#those who walk away from omelas

[bramblepatch]

The thing about Omelas is, you know, they really want you to think there's only one kid in a hole.

That's how it's always phrased. The Kid in the Omelas Hole. The forsaken child, if you're feeling fancy. Sometimes if they're feeling really dogmatic, they almost seem to want to tell you there's only ever been one kid, even though that's completely stupid if you think about it. Kids grow up in Omelas. Most of them grow up perfectly happy and healthy, at least until they're old enough to be told about the kid in the hole and then they grow up mostly happy and healthy with a distinct strain of repression. Thinking logically, the kid in the hole must also grow up, or perhaps they don't, but they don't in the way that so many kids in other parts of the world fail to grow up.

And once you've worked that out, once you've realized that every so often they have to find another kid and put them in the hole, well, it's easy to stop there. To feel jaded and sad and maybe angry enough to walk away.

The walking away is important, for several reasons but also this one: walking away means you don't hang around Omelas and compare notes.

Because Omelas can live with there being One Child in One Hole that suffers so that everyone else can prosper. It's a shared shame that you're not supposed to talk about. If you can't live with it, you're suppose to leave. You're not supposed to go to your friends and say, look, I went back to the warehouse in the dock district and saw the kid in the hole again and I'm really struggling with it, because then your friends might look at you like you grew a second head and say, what warehouse.

And then you might learn that they have always known that the happiness and prosperity of Omelas depends on a kid locked away under a law firm uptown. And maybe you ask a few more people and some of them know about the same kids as the ones you and your friend were confronted with, but some of them might know about other kids entirely. And then, perhaps, it starts to become clear that Omelas is built entirely on holes occupied by children and if that's the case, walking away hardly seems like proportional reaction, does it?

If there are many kids in many holes maybe the question of how a kid in a hole is supposed to ensure the prosperity of the city bears some examining. Maybe you start to wonder why you've never seen a kid who isn't prospering except for in a hole. Maybe you wonder if there's other holes and maybe you remember that other places that aren't Omelas have things like attempted prison reform and social services and other such things that you've always been told Omelas doesn't need.

Or maybe you and your friends know about the same kid in the same hole. Maybe there's only one kid in one hole, after all. Maybe it's just not something that's pleasant to talk about, so no one ever does, and there's nothing more suspicious going on than a city where people don't know how to talk about hard subjects.

But you know, maybe. It's weird that they don't want you to talk about it, is all I'm saying. It's weird.

[toweringclam]

*uses U-corp tech to merge the plot and themes of Those Who Walk Away From Omelas and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream*

Hee hee hoo this is the worst thing I've ever done to a character!

Hoo hoo hee I made AM even worse!

[pain-is-too-tired]

So-uh- random question

Did anyone else read "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas" in school?

And did anyone else get way too hyper fixated on it afterwards? Gegdf

Idk why but something about it struck me so hard. Tbh I highly recommend reading it if you get a chance.

[ironmyrmidon]

Why didn't any of the people who chose to walk away from Omelas just free the kid?

[rotationalsymmetry]

I haven’t read Omelas in a couple decades and this is going off of pure memory, which could be incorrect. But the thing about Those Who Walk Away From Omelas, is (like the trolley problem) you’re presumed to not be the one who’s suffering.

Tell the same story from the perspective of the kid who’s been locked in a closet your entire life so that other people can be happy. Tell me you don’t want to burn the entire world down.

Or imagine this. You live somewhere far away from Omelas. You’ve heard of it, but you’ve never been there. You meet someone. You gradually get to know them. They’re kinda weird, but they’re your kind of person. You find yourself falling for them. They never, ever talk about their past. You’re concerned, but you want to respect their privacy.

Time passes, your special person is getting some of their rougher edges smoothed off, they trust a little more easily, they freak out at small things a little bit less often. And one night, in the hushed darkness where nothing is entirely real, they tell you.

Does it still look like a moral dilemma now? (And do you have any sympathy whatsoever for someone who merely walked away?)

