Omelas Is Perfectly Misread
The Standard Reading
If you’ve heard of Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, you probably know the basic idea. It’s a go-to story for discussions of utilitarianism and its downsides. A paper calls it “the infamous objection brought up by Ursula Le Guin”. It shows up in university ‘Criticism of Utilitarianism’ syllabi and is used for classroom material alongside the Trolley Problem. The story is often also more broadly read as a parable about global inequality, the comfortable rich countries built on the suffering of the poor, and our decision to not walk away from our own complicity.
If you haven’t read ‘Omelas’, I suggest you stop here and read it now[1]. It’s a short 5-page read, and I find it beautifully written and worth reading.
The rest of this post will contain spoilers.
The popular reading goes something like: Omelas is a perfect city whose happiness depends on the extreme suffering of a single child. Most citizens accept this trade-off, but some can’t stomach it and walk away.
The Correct (?) Reading
Le Guin spends well over half the story describing Omelas before the child appears. She describes the summer festival, the bright towers, the bells, the processions, the horse race. Beautiful stuff.
She anticipates your scepticism, that you’re expecting something dark lurking underneath. But no: “They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians.”
Then comes the first part of the story everyone seems to skip over:
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.”
This is Le Guin calling out us readers directly, that we can’t accept descriptions of unsullied happiness as real.
She tries again to describe this utopia. Maybe Omelas has technology? Or maybe not? “As you like it.” She’s almost begging you to help her build a version of this city you’ll accept, even offering to throw in an orgy if that would help. Or drugs, she wants to make sure that you won’t think of the city as someone else’s utopia.
The First Question
After all this setup, she asks the reader: “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy?”
“No?”
“Then let me describe one more thing.”
Then she describes the suffering child. You wouldn’t accept the pure utopia. Let’s see if you’ll accept it at a cost.
Importantly, Le Guin provides no explanation for why the child has to suffer.
Read the passage again. The child exists “in a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings”. The people know “that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children [...] depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery”.
But why? What’s the mechanism? Magic? A curse? A natural law? The story doesn’t say. The child must suffer for Omelas to be happy because? Those are “the terms”.
This is strange if you think the story is primarily about utilitarianism. A utilitarian thought experiment typically relies on at least some sort of causal mechanism, but here the mechanism seems purposefully absent.
The Second Question
After describing the child’s suffering in detail, Le Guin asks a second question:
“Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible?”
Are they more credible? She’s not asking about the ethics of it all. She’s asking about the story’s plausibility.
And the implied answer is: Yes. You do find them more credible. You believe in Omelas now that it has a dark side.
I’d summarise this reading as: We can’t accept stories about pure utopia. Le Guin demonstrates this by having you reject her perfect city until she adds suffering to make it believable.
[ETA: Why is the standard reading, what I’ll call a misreading, so common? If you read the ending in isolation, it does feel like a critique of utilitarianism. But since the story introduces the suffering child, the ‘utilitarian downside’ of the calculus, as a clear farce, I find it not a plausible reading overall.
Taking the ending seriously is as bit as if you took the following argument against utilitarianism seriously: “Imagine there’s a child drowning in a shallow pond. You’re wearing a swimsuit and could easily save them. Sounds impausible? No, really, you can just save the kid. Don’t trust it? Okay, let me make it more believable: imagine there’s also a cute puppy guarding the pond that you’d have to kill to reach the child. Would you do it?”]
The Misreading Is Perfect
You might find the above reading kind of obvious. But I want to stress that this reading is very rare. Try to find any article, paper, or blog post that lays out this reading. I haven’t found one (but there is sometimes someone in the comments who seems to get it).[2]
Maybe what I like most about this story is that the standard reading of Omelas, as a critique of utilitarianism, as a parable about global inequality, is itself in a sense what the story is critiquing.
The story is about our inability to accept pure utopia. And what do we do when confronted with this story? We immediately look for the ‘real’ meaning. We decide it must be about something serious and dark, a utilitarian calculus, moral complicity, capitalism.
