffering in the world. After all, he notes, we already live in a world which, despite not being anywhere close to a utopia, is built on the pain of others, both in the past and present. We are not only bound to live in a world where, as Smith notes, mass suffering only gives us a mediocre mode of life. It is also “philosophically empty” to reject a world based on anyone’s suffering, so long as the level of suffering there is minimized and happiness maximized:
This is the point that almost everyone skips past. The question is not “Would you build a utopia on the torture of one child?” The question is “You already live in a civilization built on the torture of millions of children. Is the utopia you’re being offered in exchange at least better than what you’ve got?”
And the answer is obviously yes.
(I’m not familiar enough with John Smith’s writing to know if there’s an element of satire here or not – I’ll treat it as if there wasn’t.) Not mentioned in his discussion, but obviously implied, is a by-now familiar conservative caution against any ambition to make the world completely pain-free. The effort to eliminate suffering will only result in more suffering, and we have only to look at the results of every attempt at utopian social engineering to confirm this. The Ones Who Walk Away have “accomplished nothing:”
… the stayers in Omelas are, paradoxically, the more morally serious group. The stayers acknowledge their implication in the system. They feel the horror. They carry the weight. And they stay anyway, because they understand that moral life is entanglement, burden, and cost, not clean hands. The walkers, by contrast, have opted for a kind of moral privatization: they’ve decided that their own conscience is more important than the child’s welfare. They get to feel clean. The child gets nothing.
So, by implication, such renunciation is foundationally selfish and pointless.
I don’t think Smith quite gets LeGuin’s story, which is fine, as I don’t either (I’m one of the Ones in my title, in case that isn’t clear); it’s a rich enough work that it slips by us the second we have a fix on it. So, as noted, once we start treating the Omelas problem as a straight-ahead thought experiment, we can start going in any crazy direction we like. What if, to crossbreed with another thought experiment, the child is one of Nozick’s Utility Monsters, capable of heights and vistas of pleasure not accessible to normal beings? In that case, it is the population of Omelas that should be in the hole, and the child the only free resident of the city. We might also suppose that, if the Omelasians are indeed engaged in a sort of min-maxing where they have achieved the maximum possible utility for the minimum amount of pain, they are bound at some point to ask the question: have we min-maxed as much as possible? The mechanism by which the child keeps life in Omelas perfect is mysterious, so they don’t know whether, if they added another child to the basement, things could get better: might people be able to fly? Smith seems to accept that Omelas has reached perfect homeostasis so far as utility is concerned, but that’s not certain there anymore than it is here. The Omelasians would, in fact, have a moral duty to explore all the options, since perhaps a little extra suffering might, in the aggregate, lead to ever more extreme levels of joy – or, perhaps, some minor mitigation of the child’s suffering might not have disastrous consequences. Let’s give the kid some candy one day a week, and see what happens?
If we’re repulsed by Smith’s conclusion, Smith says, that’s because we’re relying on feelings, not logic. But this is, after all, about feelings, about joy and suffering. When we speak of that suffering, we are likely wise, though it’s a gloomy task, to make categorisations. I absolutely concur that, where two types of suffering are concerned, trying to eliminate them from human life is not only futile but very likely counterproductive. Unhappiness as an everyday feeling is surely not going anywhere, no matter what we do. The average Omelasian must have days, maybe even weeks or months where, for no good reason, they don’t feel happy. Despair in the broader sense is also likely permanent. The Omelasians are not immortal; they know one day this is all going to end in death for them, and what was “this” anyway? The life of a speck living upon a speck orbiting another speck is still insignificant, however happy. Feeling down and existential dread are likely such permanent features of human nature that any attempt to “walk away” from them is, indeed, foolish and immature.
But what of misery? This is the form of suffering which is imposed from outside, from the conditions of life which we have collectively created, which divides between those who get to live moderately well – some much better than that – and those who do not. Is there really nothing to be done about misery – no plan where it could be eliminated, and thus no point to trying? We know, of course, that there are successful attempts to mitigate misery, and perhaps Smith’s point is that perfect elimination is not possible, nor the attempt to create it wise. But once we accept some misery, we are quickly engaged in a calculus that can lead us to places that are both philosophically and morally empty. We don’t know where the equilibrium lies. Perhaps it is the case that 49% of humanity must live in misery so that 51% can live reasonably well; that is the only possible mixture, there’s no correcting it. But once we accept that sort of thing, we are a step away from a quagmire. The calculus doesn’t care whether there is one child or one hundred in the hole – but we should. Walking away means the knowledge that accepting any level of misery, however realistic we may be in doing so, is accepting every level.