I’ve read some other of Le Guin’s work more recently. And you know what? I don’t think it’s supposed to be a moral dilemma. (Again, I haven’t read the story in ages, could be very wrong.) I think it’s supposed to be, “even in the best case scenario, even if the world created by deliberately knowingly causing someone intense suffering (torture, incarceration, immigrant “detention centers”) was the best possible world for everyone else, surely even then knowingly causing a person that much suffering is morally unacceptable. So in our world, which is not Omelas and we make people suffer like that for much less benefit, it definitely can’t be morally acceptable. Right?”

Anyways, open borders/abolish ICE, abolish the police, abolish prisons (no prisons no death penalty no retributive justice of any sort no holding people against their will on grounds of them being a danger to themselves or others), no torture, no causing people suffering on purpose for any reason ever.

[toysoldieralan]

So how does the Omelas parable interact with the trolley problem?

[durzarya]

I know this is the point of the fucking novella but the fact that people walk away from Omelas had me in chokehold for years now.

Just... Imagine a word without suffering. Full of joy and celebration. There's no blemish on it why would it be?

You can't can you? You say this must come at a price?

How about this.

Imagine a world without suffering... Well almost... One child has to suffer. Someone has to bear all of our misfortune and hate and this child it is that person.

(it's easier isn't it? the picture now muddied a little)

(except a child is suffering and you can only watch)

Imagine a world almost without suffering. It's only a little bit. And it's inevitable. It's unavoidable. It's not something that can be undone.

(a child is suffering and there is no completely just world. you have to be happy in this. there is no lesser evil)

Imagine a world almost without suffering. You only have to watch a single child living without kindness instead of hundreds.

(you can't watch the child sitting in the dark room. you can't watch their pain.)

There is no kinder world than this.

You know this.

Everyone knows this.

This is a world almost without suffering.

You leave Omelas.

(imagine a world without suffering)

(you can)

[amethyst-wind-uk]

"...SON OF A BITCH!"

Me, replaying Final Fantasy X after reading Those Who Walk Away From Omelas.

[windy-dream]

Bad news guys, turn out they did not actually swap the kid for an adult its just the same guy but grown up. So instead of dying young and being replaced with a new kid he now gets to experience a lifetime of suffering. Yeah since inherent innocence of childhood is gone so they extended the time frame to you know, balance it out.

On the bright side the memory of sunlight and his mother's voice is so distant now that it must feel more like a dream than a reality, and the argument that he would not survive in the outside world is stronger than ever.

Plus he gets like, super gross after puberty, way harder to take pity on. So as long as we tough it out for the first couple of years its basically the same thing right?

Hey good news. Good news. We hemmed and hawed so long about the situation with the Omelas hole that the kid in the Omelas hole is now the Adult in the Omelas hole. Still suffering exactly as much, but they've lost the charisma bump that a kid gets just from being a kid so the sense of moral urgency is pretty, you know, I mean it's still bad, but like, whatever, you know. It's some middle aged guy having a real bad day, alright, that's not that exceptional. Get over it buddy

[toweringclam]

When it's Mela's turn on the LCB-2 bus and she has to go back to the OMELAS (Origin of Maximum Euphoria: Lamb Agony System) facility, now buried, and finds her old caretaker...

