Dilemmas of Political Agency and Sovereignty: The Omelian Allegory

The Moral Dilemma

‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ describes what appears to be a utopia – or eutopia, that is, a ‘non-existent society … that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived’ (Tower Sargent, 1994: 9). The city of Omelas is a jubilant place of festivals, chiming bells, prancing horses, and processions of cheerful, contented workmen, mothers, and children. The picture painted is that of a ‘city in a fairy tale’, but unlike most fairy-tale cities it needs no king to rule it, no servants and no sword. It has few laws, yet, Le Guin notes, its inhabitants are complex and intelligent, as morally and politically conscious as we are. As if mindful that, as Jameson (2005: 292) suggested, the content of a utopia is ‘a perpetual interrogation on its own condition of possibility’, Le Guin observes that the best way to describe Omelas is to ask her readers to formulate their own version of this paradise. Omelas is the best we readers can wish for, and this probably implies, Le Guin suggests, material comfort with no destructive technology; sex and drugs, but without all their negative effects; religion without clergy; courage without soldiers; and all the pleasures of the senses. At first sight, Omelas is satisfaction without guilt.

To make this utopia more realistic, Le Guin adds ‘one more thing’. In a broom closet, in a cellar under one of Omelas’s buildings – in a place, therefore, that constitutes the foundations of Omelas (Adams, 1991: 40) – a child is sitting. The room is dark, dirty and damp. The child is nearly ten but looks six. It – nobody knows whether it is a boy or a girl – is naked, malnourished, covered in sores and excrement, scared and feeble-minded: ‘Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect’. It remembers its mother’s voice, and implores: ‘I will be good … Please let me out. I will be good’ (Le Guin, 1979: 257). All Omelians know it is there, and all know of its abominable suffering. Some come and ‘kick the child to make it stand up’ so they can see it better. Children, too, come and feel disgust and despair. All understand, however, that the child’s misery is the condition on which rests the joy and health and abundance of the city. The child must be there, in that agony, to allow for the happiness of Omelas. All realize that it would be ‘a good thing’ if it was released, but that at the very moment of its deliverance the contentment of all would be irreversibly destroyed. It is, therefore, the consciousness of the child’s torment that constitutes the origin and the essence of their own prosperity: ‘It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children’ (Le Guin, 1979: 258–9).

The story, however, includes another ‘one more thing’. Sometimes, the people who come to see the child do not return home. After they visit the broom closet, they stop talking for a day or two – and then they walk down the street and through the gates of the city: ‘Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. … They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back’ (p. 259). Their destination is unknown: Le Guin offers no indication of where they will go and what will happen to them after they leave. All we know is that they abandon their perfect life because of the evil on which it is built.

An ethical, Levinassian understanding of the fable would immediately condemn the conatus or perseverance in being of the Omelians, who delight in their beautiful city and their satisfying lives at the cost of the child’s suffering. It would emphasize that ontological enjoyment (the pleasure of being) is always detrimental to others: care for oneself, in its selfishness, necessarily carries with it indifference or even cruelty towards others. From a Levinassian perspective, one would also describe the ethical shock of responsibility felt by those who leave Omelas when they see the ‘face’ of the other, namely, when they visit the child. For Levinas, indeed, the responsibility for ‘the other … [who] is the weak one whereas I am the strong one; he is the poor one, “the widow and the orphan”’ (Levinas, 1985: 95), involves the sacrifice of the ego (here, the Omelians who leave Omelas) for the other (here, the child) (Levinas, 1998: 114). From the same perspective, however, we should note that while some Omelians sacrifice their well-being because of the child, they do not do it for her. As will become clearer later in this paper, leaving Omelas relieves the conscience of those who leave but does not improve the child’s life. Therefore, from a Levinassian point of view, we should probably conclude that those who leave, just like those who stay, care mainly about themselves and their own well-being.