It’s kind of perfect. The story critiques our inability to take happiness seriously, and we respond by not taking the happiness seriously. We focus entirely on the suffering child and the people walking away. We refer to it in philosophy classes on difficult moral choices and cite it in discussions about necessary evils.
The story has this great quality: The common interpretation of the story proves its point more effectively than the story itself ever could. We do what Le Guin said we’d do. We make it about pain, because “only pain is intellectual, only evil is interesting”.
(This makes me wonder if ‘you can’t accept a pure utopia’ is sort of an anti-meme[3]. Even when Le Guin tells you outright what she’s doing (“we have a bad habit of considering happiness as something rather stupid”), even when she structures the entire narrative around your scepticism, even when she asks straight up whether you find the city more believable once it has suffering, you still walk away thinking the story is fundamentally about suffering, not about your relationship to happiness.)
Le Guin Disagrees
There’s one problem with this reading: While Le Guin herself talked in vague terms about the story’s themes, she did lean toward the direction of Omelas as a critique of utilitarianism, or would call it a psychomyth about scapegoating. In her introduction to ‘The Wind’s Twelve Quarters’, she wrote that the story was inspired by William James’s discussion of moral philosophy, specifically his example of millions living in happiness on the condition that one ‘lost soul’ remains in torture. She describes it as “the dilemma of the American conscience”.
This seems to contradict what I just argued. So what’s going on? Here are some options that might partially explain it:
A. The Standard Reading Is Mostly Correct
Maybe I’m focusing on patterns that aren’t important. Maybe the story really is primarily about utilitarian ethics, and all the stuff about our inability to accept happiness is just a literary buildup before the main event in the last paragraphs. Maybe I’m focusing on a contrarian reading because it feels clever.
B. Le Guin Leaned Into The Irony
Maybe Le Guin realised what was happening and decided to go with it. The misreading itself proves the point better than any explanation she could give would.
C. Anti-Meme
This is the least likely but most entertaining explanation: Le Guin demonstrated our inability to accept pure utopia so effectively that even she couldn’t see past it afterwards – she fell victim to her own anti-meme. She wrote the story, knew what she was doing while writing it, but when she looked back at it later, she could only see the suffering child and the utilitarian dilemma.
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All of this still feels a bit like a puzzle to me. I don’t know which explanation is right. What I do know is that Omelas is doing something far more interesting than being a thought experiment about utilitarianism.
People often cite Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” as the most commonly misread piece of literature. But knowing about that misreading has become almost more common than actually misreading the poem. Omelas is different in that the misreading is still winning.
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I’m aware of the irony of where the story is hosted
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ETA: @Callum McDougall found a video and @Garrett Baker pointed to Ozy Brennan’s blog post making the same point.
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“A unit of information that prevents itself from being spread, often by erasing itself from any mind that it enters.”
Aren’t you ignoring the end of the story (and the part the title references) though? It seems like the whole thing is buildup to the people who walk away from Omelas, who are implied to do so because this situation is terrible, despite the utilitarian calculus.
Seems to me like the intended meaning of that title was different when Le Guin started writing, and then things went in a different direction along the way, and Le Guin just accepted where it ended up.
My guess is it was initially intended to refer to those who wont accept the possibility of utopia, those who cynically turn away before it’s built, or those idealists who will swarm and rupture any near-perfect thing by picking and tearing at its smallest flaws, and as Tobias points out, much of it seems to have been written that way.
Then I think it might’ve gotten lost partway through, in the way a dream does, a contrivance is introduced to make a broader point, the contrivance grabs the attention of the dreamer to such an extent that the broader point gets forgotten, and “the ones who walk away from omelas” ended up walking away entirely in response to the contrivance.
So Le Guin faced a choice, she could have noticed that and trashed it and started over until she had something perfectly intentional, but successful authors generally don’t do that ime. They publish in large quantity and they publish entertaining rides rather than coherent parables. If the contrivance was engaging enough to obscure the broader point, then a successful author lets the work become about the contrivance.
