A short story that questions our morality
Maybe you’re familiar with Ursula Le Guin’s short, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. It’s about a lovely parks and delightful music. The people in the city are genuinely happy. They enjoy their handsome buildings and a “magnificent” famers’ market.
Le Guin describes a festival day with delicious beer and horse races : “An old women, wear small ,fat ,and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair A child of nine or ten sits at edge of the crowd, alone ,playing on a wooden flute”
It is an idyllic, magical place. But then le Guin describes one more feature of Omelas. In the basement of one of the buildings, there is a small broom-closet-sized room with a locked door and no windows. A small child is locked inside the room. The child is about 6, but actually, the child is nearly 10. “It is feebleminded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition and neglect.”
Occasionally, the door opens and people look in. The child used to cry out, “Please let me out. I will be good!” But the people never answered and now the child just whimpers. It is terribly thin, lives on a half-bowl of cornmeal a day and must sit in its own excrement.
“They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas,” Le Guin writes. “Some of them have come to see it; others are content merely to know it is there. They all know 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…depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.”
That is the social contract in Omelas. One child suffers horribly so that the rest can be happy. If the child were let free or comforted, Omelas would be destroyed. Most people feel horrible for the child, and some parents hold their kids tighter, and then they return to their happiness.
But some go to see the child in the room and then keep walking. They don’t want to be part of that social contract “They leave Omelas; they walk ahead into the darkness and they do not come back.”
In one reading this is a parable about exploitation. According to this reading, many of us live in societies whore prosperity depends on some faraway child in the basement. When we buy a cell phone or a piece of cheap clothing, there is some exploited worker—a child in the basement. We tolerate exploitation, telling each other that their misery is necessary for overall affluence, though maybe it’s not.
In another reading , the story is a challenge to the utilitarian mindset so prevalent today.
In theory, most of us subscribe to a set of values based on the idea that a human being is an end not a means.