The Ones Who Drive Away From Omelas
With the thunder of electronic dance music that came from gigantic speakers mounted on trucks, the festival of the new year came to the town of Bolebur in the nation of Semang.
The people of Semang are happy, for the most part. They are theoretically immortal and could be so if they stayed indoors forever. But what kind of life is that? No, they venture outside knowing there is a remote probability of a freak accident or murder because life in Semang is full, rich, and interesting. Perhaps you don’t think so. Perhaps you find such utopian worlds boring, being more interested in dystopian worlds like those where the Axis won WWII. But I assure you that the people of Semang live lives that are as rich and varied as anyone. They form friendships, get married, get divorced, and feud with in-laws. They read books to become more knowledgeable and signal their intelligence to others. They take long trips to “get away from it all.” They tell jokes, write essays, play sports, climb mountains, wear costumes, attend concerts, organize parties, take drugs, and sleep with their lovebots. Yes, they have lovebots. But these are not just advanced masturbation aids; you can talk to them and they talk back. They are very easy to fall in love with, and they’ll never leave you.
The people of Semang know they will always be inferior to their AI overlords. Their works of art and literature will never be as good as those created by machines. But the child in our society knows his painting will never compare with the masters, yet he continues to enjoy art class. The people of Semang are much like children, taken care of by a benevolent government. They are happy children, up to a point. You see, hedonic adaptation means the people of Semang do not live lives of eternal, constant bliss.
Without natural headaches, some seem to seek out sources of misery. Smarter people depress themselves by saying life is pointless. Dumber people depress themselves with dysfunctional, chaotic, drama-filled relationships. Sure, a lovebot will never mock you and sleep with your friend, but where’s the fun in that?
Whenever someone is acting too gloomy, harshing the buzz of those around him, he is reminded of the concentration camps.
Yes, there are concentration camps in Semang.
To explain why, we have to go back to the beginning of the people’s republic of Semang. Yes, that’s still its official name. There is nothing good to say about the first dictator, a tyrant named Namga. He left his state as poor as he found it, a laughingstock of the world.
He was succeeded by a man named Ruoat. Ruoat knew his predecessor was insane, though he wouldn’t dare say so. And he knew that his people wanted democracy. He wondered why. Ruoat was a well-traveled man who had lived for years in the United States. A country where they loved democracy so much that large fractions of people didn’t even bother to vote. Do people really love democracy that much, he asked?
No, he decided, it wasn’t democracy that they wanted. They wanted wealth, associating democracy with the affluence of places like America. He set out to give his people wealth by promoting rather than suppressing private enterprise. Politically conditions would remain repressive as ever. The plan seemed to be working. Growth rates were high, much higher than those of the advanced democracies. For a while, it was common for elite members of his government to send their kids to study in America, where they’d stay as immigrants after graduation. This angered Ruoat, who saw it draining his country of its best minds. But banning emigration would piss off powerful members of his government, so he permitted it. Eventually, the problem solved itself. His country grew rich enough that foreign students decided they’d rather return to Semang than live as immigrants in a culturally alien land.
Soon after Ruoat’s death, he was succeeded by a man named Favaco. A few years into Favaco’s reign, protestors nearly toppled him. He wondered why his people decided to riot. All the statistics said the people were getting richer and richer. Not just his own statistics, either; foreign statistics told him the same thing as his cronies. What was wrong? He concluded that if the problem used to be that people were too poor, now they were too rich. They took for granted that there would be food on the shelves at every supermarket, never having known anything different. And they had little fear of the concentration camps, as the government-controlled media did not publish anything about them.
Favaco ordered an abrupt change in the media regulations. Now, copies of Amnesty International’s report on the concentration camps were to be published in every bookstore, with a foreword by Favaco claiming the description was “exaggerated” but also that the concentration camps were “not vacation resorts.” Those who were predisposed to view the regime favorably would dismiss the report as lies, while those predisposed to oppose the regime would buy a copy and be scared shitless that that would become their fate if they rebelled.
Being rather open about the regime’s atrocities had another benefit. Those in his government knew they were tainted, that in the event of a successful revolution there would be calls to prosecute them.
The concentration camps continued into the present utopian epoch. They now house about five thousand people, a mix of genuine revolutionaries and unlucky people abducted to meet the regime’s quotas. People outside Semang often know it only for this fact.
The benefit to the regime is obvious, but perhaps there is also a benefit to the people as well, for the concentration camps remind them how far their civilization has come and how happy they ought to be.
***
“The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat”, writes Le Guin, “turns up in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. The fact is, I haven’t been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I’d simply forgotten he used the idea. But when I met it in James’ ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,’ it was with a shock of recognition.”