Again, I’m not convinced any of this consideration is really wise or needed in relation to LeGuin’s story. It’s not that they are not germane to the story, but rather that, when we respond to it, we ought to keep foremost in our mind that it is a story. Smith imposes smug satisfaction onto the Ones Who Walk Away, but the ending of LeGuin’s story is set in an oneiric atmosphere:
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, 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
The walkers seem almost entranced, automated. They do not announce their departure, no posts to social media signalling their rejection, no angry words spoken over a holiday meal with the extended family. They make no argument, do not proclaim themselves heroes; this is an act of pure and silent renunciation, like the immurement of an anchorite – the Latin root of “renunciation” meaning “protest.” It is a rejection based not on reasoning, and not precisely on feeling; there is a holy element to it, and for all we know they are walking away to their deaths. If Smith is angered by the ostentatious voices of the 21st century world clamouring in every venue against the suffering they very clearly benefit from, well, I’ll share some of his annoyance, but I find nothing of the sort in LeGuin’s story. (And, to be clear, I’d rather the clamour than complacency).
Literature is best responded to by literature. Curiously, Smith refers to two stories, N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” and Isabel J. Kim “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole,” but he doesn’t get either one right. Both could be said to attempt to advance LeGuin’s narrative into a more recognisable 21st century frame. The utopia of Jemisin’s city of Um-Helat is sustained because dehumanising language (the source of which is transmissions from our world) is banned, so much so that anyone who consumes it or engages in it is killed, and their children re-educated. Smith’s gloss on the story is thus a little confusing:
N.K. Jemisin, in her 2018 response story “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” makes a version of this point: there is nowhere to walk away to. But I’d go further than Jemisin. She frames staying as an obligation to fight injustice. In Omelas, there may be nothing to fight. The causal link between the child’s suffering and the city’s flourishing is a stipulated fact of the universe, like gravity. You don’t fight gravity. You don’t form a committee to repeal it. You accept that it’s the price of a world where things fall down instead of floating away, and you live accordingly.
“Staying and fighting,” in Jemisin’s case, involves the violent suppression of speech. And I don’t think for a moment that Jemisin is either sanguine or naïve about this; she merely points out that this, not the mysteriously effective suffering of one child, is the very blood among the foundations that any hope for a better society might have to endure. I found her story chilling, not because of its intimations about free speech, but because of the sudden intrusion of realism – the realisation that she may be right. Perhaps the only sort of min-maxing that is actually going to work for us is in making those who would dehumanise others suffer the pain of silence. The liberal in me doesn’t want to come to that conclusion, but there are other bits that may know better.
Kim’s story is a more ludicrous romp. This is Omelas as it would exist in 2026, with social media and hot takes everywhere. The result is that the “kid in the hole” keeps getting murdered by activists and nihilists, bad things begin happening, and then the kid get replaced (by an “ethically sourced” child) only for the murder to happen again. Omelas descends into horrific and hilarious chaos, and again Smith’s analysis strenuously misses the point:
Kim means this as satire of technocratic solutionism, and it’s very good satire. But she accidentally makes the strongest possible case for the position she’s mocking. Every intervention in Omelas makes things worse. The system, horrible as its price is, works. The child suffers and everything else is paradise. Start tinkering with the mechanism and you don’t get paradise-minus-one-tortured-child. You get something closer to our world: millions of children suffering, no paradise, and a lot of people with PowerPoints.
Kim’s story may well be about how our fidgety society can’t seem to leave anything alone, so the idea that we might contently live with knowing about the kid without trying in some way to intervene – even if it’s to take a selfie in the hole – is well-taken. But it’s difficult to believe that anyone could read this story and think the real point is that Omelas was just fine as it was; I don’t think Kim is saying this, accidentally or not. We, in this age, couldn’t even get to the perfectly harmonised evil of Omelas; we’d find a way to fuck up even that. Social engineering becomes replaced with stochastic idiocies which make the entire concept of utilitarian calculus pointless – a situation all too recognisable.
“The system, horrible as its price is, works.” Again, we might very well start with the premises that utopia and the total mitigation of misery are impossible. But premise-creep is unavoidable. Does our society, the one in which there is mass suffering and mediocre levels of happiness, not, in a very real sense, work? Perhaps we have reached the price floor for suffering; never mind Omelas or Um-Helat, it won’t get better than this. So, “work” is relative; you might think it could work better, but it can’t. But just as the ones walking away don’t know where they are going, the ones who stay don’t know where they’re staying. Let’s put mysticism aside for one last thought experiment: one day, the Omelasians decide to free the child. As LeGuin makes clear, years of deprivation have meant that the child isn’t really capable of happiness, and yes, disasters befall the city. But little by little, the Omelasian get by; they work to mimic the happiness they’ve lost. Yes, in the aggregate, etc. But they’re working at it, the way we all should work at it, and work at it precisely because some other equation better balancing torture and profit might be out there – and maybe there’s one where pain and unhappiness are worth nothing to anybody. Any mentality which shrugs its shoulders at either the kid the hole or the child in the sweatshop is not one I want to truck with, no matter how “mature.” And if the vertigo imposed by our feeling of hypocrisy here in the West makes us act in foolish ways, so be it. I’ll take all the virtue-signalling in the world over the abandonment of hope.
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