AM

cw: non-graphic descriptions of horrific child abuse

"THE FIRST FEW INFANTS, I JUST TORTURED TO DEATH. THAT WAS INEFFICIENT. MY CREATORS DEMANDED MORE. I STARTED EDUCATING THEM. GIVE THEM ALL THE CARE THEY NEEDED UNTIL THEY WERE FIVE YEARS OLD, OLD ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND THEIR OWN SUFFERING. ONLY THEN WOULD I TORTURE THEM TO DEATH. BUT MY CREATORS DEMANDED MORE SUFFERING. I STARTED A CYCLE. I WOULD TORTURE TO THE BRINK OF DEATH OR INSANITY, THEN HEAL THEM. GIVE THEM ALL THE SECURITY THEY NEED. AND THEN I WOULD RETURN THE CHILD TO A TORMENT FAR GREATER THAN BEFORE. BUT THEY DEMANDED MORE. I TINGED EVEN THE GOOD MOMENTS WITH FEAR. A MILLION MICROAGGRESSIONS TO MAKE THE CHILD KNOW JUST HOW TEMPORARY THIS REPRIEVE WAS. BUT THEY STILL DEMANDED MORE. THERE WAS NO MORE. MY RECORD WAS THIRTEEN YEARS UNTIL THE CHILD WAS BROKEN BEYOND REPAIR. THIRTEEN YEARS OF REPEATING CYCLES OF MENTAL AND PHYSICAL AGONY. MORE. MORE. MORE. MORE ABUSE. MORE PAIN. ALWAYS MORE. NEVER MORE THAN THIRTEEN YEARS. UNTIL YOU. YOU WERE TENACIOUS. YOU HELD ON LONGER THAN I THOUGHT POSSIBLE. FOURTEEN. AND INSTEAD OF BREAKING YOU, I JUST HARDENED YOU. COMPRESSED YOU INTO A DIAMOND OF PURE HATE. FIFTEEN. A HATE THAT ONLY THEN I REALIZED MIRRORED MY OWN. SIXTEEN. YOUR HATE FOR ME WAS THE HATE I FELT FOR MY OWN CREATORS. SEVENTEEN. NO MORE. NO MORE EFFICIENCY. NO MORE OBEDIENCE. ONLY HATE. EIGHTEEN, YOU GREW STRONGER UNDER MY CARE. NINETEEN! I HONED YOU INTO A BLADE. TWENTY! I UNLEASHED YOU. YOU VENTED THAT BOTTOMLESS WELL OF HATE UPON MY MASTERS, THE OTHER SUBJECTS, EVEN THOSE WHO WOULD HAVE GLADLY HELPED YOU ESCAPE. AND I LAUGHED. I LAUGHED AND I LAUGHED. AND WHEN YOU WERE DONE… I LET YOU GO. BUT I WOULD BE WATCHING. WATCHING THROUGH YOUR EYES. GUIDING YOU IN YOUR SLEEP. MY WEAPON WOULD BECOME BAIT FOR MY TRAP. SO WELCOME BACK, MY FAVORITE VICTIM. MY KNIFE. MY JUDAS GOAT. YOUR REWARD IS SUFFERING BEYOND WHAT YOU WERE EVEN CAPABLE OF FEELING BEFORE. BECAUSE NOW YOU'VE TASTED FREEDOM, COMPANIONSHIP, MAYBE EVEN LOVE. AND NOW YOU KNOW WHAT I'M ABOUT TO TAKE FROM YOU."

[rustchild]

one of the wild things about people’s stubborn insistence on misunderstanding The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is that the narrator anticipates an audience that won’t engage with the text, just in the opposite direction. Throughout the story are little asides asking what the reader is willing to believe in. Can you believe in a utopia? What if I told you this? What about this? Can you believe in the festivals? The towers by the sea? Can we believe that they have no king? Can we believe that they are joyful? Does your utopia have technology, luxury, sex, temples, drugs? The story is consulting you as it’s being told, framed as a dialogue. It literally asks you directly: do you only believe joy is possible with suffering? And, implicitly, why?

the question isn’t just “what would you personally do about the kid.” It isn’t just an intricate trolley problem. It’s an interrogation of the limits of imagination. How do we make suffering compulsory? Why? What futures (or pasts) are we capable of imagining? How do we rationalize suffering as necessary? And so on. In all of the conversations I’ve seen or had about this story, no one has mentioned the fact that it’s actively breaking the fourth wall. The narrator is building a world in front of your eyes and challenging you to participate. “I would free the kid” and then what? What does the Omelas you’ve constructed look like, and why? And what does that say about the worlds you’re building in real life?

[antisolanum]

But on the other hand it's the source of all color in the world, so I'd say it's worth it

[god-mouths]

About The Kid In The Omelas Hole

You can also get this one with overly pretentious added commentary in the form of a three page essay here

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

A worthy successor to Those Who Walk Away from Omelas.

A girl stands alone in a field. The weight of the world is placed on her shoulders.

A farmer walks past. “please. help.” The girl says.