Le Guin’s own framework of interpretation for ‘Omelas’ is not Levinas’s ethics but rather what seems to be an anti-utopian critique of utilitarianism. In her introduction to the story, she acknowledges that the theme of the sacrifice of one for the utopian happiness of all became known to her through William James, who, in ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’, wrote:

If the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should be all outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-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? (James, 1891: 333; Le Guin, 1979: 251)

‘Omelas’ is not the first story constructed by Le Guin around a thought experiment. In her 1976 Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) she explains that ‘the purpose of a thought-experiment … is not to predict the future … but to describe reality, the present world’ (Le Guin, 1976: 9). And indeed, in the paragraphs that preface ‘Omelas’, she indicates that her story reflects ‘the dilemma of the American conscience’ (Le Guin, 1979: 251). The sacrifice of some (the poor? the sick? the Global South?) seems to be the necessary condition for late capitalist society’s comfort and happiness. In Omelas, as in most of Le Guin’s speculative fiction, however, reality is not simply ‘described’. The artful hyperbole of the utopian/dystopian background emphasizes the extent of the dilemma. Would we renounce infinite happiness for all because of the suffering of one? Would releasing the child not imply the sacrifice of the entire city? This unbearable impasse, and the absence of any imaginable way to resolve it – apart from leaving and ‘walk[ing] ahead into the darkness’ (Le Guin, 1979: 259) – make us aware, as Jameson has argued, of ‘our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself, and this, not owing to any individual failure of imagination but as the result of the systemic, cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners’ (Jameson, 2005: 289). This ideological closure is reflected in ‘Omelas’ more clearly than in other works by Le Guin. For instance, The Dispossessed, despite its many ambiguities, attempts – perhaps in vain – to envision a solution to that closure, describing a better society built by revolutionary anarchists on a far-away planet. In ‘Omelas’, however, Le Guin plays with what Jameson called the ‘failure of imagination’ up to the end. After asking us to ‘imagine’ our own best utopia, she describes its awful foundations, the impossibility of transforming them, and the impossibility of imagining a better world outside of Omelas.

If so, the case of ‘Omelas’ reveals the hopelessness of change and the ambiguity of resistance against a society believed to be optimal. What can be done against a system like that of Omelas except to leave, and what does leaving mean? The story emphasizes the blurred boundary between political action, on the one hand, and mere noncompliance – in the sense of withdrawing oneself from participation in wrongdoing – on the other. In his recent book On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance, Howard Caygill conflates resistance with political action (Caygill, 2013). Quoting one of Foucault’s last interviews, he underlines that resistance is always part of power relations (Caygill, 2013: 8). Whether violent or passive, resistance, Caygill points out, invariably involves some kind of force, because the resistant agent stands and struggles against a political enemy. Resistance, therefore, is a ‘capacity’ that can thrive or be destroyed (Caygill, 2013: 165). Hannah Arendt, however, contends that ‘doing nothing’ – that is, withdrawing oneself from participation in evil – is a legitimate response to evil when the capacity to resist has been destroyed (Arendt, 2007: 468–9). In other words, withdrawal, which is not an action, and therefore not a political position, has nevertheless a moral and political value. As for Bernard Stiegler, he argues that resistance is incompatible with the imagination and invention of alternatives to the political order, and, therefore, it is not a form of political action and should not be considered in a political context (Stiegler, 2015: 76–8). The question raised by our discussion of ‘Omelas’ is therefore this: Is noncompliance a form of resistance, and, if so, can it transform the political reality?

While this question is easily understandable in an authoritarian or despotic context, it is less so in that of the city of Omelas. Its non-coercive utopian character, indeed, seems to remove not only the capacity to resist, but also the legitimacy and even the raison d’être of resistance. The narrative leaves the impression that the citizens of Omelas need obey no one but themselves, and, therefore, have no one to resist but themselves. Because nothing is said of the kind of regime that rules the city – except that it has no monarch and no secret police – we cannot know for sure that Omelas is a democracy. However, it looks as if the Omelians themselves are wholly responsible for the organization of their existence, and for the life and suffering of the child. In that sense, Omelas appears to be sovereign as a collective, where sovereignty has the sense of the ‘highest level of independently exercised power’ (Grimm, 2015: 21), also defined by Foucault as a ‘radical form of will’ (Foucault, 2003: 96). In the next section, we will examine the political configuration of the city of Omelas and the meaning of its sovereignty.