The description in Brothers Karamazov refers to the doctrine of salvation through the crucifixion of Jesus. I hadn’t realized the similarity between the child in the basement and Jesus on the cross, though it seems obvious in retrospect. I bet many of our “modern” ideas unexpectedly trace back to the Jesus story, which is undoubtedly compelling. Though, like most religious stories, it tends to fall apart under the microscope.
Suppose the whole Jesus narrative is 100% true. Yes, Jesus suffered great torture so that our “sins” could be forgiven. But he’s hardly the only man to have self-sacrificed in such a way. How many men volunteered to defend their villages and then bled to death in agony over many hours on the battlefield? How many men held out under ghastly torture rather than reveal secrets? Jesus demands worship, validation, and appreciation of his sacrifice. The nameless man who gave his life on the battlefield in 303 BC knew he would get none of that. He knew that in a hundred years, he would be but a name to his great-grandchildren. “Yeah, I had a great-grandpa named Jack who died in that war.” His great-great-great grandchildren wouldn’t even know that. The only way we should see Jesus’s sacrifice as more substantial is if we believe that the pain of a God getting nailed to a cross matters more than the pain of a man.
Still, Dostoevsky believed, or at least believed he believed. He wrote that “even if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” Maybe it was just a cope, for him and many others.
***
I’ve heard the interpretation that Omelas is an allegory for the good life you live in the first world, which is ultimately dependent on the suffering of the child in the sweatshop who stitched your shirt together. This was what the Soviets said, when asked why life in Western Europe and America was so good. It all comes at the expense of some very poor people in the Global South. As Jeremiah A. Wright said:
“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…”
In countries like Tanzania, we’ve seen that the further away you get from white folks’ greed, the more in need you become. Poverty is the default, natural state of mankind. If a poor person agrees to work voluntarily in a sweatshop, it’s probably because it makes him slightly less poor, not because he’s being ripped off.
You could say this, and people did. But perhaps explanations where nobody is to blame are naturally less compelling to humans. When somebody points the accusing finger at you, do you want to say “nobody is to blame” or do you want to get back at your accuser by pointing the finger at him? No, people say, I am not to blame for the poverty of those people in sweatshop countries! Instead, it’s their fault for having too many kids! They have six kids while I have two. Their countries are overpopulated! Never mind that a single glance at a table of population densities by country should be enough to falsify this idea.
Perhaps the theme of the story is that people have zero-sum and someone-is-to-blame biases. Le Guin assumes that the reader does not “accept” the city until she tells him about the child. We look at the wonderfully happy city and conclude that it must have come at somebody else’s expense.
As an aside, somebody should make a sequel to Avatar that takes place 120 years after the events of the second movie. Instead of a world where nobody goes hungry because fish swim into people’s mouths, it’s a Malthusian world where the population is ten times its previous value and many species have been driven extinct. A human visitor, expecting to learn morality and spirituality from the wise noble savages, is shocked as he walks past a disheveled, underfed beggar. The human asks his native guide what the hell happened.
“Oh,” says the native guide. “You see, we evolved and spent most of our history on a small island called Na’Wop’Lop. We believed at that point that Na’Wop’Lop was all there was, that the ocean surrounding it extended forever. But sixty years before you got here, another group of aliens crash-landed here. They traded with us for a time and then left. We got some of their boats, which we used to journey to the rest of this planet. We found a happy hunting ground, and it was all idyllic and peaceful until you showed up. But eventually, we filled up this land just as we filled up Na’Wop’Lop. We regressed back to Malthusiasm, sad, yes, but you must understand that this is the norm in our history.”
***
Take it as a given that the people of Omelas ought to free the child? In this case, should a good person leave Omelas? Stay or leave seems to be the only options in the story, nobody thinks to organize a movement to free the child or find some way to achieve the utopia without torturing the child. Omelas, it is clear, is not a democratic state.
Leaving might weaken the regime, make it more vulnerable to its enemies, but there don’t seem to be any enemies. Since political, moral, and religious views are heritable, the process of emigration should select against the genes that make people bothered enough by the child to consider emigration.
From a consequentialist standpoint, then, emigration doesn’t seem to do any good. But if the goal is reducing personal moral contamination and blame for the situation without fixing the situation, emigration may seem to be the moral option.
***
LeGuin writes (emphasis added):
But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however--that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.-- they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter.
Why do liberals hate cars? This dates to before global warming was really a thing, so it can’t be that. It’s not a hatred of technology per se, subway trains are apparently fine. Lion of the Blogosphere has observed that liberals hated cars before global warming, which gave them an intellectual justification to do what they already wanted to do anyway.