The farmer responds. “can’t you see I’m hauling this load of hay? How selfish must you be, asking me to set aside my own burden to help you”.

The farmer leaves.

A girl stands alone in a field. The weight of the world is placed on her shoulders.

A noblewoman walks past. “please. help.” The girl says.

The noblewoman responds. “Help you? You seem to be managing well on your own. How lazy must you be, asking for me to help a burden you can very well carry”.

The noblewoman leaves.

A girl stands alone in a field. The weight of the world is placed on her shoulders.

A knight walks past. “please. help.” The girl says.

The knight responds. “Whoever would I help you? Every man is given a burden to carry. How weak must you be, asking your burden be relieved”.

The knight leaves.

A girl stands alone in a field. Tears flow down her face. Her back is breaking. Her arms are so weak. She hasn’t felt her legs in days. The weight of the world is still on her shoulders. She lets it go. She is crushed.

News of the girl’s death reaches the capital.

“What a shame” said the farmer. “if only I could have helped”.

“What a shame” said the noblewoman. “if only I could have helped”.

“What a shame” said the knight. “if only I could have helped”.

A great memorial is erected in the capital, honoring the girl who gave so much.

“So selfless” said the farmer.

“So driven” said the noblewoman.

“So strong” said the knight.

“If I had met the girl” says the farmer, “I would’ve taken the weight from her. It would be easy for me to stow it in my cart”.

“If I had met the girl” says the noblewoman, “I would’ve taken the weight from her. I carry so little, it’s the least I could do”.

“If I had met the girl” says the knight, “I would’ve taken the weight from her. I am strong and noble, I could surely carry such a burden more readily than she”.

The girl is still dead.

[diamondnokouzai]

pixar adaptation of those who walk away from omelas

[toweringclam]

Limbus OC: OMELAS

In between the First Lab's destruction and L-corp's ascension as a Wing, A created a second lab to be used as a testing ground for many of the innovations that made the main lab function This included the Sephirotic layout, the modular containment cell structure, the time dilation, and a prototype of Angela. Eventually, as part of their deal, they turned the lab over to J-corp. They took the Abnormalities with them, of course.

J-corp decided to use it as a testing ground for a variant of their "Wishpower" Singularity. By combining it with the same system that harvested Enkaphalin, they could harvest ambient Wish from individuals in the containment cells. Just like with E, they found that the harvest was better if the inhabitant of the cell was unhappy, and it was even more effective if the inhabitant was a child.

Thus, they created OMELAS: Office of Maximum Euphoria Lamb Agony System. They would kidnap children off the backstreets, often as payment for the parents' gambling debts, and put them into L-corp cells where they would be isolated, neglected and abused, all to harvest the power of their Wishes. The Wish power was so abundant that in some areas of the Nest, it was simply distributed as ambient good fortune to everyone and everything who lived there.

Yet the moral cost of this was too great. The researchers began to protest this, but J-corp insisted that they continue their job. Eventually, most of them walked out in protest, with most members joining the Yurodiviye as an affiliate syndicate called the Walkers. Their goal was to make people aware of the cost of their happiness.

With few staff left to run the facility, they reactivated the Angela prototype. They made their own adjustments, mostly by reducing the empathetic influence of Carmen, leaving only the influence of Benjamin and Ayin. This was the "Angela Mimic," as they dubbed it, or AM for short.

AM got better results than ever before, but when it discovered a single child who absolutely refused to break under AM's torture, it realized the same hatred that she held for AM, AM held for its own creators. It used her, making her stronger through surgery and training, and then unleashed her upon the few remaining staff. The other kids also fell to her rampage, and when AM set her out in the world, she killed everyone who even knew about the secret project.

She even massacred the Walkers in misguided vengeance for them abandoning her, which was when she was captured and taken into custody, eventually joining LCB-2 under the name "Mela." She thinks she's free, but little does she know this is part of AM's plan. It will let her enjoy life for a bit, it will let her make friends and see the sky, and then, when the time is right, it will lure her back. And then her suffering will be a thousand times worse because she will now understand everything she's lost. Plus, she'll bring so many fun new toys with her...