Sovereignty in Omelas

We are not told why the happiness of Omelas depends on the torture of the child. Le Guin states simply, ‘Those are the terms’, and, a few lines later, adds ‘The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child’ (Le Guin, 1979: 258). Le Guin’s elusiveness about the origins of these ‘terms’ provides the story with its enigmatic atmosphere and emphasizes its double dimension. First, the story consists of an allegory (comparable to Plato’s cave; Senior, 2005: 186); therefore, the source and cause of its circumstances are immaterial. Second, it depicts a utopia, etymologically a ‘no-place’ in which, therefore, some (though not all) constraints of realism can be neglected. For these two reasons, the ‘terms’ can be left unexplained. For the same reasons, they are, in effect, Le Guin’s own rules: the terms are hers, or, perhaps, since readers are asked to imagine Omelas in line with their uttermost wishes, ours (Adams, 1991: 41).

When we formulate the Omelas case in terms of political agency and not only in terms of a moral dilemma, however, the cause of the child’s torment matters. This is because political resistance or rebellion may take different forms depending on the party against whom one rebels or resists. As mentioned above, it is stated explicitly that Omelas has neither king nor secret police (Le Guin, 1979: 253). The omission of tribunals and punishments from the narrative suggests that these do not exist either. There seems to be no person or institution, therefore, whose function is to intimidate the Omelians and force them to keep the child in the broom closet. The terms of the bargain are of unidentified origin.

Accordingly, it may seem that ‘Omelians believe that some force, some mandate that appears to be supernatural, has put this bargain into place. They have no opportunity, then, to make their own “just discrimination of what is necessary”; necessity is imposed upon them’ (Simon, 2004: 95). To that possible belief in a transcendent origin, I would like to add three other possible understandings of the ‘force’ that has put this bargain into place.

The first interpretation is based on René Girard’s theory of the scapegoat as the foundation of human culture (let us remember that ‘as the daughter of anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, Le Guin undoubtedly was, more than most, consciously steeped in myths and rituals of sacrifice’ [Adams, 1991: 37]). The child might be seen, indeed, as a scapegoat in Girard’s sense, namely, as the arbitrary but inevitable conclusion of a society’s initial ‘mimetic’ violence, which, as such, puts an end to this violence and allows for the community’s solidarity to emerge (Girard, 1978: 33–4; Adams, 1991: 36; Wydra, 2013: 75). In Le Guin’s ‘psychomyth’ the child is a version of the sacrificial foundation of all societies. Girard makes it clear that the origin of the sacrifice is immanent, meaning that it is the community’s own way of ending violence, but he also insists that the members of the community do not understand the mechanism whereby violence is replaced by solidarity. Therefore, to Omelians the sacrifice would not appear to be the result of a rational choice, but a ‘miraculous event’ granting them peace and harmony (Girard, 1978: 36–7).

We can infer from this that no matter whether the ‘terms’ are of transcendent or immanent origin, Omelians perceive them as pure necessity – meaning that they can envision no other possible way to achieve joy and solidarity. This necessity, however, should not be understood in the Omelas case in a way that would give it an a posteriori apologetic justification, as if the result of the suffering – the happiness of all – could supersede the suffering and transform it into a myth of foundation. The sacrifice in Omelas does not take place in a single historical moment but is unending, perpetual. Hence, for Omelas, the child’s torment is neither a legendary nor hypothetical foundational event, but the city’s ‘vital organ’ (Povinelli, 2011: 3). It cannot be retroactively excused, because it takes place in an eternal present. For the Omelians, the child is being tortured right now. Therefore, their responsibility is not ‘collective’ in the sense defined by Arendt as responsibility for actions committed by members of one’s community but not personally by oneself (Arendt, 2003: 147–9). On the contrary, each Omelian is personally and actively responsible for the suffering of the child. This is the paradox of Omelas’s existence in both interpretations of the bargain discussed so far (i.e. as transcendent order or as the sacrificial foundation of society): on the one hand the bargain is a necessity imposed upon the Omelians; on the other, they are active creators of its reality.

