I have just read the story, the post, and several comments, now amalgamating them in this reading:
The citizens of Omelas torture the child because they know that they themselves wouldn’t believe in their own utopia (just like the reader).
and 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.
It depends on it precisely because of this human flaw of not being capable of believing in such a perfect world without any tradeoffs. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts—they need to torture the child because they believe they need to torture the child.
The ones who walk away, therefore, are those who are able to recognize and discard that flaw, and build a new utopia without tradeoffs.
I have just read the story, the post, and several comments, now amalgamating them in this reading:
The citizens of Omelas torture the child because they know that they themselves wouldn’t believe in their own utopia (just like the reader).
It depends on it precisely because of this human flaw of not being capable of believing in such a perfect world without any tradeoffs. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts—they need to torture the child because they believe they need to torture the child.
The ones who walk away, therefore, are those who are able to recognize and discard that flaw, and build a new utopia without tradeoffs.