When I was reading it I had the impression that the reactions of the people of Omelas to the child were meant to reference the readers’ own rationalizations of suffering, in real life as well as fiction, especially in this paragraph:
The child wouldn’t even like being released anyway; it’s a fundamental part of reality; if the child didn’t exist we couldn’t really be happy. That sounds like a big pile of rationalizations to me! The people of Omelas start by knowing the child’s suffering is wrong, aren’t able to do something about it, and then slowly come up with rationalizations until they can accept it.
So the ones who walk away are the ones that refuse to rationalize. This could imply that they are nothing but the ones that refuse to rationalize, that the “walking away” represents rejecting the city of Omelas as happy and resolving to build a better version of it. Or maybe I’m just imagining and this is not even close to the intended meaning.
Thanks for pointing out that this is a big omission! I’ve added a bit about it.
I don’t think ‘you’re not able to accept a pure utopia’ is the only theme of the story, but it is a large and (to me) dominant one.
If I read the ending in isolation, it does feel like a critique of utilitarianism. But since the story introduces the suffering child, the ‘utilitarian downside’ of the calculus, as a clear farce, I find it not a plausible reading overall.
Taking the ending seriously is as bit as if you took the following argument against utilitarianism seriously: “Imagine there’s a child drowning in a shallow pond. You’re wearing a swimsuit and could easily save them. Don’t believe me? Okay, let me make it more believable: imagine there’s also a cute puppy guarding the pond that you’d have to kill to reach the child. Would you do it?”
She mentions that they know where they are going, but she doesn’t mention why they are going. It could be because they’d personally be unhappy in such a place. It could be because they think there’s an even better possible place. It could be because they reject the utilitarian calculus. I’m genuinely confused what the end is about.
idk if you saw my second comment, but I think this explains it
This makes sense, especially given when Le Guin says “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.”. If she did describe it, the reader (who has not yet themselves left Omelas) would assume that place also has some horrible secret, and so her attempt would fail.
This seems very incoherent.
It starts with “Imagine” and then two sentences later asks “Don’t believe me?”
Believe what? Believe that I was asked to imagine something? I look back up a bit on the page, and I can have rather high credence that I was asked to imagine something.
Believe that I have imagined the scenario? I can have pretty high credence of imagining something that matches the description so that doesn’t fit either.
Believe that the imaginary scenario is real? Agreed, I definitely don’t believe that and there’s a lot of evidence that it’s false, but what relevance does it have? The text didn’t ask me to believe that.
Maybe believe that I could one day be in such a situation? Well, that’s definitely more believable but still very unlikely. I’m very much not in a habit of wearing swimsuits near ponds, though if it had been a swimming pool that would be more believable (while still being very unbelievable). So yes I don’t believe it.
Then the text goes on to posit a wildly more improbable scenario, prefaced with “let me make it more believable”. What? No, that just made it massively more unbelievable, so the writer of this story probably has terrible epistemics, or at best is authoring an unreliable narrator character that does. Pretty much any further detail would make it less believable by conjunction.
What’s worse, that particular conjunction is pretty ridiculous. I can still imagine it happening in some amazingly contrived scenario, but brings up so many other questions like “how” that make even suspension of disbelief for a fictional situation difficult. In what manner would I have to kill it to rescue the child? Is it basically a full-grown dog (but still cute) that would threaten my own life if I approach, and I happen to have a gun with my swimsuit? Maybe there’s a supernatural barrier that’s tied to its life? In what way is any of this more believable even for a very unreliable narrator?
In my opinion, the usual utilitarian reading also ignores this aspect too though. The usual reading says that each person has the choice between accepting or rejecting the utilitarian logic, but a rejection of the utilitarian logic doesn’t look like leaving the city, leaving the child to suffer. It looks like actively fighting to bring the child out into the sunlight.
Omelas: How We Talk About Utopia
Pretty much identical thesis, does this count?
Yes, for sure – it’s almost identical! Thanks for sharing.
108k views means that many more people have heard of this thesis than I previously thought.
