In her classic short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, (PDF) Ursula K. LeGuin describes a delightful scene of sunny skies and colorful banners and a utopian life for the residents of Omelas. It is their Festival of Summer she begins describing, with a procession through town heading to the Green Fields where a horse race will take place.
But there is a price for this utopia … a child perpetually kept in torturous, miserable conditions …
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.
And then there are the ones who walk away. They cannot bear the burden of guilt that their knowledge of the child’s existence places on them. For this is part of the magic of Omelas, the lack of guilt in the populace. They simply accept that the child must suffer, and that is the way things are — A-OK,
Accompanying the story at the link is some background material she included regarding her inspiration for the story:
The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat, 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's "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," it was with a shock of recognition. Here is how James puts it:
"Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?"
* — not to be confused with the Flying Karamazov Brothers who I saw perform last year at the Oregon Country Fair — a place that has a superficial resemblance to Omelas. And is in the same state :-) as according to Ms. LeGuin, the name Omelas is simply Salem, O(R) backwards.
Vonnegut’s version — Jailbird
This theme of buying happiness and comfort at the price of another’s suffering also shows up in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Jailbird. (Clap, clap, clap) Though in this instance it is far less mystical an effect involved. His protagonist, Walter F. Starbuck, while a young man studying at Harvard is given a talk about the economic facts of life by his wealthy uncle. His uncle explains to him that for their family to live the lives of luxury to which they were accustomed, it is necessary for them to take for themselves the resources of thirty people each, thus leaving those people to live in miserable poverty as a result. (I believe that was the number, it was in that ballpark.)
This was their dirty secret that was shared among the menfolk. The ladies such as his mother were all busy with their social causes and projects to help the poor, but their husbands were the true causes of the poverty the wives were fighting. The rest of the story involves Starbuck eventually teaming with an old friend who appears to him as a bag lady living in a rest room in Grand Central Station, but who in reality is the richest person in the world. She lives incognito for safety. For security, all transactions she does require her fingerprints as signature. And she has people trying to cut off her arms as a result.
He becomes her business manager and builds her already large RamJac Corporation into an enormous conglomerate which continues to swallow businesses until it has under its umbrella every entity in the country. He then bequeaths the entire operation to the people of the United States to usher in a new era of benign socialism — Ramjac was always a very socially responsible company which shared profits with employees. And being the United States, the corporation was immediately broken up and the pieces sold to the highest bidders.
Upending Omelas
I was reminded of the resources multiplier theory recently when I was comparing the wealth of the median American family, Bernie Sanders, and Michael Bloomberg. Looking at the numbers is a study in orders of magnitude. the mathematical definition of an order of magnitude is essentially a multiple of ten. So when comparing Sanders wealth — estimated at $3,000,000, with that of the median family ~$97,000 we come up with a factor of just over 30, more than an order of magnitude greater but well under two orders. Bloomberg has an estimated $60,000,000,000. This puts him at 600,000 times the median, or between 5 and 6 orders of magnitude more. Meanwhile Sanders is trying to get his own taxes raised, while Bloomberg and his fellow billionaires are shitting a fit over the possibility of having their lives of extreme privilege dialed back to maybe just 100,000 times median — quite a haircut, but tons of hair left.
And like Omelas, there appears to be no guilt among the wealthy conservatives who are fighting M4A and other programs of social progress tooth and nail. OMG! Executions in Central Park! We’re going to be just like Venezuela and Cuba!!! Meanwhile …
The U.S. Census Bureau defines “deep poverty” as living in a household with a total cash income below 50 percent of its poverty threshold. According to the Census Bureau, in 2016 18.5 million people lived in deep poverty. Those in deep poverty represented 5.8 percent of the total population and 45.6 percent of those in poverty.
While poverty thresholds vary by the size and household composition, for a single individual under 65 years old, deep poverty would be an income below $6,243 in 2016. For a family of four with two children, it would be $12,169.50.
A total of 39 million people overall were categorized as living in poverty. Health care? Emergency room only. Food? Overpriced poor nutritional value items may be all that are available in some locations. Safety? Having next to nothing does not make you any less vulnerable to losing the little you do have to predators — sometimes those predators are the husbands of those society ladies mentioned by Vonnegut.
These people ... 39 MILLION Fellow Human Beings
MANY OF THEM CHILDREN THEMSELVES
are our tortured child of Omelas.
We as a society buy our relative comfort at the price of their suffering. At least, our elites make this bargain. The rest of us are kind of caught in between, not wanting to rock the boat, but also feeling bad for those paying the price for us. That dynamic has been shifting the past decade, first with the election of our Hope and Change president in Barack Obama. Then with Occupy Wall Street. And now with Our Revolution. Not Me. Us. This is about those of us in between, and those few at the top who are in league with the “ones who walk away,” who are ready to upend the unfairness inherent in the Omelas social paradigm.
It is time to free the tortured child and allow them a life as well — all 39 million of them. We need to enforce a more progressive taxation system that promotes a more equitable distribution of resources. There is certainly nothing wrong with a merit based system. But what we have now is not merit based at all, it is birth-lottery based, and connections based, and how sleazy can you get away with being based. Raise the minimum wage to be at least semi-commensurate with the increase in productivity over the past three decades. Provide health care and education as a birth right instead of a birth-lottery right. Give average people a sense of being freed from constant concern about finances and health. Provide aging seniors and the disabled the possibility of living in dignity instead of life being a constant demeaning struggle. Get us away from the “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and the whole Pottersville vibe, and back to FDR’s four freedoms.
Freedom of Speech
Freedom of Worship
Freedom from WANT
Freedom from Fear
I see this political revolution as being the glide path from oligarchy to a more equitable and egalitarian society. Hopefully enough of our oligarchs recognize this opportunity for what it is. Unfortunately for us all, the window on that may close quickly.