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. 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).
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. 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.
I think it's kinda weird to call the meaning that the vast majority of people, including LeGuin herself, ascribed to her work as a "misreading". Isn't it more likely that you have found another interpretation of the work that the author didn't intend?
My interpetation is that Leguin did indeed believe in utopias, and in the passage you cited was indeed critiquing peoples inability to concieve of them. Her excellent book "the dispossessed" has the subtitle "a flawed utopia", and describes an anarchist society that is not sustained by torture or inequality.
However, "Omelas" is a critique of "Utopias" which are not truly utopias, because the provide good lives to the majority at the expense of bad lives for a few. Under many forms of utilitarianism, a society like the one described in Omelas would be described as a very good one: LeGuin disagrees, and so do I. Omelas is about rejecting fake utopias, and pushing towards real ones.
I've seen the critique Tobias makes before - it is a fair point (though kind of unrelated to the usefulness of the Omelas story). The story itself is really explicitly making a point about the writing/ imagining of utopias, as Tobias says. It's really not hard to see this when you read it - it was surprising for me to come back to the story and read it again and see that it's a very explicit thought experiment about just that.
However I do think that's not much of a gotcha against the people who use it to make points about utilitarianism. They're only wrong insofar as their argument relies on the authority of Le Guin or something --- you can use and repurpose fiction as a thought experiment however you like. I presume (without reading the context) that Le Guin herself is using her thought experiment for a different purpose in different contexts, and that's fine.
Thanks, Toby & titotal!
Fair, 'misreading' is a strong word for what's going on. I find it somewhat justified because of how much less plausible the 'standard reading' becomes once you engage with the whole story. I tried to address the weirdness of disagreeing with the author in the last section.
I didn't intend this post to be a gotcha. Sorry if it comes across this way!
I also agree that it's fine for people to repurpose stories. There are likely many people with "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by. And that has made all the difference." posters, who derive a lot of value from them, which is good. But it's still interesting to me that those posters misread the poem, and that how common this misreading is may reveal something broader about the readers & what they want to get out of literature.
I'll continue to defend the 'standard reading'. I think the story can be critiquing our lack of imagination of utopia and also be against standard utilitarianism and third world exploitation and so on. I don't think the two are opposed, I think they actually link up.
I think what's missing from your interpretation is the climax of the story, which is also the title: the ones who walk away:
I don't think this finale works, if the story is only about Omelas being absurd. I think LeGuin is arguing that the type of society described in Omelas is wrong, and is arguing that it should be rejected.
LeGuin was a left-wing anarchist and anti-capitalist. I'm guessing she was probably gesturing to western society as analogous to Omelas, as a place of plenty that benefits from the exploitation of others in the developing world. She was saying that people justify an unjust status quo with utilitarian arguments that exploitation is justified on greater good grounds. I see the story as an attack on peoples inability to think that a world without exploitation and inequality is possible: an attack on fatalistic acceptance of pain and suffering as inevitable.
I'm guessing that you are not a left-wing anarchist anti-capitalist, which is fine. I think your interpretation is a valid one, but I would guess that it is not the one that is intended by the author, which is also fine. LeGuin was an excellent writer but nobody is obligated to agree with her politically.
I think this was just poor word-choice on my part - I was just pointing out that sometimes this point (that people are reading the story wrong) can be used as a point against people making the anti-utilitarian argument. 'Gotcha' is a bit harsher than what I meant, and I also didn't want to accuse you of this. Sorry!