I’ve watched Big Joel videos before, which makes me wonder if I have seen this one but forgotten about it. I expressed the same basic idea before this video was released, but the structure I used here is very similar.
I agree with you about the meaning of the exhortations to the reader, up to the point in the last paragraph where some people walk away. The behavior of those who walk away doesn’t fit neatly into the “critique of utilitarianism/capitalism” reading, since they aren’t helping, but it doesn’t fit neatly into my “commentary on inability to imagine utopia” reading- and they are the ones the story is named after, so they’re probably important.
I guess the glibest reading is that they are walking to a city that is nice without a suffering child, and that’s why we can’t see or imagine the place they are walking to. However, that doesn’t explain the emphasized detail that they walk alone, and it feels too riddle-like for le Guin.
I agree that the ending doesn’t fit either. I’ve mentioned something similar here. I’m genuinely confused what the ending is about, and have mainly settled on ‘the story would be really bleak and unenjoyable without it’.
The people of Omelas also can’t take their own happiness seriously without the suffering child:
The story emphasizes the avoidance of guilt:
My reading of this: The inhabitants need to avoid guilt, need to justify torturing the child to themselves and each other; and, while torturing the child doesn’t materially do anything, to stop would be to admit that it was never necessary, which would invite guilt. It’s a kind of terrible punishment-of-nonpunishers equilibrium.
The ones who walk away are the ones who recognize all of this and are no longer willing to participate in the collective illusion (hence, alone).
Importantly (though, I think, consistently with both this and the standard reading), The Wind’s Twelve Quarters introduces “The Day Before the Revolution”, a story about an anarchist revolutionary in the same world as The Dispossessed, with “This story is about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas.”
I like this reading, I hadn’t thought about it before!
(note the following is me explaining my interpretation, not explaining my beliefs)
I think its a criticism of utilitarianism via a criticism of our inability to take just good things seriously. The whole point of (at least certain kinds of) utilitarianism is that we are in triage every second of every day. The Ones Who Walk Away is a denial of actions and worlds that are just good, the assertion that every decision is a trolley problem, and every good you do comes at the expense of bad you neglected to avert.
Omelas seems more likely given a tortured child at its heart for the same reason we find the assertion that an action which has a horrible consequence is nevertheless good. This is the same implicit logic used to defend actions taken for “the greater good”, and an implicit claim about the psychology of people taking bad actions “for the greater good”. That people find it more likely they can have a positive impact if there’s an obvious negative consequence to their action, the bias which has caused the most horrible atrocities we know of.
Those who walk away therefore are those who try not to fall for this bias. Both metaphorically, the reader who says “no, I don’t think you need to torture a kid to get a perfect world”, and literally, those who live in Omelas and say “no, I don’t think we ought to live in a society which tortures a kid”.
Another interpretation of “those who walk away”: Those who walk away are those who are even able to live in a non-Omelas, those who are able to imagine even the possibility of not having a hidden evil at the heart of a perfect world. The reader who does not walk away from Omelas, lives in Omelas and has lived in Omelas for their whole life, in the sense of mentally inhibiting the world in which any Omelas must have the tortured child. Those who walk away are therefore the very few who are able to reject that mental world, leave it, and achieve all the good rather than just the good that comes at a tragic cost.
This fits both the literal people who walk away in the story—they walk away because they imagine there is a land that is nicer, that doesn’t have a tortured child at its heart—and the reader metaphorically—they also walk away because they imagine a nicer world and believe that can be achieved without sacrifice.
I like this interpretation, but ‘criticism of [something like zero-sum] bias rationalized as utilitarianism’ ≠ ‘criticism of utilitarianism’.[1]
This feels really important to me, in a way that’s much less like ‘the good name of utilitarianism must be defended’ than like ‘zero-sum bias is a sneaky evil bastard, don’t ever let it get away with hiding behind other names’.
