I Walk the Line: On Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"
by Randy Kaufman, with research assistance from Dustin Lowman
Does happiness for some rely on the suffering of others?
That’s the question. For those of us who have managed to make the most of the pandemic, emerging wealthier and/or happier than when global panic mode first set in, we should ask ourselves this. And, if the answer is yes, then what?
It’s also the question that, in no uncertain terms, Ursula Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” asks its readers. I recently read and discussed the story as part of a Partner’s zoom call with Acumen Partners, and I found it as relevant to today’s world, as the one Le Guin occupied in 1973.
Le Guin tells the story of the often fraught relationship between suffering and happiness, and it’s a story about stories — the ones we tell ourselves to get to sleep at night. As the U.S. emerges from social isolation into a thrill-filled summer, I felt it was the perfect time to put Le Guin’s story on display, analyze its messages, and encourage us all to think about what it means. Do I stay, or do I go?
The Story
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is short — four pages in my PDF version, no more than 10 or 12 in book form. What it lacks in length, it makes up for in detail. Through a veritable tapestry of sensory information, Le Guin paints Omelas as a succulent city by the sea, poised to begin its Summer Festival, an eruption of orgiastic delights. The citizens of Omelas are “mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle!”
In a word, the citizens of Omelas are happy, and their happiness never ebbs.
Where does their happiness come from? What makes their architecture so noble, their music so poignant, their science so profound? Le Guin acknowledges how incredible it all sounds, then nearly chastises the reader for refusing to accept it. Throughout its first half, the story proceeds as a menagerie of sensory thrills, punctuated by Le Guin’s invocations to the reader: “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No?”
Then, fatefully: “Then let me describe one more thing.”
In a dank, moldy basement, a nameless child snivels. Le Guin goes out of her way to describe the child in gruesome terms: “Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.” Between the ages of eight and 12, every citizen of Omelas visits the child, and all of them learn that the city’s impregnable bliss depends on the suffering of this child.
“But there is nothing they can do,” Le Guin tells us, “if it were cleaned and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.” The citizens of Omelas mostly accept this story as true, and base their happiness on the fact that they, for whatever reason, were not chosen to languish in the basement.
Not everyone accepts the story. Some, for reasons that defy even Le Guin, walk away, “straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates.” She doesn’t know where they’re going, or what compelled them to leave, but “they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
The Allegory
“To them, I said, ‘The truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images .’”
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is clearly an allegory — but for what? What does Omelas represent? What does the child symbolize? Most perplexing and fascinating of all: Who are the ones who walk away? Why do they walk away? And, where do they go?
As with all great literature, Le Guin’s story doesn’t answer these questions. Rather, it points us in their direction, and it invites us to answer them. Truthfully, Omelas could be just about anywhere, just about anytime; but as I indicated in my introduction, at the time of reading, Omelas feels a whole lot like post-pandemic America.
Peter Atwater, a brilliant colleague from my JP Morgan investment banking days, first coined the term “K-shaped recovery,” which by now has become common parlance. Per data from CBS News, billionaires got 54% richer during the pandemic, while at the same time, the number of people living in poverty around the world doubled to more than 500 million. It’s the Omelas phenomenon, albeit reversed. In Omelas, one person suffers for the sake of thousands, but here on planet Earth, 2,365 billionaires gained $4 trillion in wealth, while 250 million plunged into poverty.
The pandemic didn’t create this problem, but it surely exacerbated it. In many ways, this country functions as a feudal society cloaked in the garb of freedom. America was founded on the exploitation of human capital, and continues to operate on that model — according to the latest statistics, there are now 57 million gig workers in the US economy, accounting for 36% of all US workers. Meanwhile, due to a plethora of tax code provisions designed for the wealthy, some billionaires regularly pay no federal income tax. Who exactly is entitled?
This may disturb us intellectually, but it doesn’t cause some people to lose a wink of sleep. Most of us go happily on with our lives, apparently operating under the belief that there’s something like justice in that ratio, 2,365 : 250,000,000. Or, worse, not even caring.
Walking Away
So, what does it mean to walk away?
That’s a many-trillion dollar question, and I believe people have built lives that try to answer it
in a wide variety of ways. Some people have lived lives of protest, galvanizing movements that oppose the exploitative practices of their parent countries. Others have lived lives of non-involvement, distancing themselves from instruments of oppression. Others, like the brilliant and brave Jacqueline Novogratz, who founded Acumen Partners 20 years ago and has dedicated her life to lifting up the poor, have set up organizations to change the way in which the world tackles poverty. Jaqueline’s mission in life is to reimagine capitalism — not to throw it out, but to shift it away from a purely shareholder-enriching system. American capitalism produces so much good, and she believes more than the wealthy few deserve to benefit from it.
I’m proud of my affiliation with Acumen, but I certainly don’t mean to give myself too decisive a pat on the back. I believe I have done far too little with far too much over my life. But all I have is the present, and it fills me with gratitude to serve on Acumen’s advisory board. For me, walking away means confronting the reality of our world, choosing another path, and donating my time, money, and expertise to an organization in whose purpose I believe.
Acumen knew exactly what they were doing when they assigned this story. Its humor, self-referential embellishments, and gruesomeness aside, I believe “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is fundamentally a story about writing the story of the world on your own terms. Where do the ones who walk away go? To all kinds of different places, probably, with many different guiding tenets. Regardless of where they end up, they start with the same motivation: They reject the narrative that their culture expects them to accept, and they go out in search of a better one.
If you’re reading this, chances are, you’re one of the lucky ones. You may not be as transcendently happy as the people of Omelas, but you probably ended up on the fortunate side of the equation, out of the basement, up in the sunlight. If so, I ask you: What does walking away mean to you?