I agree, but also, like, I think its good to notice the skulls here. This bias isn’t equivalent to utilitarianism, but often justifies itself on utilitarian grounds, and utilitarians… don’t necessarily seem like they do all that much to try to stave off such biases when making their decisions or advocating for their moral frameworks. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me utilitiarians often revel in their ability to make hard moral tradeoffs rather than their ability to try to think of ways to get all of what they want without having to trade anything off (which is what the “steel utilitarian” would do).
I’m also reminded of the dispossessed, in which le guin describes two worlds, a capitalist society in which people are rich but have curtailed freedoms and some authoritarian aspects, and a kind of socialist anarchy where people are very poor, claim to be free, and are constrained by culture and custom rather than law.
I find that people who come into the book with a strong prior on capitalism being good or bad will also end up with a clear view on which “utopia” is better. The book itself is probably a critique of the idea that utopia is even possible and whether it’s a coherent concept at all.
I think that this is a minor point, yes, not the main point. It’s a subtlety that many miss, not the key reading.
But likewise, I’ve found a prod in Omelas that goads me personally more than the main theme does. It’s the unspoken “and if you’re that unsatisfied with that perfect city, with one single justifiedly suffering child, what in god’s name are you doing about this world, with so much less good, and so much more suffering, so much less justified?”
Yeah seriously. Omelas is better than our world in every possible way INCLUDING child abuse and exploitation
I think it’s worth noting that this is generally not how literary criticism is done? It is good and right to accept that authors are often mistaken about the meaning of their own work. If you can explain an idea simply then you do so simply—the reason to create art is to express ideas that lose something in the process of being simplified, and so artists expect (or should expect) that the meaning of their own work is not fully legible to them. That is to say, it is possible for this to be a completely correct reading without Le Guin herself having ever been aware of it.
One of question I have about “the Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is “walk away to where?” I’d argue most societies cause more misery for less benefit.
When I read it in school, the story frustrated me because I immediately wanted to create Omelas seeing as it’s a thousand times better than our society, so I didn’t really get the point of the intended and/or common interpretations.
Ozy argues the same thesis as you do here.
I’m not sure how I missed this one. Thanks!
Maybe not “fell victim to her own anti-meme”, but “after hearing everyone analyze her story as a utilitarian parable, she started believing in that explanation too and forgot what she originally had in mind when writing it”. It feels like the kind of thing that has happened to me sometimes, so it wouldn’t be surprised if it happened to Le Guin, too.
Despite my strong resonance with much of the take in OP, I partly also find “The (simple) meaning” of such a text as a concept a bit of a non-starter anyway. Independently of what all things the author exactly may have had in mind at whichever moment of the writing process, a text remains just that, a text, and then it’s instead us who get some inspiration for whichever points/meaning we think we’re now reminded or educated about. So in the most important sense, the meaning doesn’t exist, it’s only us who derive some meaning.
I’d wager many writers have exactly not strictly one very clear and narrowly defined specific point they wanted to convey, but more a fuzzy cloud of +- related thoughts, rather than a simple and clear ‘meaning’, and exactly in such situations beautiful, deeply feeling and moving texts may come about that we can then dream and ponder about at length, maybe without every finding full agreement. In that sense, Le Guin isn’t wrong to agree if we see it as a critique of utilitarianism—if the text almost by definition is simply whatever we see in the text.
[Meta: I hope it’s ok to split a comment in two as I think it’s two entirely different points]
Partly love this. Biased as I once had a debate where sb claimed ‘Omelas obviously critique of utilitarianism’ and I disappointedly claimed ‘No that’s too narrow for that’ but was a bit dumbfounded as hadn’t quite organized what seems wrong in that simple take of that so deeply moving story. Thanks for providing some relevant points why the story clearly is broader.
One point for which I consider Omelas not at its core a critique of utilitarianism is: The utilitarian-half of me distinctly gets the feeling of Omelas offering an interesting basis for discourse about the theory rather than a clearly intended rebuttal. As follows: To the same degree as the non-utilitarian half of me tells my utilitarian “there you go, clearly you can’t claim you like the situation”, the utilitarian in me tells the other half “there you go, while you claim you don’t like Omelas, but you and everyone else don’t even want to blow up real Earth—on which there is obviously a ton of such equally unjustified and pointless, evil suffering plus much less happiness than in Omelas—you exactly proof to accept the very horrible tradeoffs that you claim only me cold terrible utilitarian could be willing to accept”[1] - or something.
I don’t claim this imaginary statement to be very perfectly worded; the gist of it is the point.
My own reading of Omelas: The scenario at the end has the child being sacrificed for the good of the rest of society. But the lesson to be learned from that depends on who you’re supposed to identify with. If you identify with the society, the reader is being lectured on not hurting people for his own gain. But if you identify with the child, the moral of the story is that it’s wrong for other people to ask you to sacrifice things for the good of society. The moral that was obviously intended was the first of these—this kind of story tends to lecture the reader, and “you need to be less selfish” is one of the most common morals in existence. Nobody writes a story whose moral is that you should be selfish and ignore the greater good, but the story unintentionally says exactly that.
I think you’re overestimating the discourse on Frost.
It’s also about literal child molesters living in Salem Oregon.
Maybe referencing this? http://www.castaliahouse.com/when-good-science-fiction-goes-bad/
Referencing mainly Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband Walter Breen, but the scuttlebutt is that they were not the only problem in the scene at the time. Including enablement by other authors who knew about it being a problem.
But like, how do you know about the details here? Did you read anything that made you believe this? See an interview? Did you know anyone involved directly or indirectly?
Spoke with an older sff enthusiast about it at one point, so, hearsay.
One thing that makes Omelas such a good story is that it supports a variety of interpretations. For me, it supported two (related) interpretations, neither of which was touched on here.
The first was religion. I was in the process of deconstructing my Christian beliefs when I read the story, and for me it pointed out the horror that the Christian story postulated. An all-knowing all-powerful god thought that eternal human suffering (hell) was a price worth paying for utopia (heaven) for a select few. Though it was even worse than the story; at least in Omelas, only one suffered so that everyone else could be free.
The second was the value of rejecting a horrible system rather than embracing it as good enough. What do you do if you find yourself living in Omelas? Simply living in it seems wrong, because it requires the suffering of an innocent child. But saving the child also seems wrong, because that forces everyone else to suffer. The solution of those who walk away is to recognize that the system is fundamentally flawed and reject it entirely. If everyone did so, the child could be freed without causing any harm, as there would be no one left in Omelas to benefit from the child’s anguish.
My gut reaction to reading this might illuminate why people don’t take stories about utopia or easily-accomplished things seriously: there doesn’t seem to be much benefit to be gained by telling a story where everything goes well, there’s no dilemma or moral problem, and nothing salient to latch on to.
Imagine there was a TV show about a starship. It is run well, the ship functions normally, the crew go about their days, there’s plenty of power and supplies, the journey is vast and not very notable, their mission of moving cargo between two planets back and forth goes fine with no complaints. Once you got past the 2- or 3-episode explanation and tour of the ship and her crew, there wouldn’t really be much else different on episode 105 as there was on episode 5.
What would it take to make this show better? Conflict of some sort, perhaps between the crew, or with the environment, or the government, or maybe the suppliers/buyers of the cargo, or maybe with the isolating environment of space and the ennui of staring out a mostly-black window 24⁄7.
I also posit that we see this pattern in our own lives; we need something to do with our time, even if that something is just a hobby project or reading a few books. Consider fresh retirees in good shape: home paid off, kids in their own careers and doing well, spouse happy. Many such retirees may choose to take it easy, resting and watching TV, and this often either makes them miserable enough to reconsider or saddles them with health problems from their sedentary lifestyle, sometimes leading to death. Contrast with retirees who still make and keep plans, still go traveling, work on projects.
So that’s my guess. People don’t take stories about happy worlds where nothing goes wrong very seriously because there just isn’t much to say about such worlds, so why write stories about them?
“Omelas Is Perfectly Misread” —> “The ones who misread Omelas”. :)
I’ve always thought this about Omelas, never heard it expressed!