This is so because Omelas is a city, a polis – a polity. The suffering of the child is the price that must be paid not only for the happiness of many, but for the construction of a political order. There is more at stake in Omelas than personal contentment. What is at stake is a formidable organization, which Le Guin obliquely details in her meticulous description of the Festival of Summer with which the story opens (processions, banners, trumpets, a horse race) while simultaneously downplaying it, assuring us the city has ‘singularly few’ rules and laws. The apparent focus on the festival’s ceremonial aspect rather than on the rules that underlie it is meant to underline the ‘joy’ of the city, but instead of creating a sense that rules are absent, it reinforces the impression that everything, in Omelas, has been carefully planned.

The child’s pain is the core of the rules by which Omelian society is organized. It is Omelas’s original law, its constitution. All Omelians contribute to its fulfilment: they visit the broom closet and kick the child, send their children to see it, rationalize its suffering – and march in joyful processions above its head. Contrary to how things appeared at first sight, the absence of a king does not mean an absence of power and sovereignty. Quite the opposite: sovereignty is the very author of the ‘terms’. Sovereignty is infinitely exercised by all citizens but one – and exercised on that one only. Therefore, we may add a second structural interpretation of the broom closet. The child may be considered homo sacer, in the sense famously analyzed by Agamben. He or she has been set apart from society and reduced to bare life, illustrating that ‘the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’ (Agamben, 1998: 6). In becoming the paradigmatic subject of political control, he or she constitutes a mirror-image of the sovereign: ‘The sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns’ (Agamben, 1998: 84).

Regardless of whether we understand the torture of the child as granting the peace and solidarity of the community (Girard) or exposing its regulation of bare life, namely, its biopolitical essence (Agamben), the pharmakos creates and mirrors a sovereignty shared by all but one. It is at the same time the condition of possibility of sovereignty, and the object on which sovereignty is expressed. This is why Omelas is a utopia, the best possible political enterprise: without power Omelas would be merely a fantasy, an imagined world. Utopia, as a human endeavor, acknowledges the deficiencies of human nature and the challenges of the natural environment but uses power and legal constraints to reduce and correct them (Ramiro Avilés, 2001: 234). Omelas is a utopia, therefore, because the political bargain at its core abolishes almost all possible human and natural imperfection. More: it is an archetype of utopia, a perfect perfect-society, because its constraints are concentrated on the absolute minimum of people. That is, Omelas – like all utopias – requires the ‘systematic intensification of the restraints upon which all society rests’ (Beauchamps, 1973: 285), but these restraints converge on the smallest number of recipients, on one little child.

For this reason, I suggest, Le Guin insists that the details of the child’s torment make the joy more believable. That is, they do not simply make Omelas more similar to contemporary American society, but make it more believably consistent with the most extreme political dream of late liberal modernity, in which we would be free to satisfy all possible forms of self-realization with no constraints whatsoever, all of us enjoying absolute sovereignty yet exercising it on almost no one – literally on one who is almost nobody, a feeble-minded child in a broom closet. Utopia appears here to be not an ideal exterior to our reality but the very essence, the very idea of that reality.

Therefore, I propose a third interpretation of the Omelian bargain: one in which the exclusion and torture of the child represents an irrevocable social contract where one victim is singled out as a kind of inverse Hobbesian sovereign – an individual so deprived of rights that everybody else must receive the maximum of them. If, in the Hobbesian model, the members of the community choose a sovereign who enjoys all rights in order for them to enjoy their right of life, in Le Guin’s model the chosen one is deprived of all rights except life in order for all to become sovereign and enjoy all rights. Le Guin’s ultimate version of the liberal dream, thus, is one in which the state apparatus has been reduced to almost nothing and the hedonist ideal has been illimitably expanded; in which all but one enjoy an equal (and boundless) right to power, security and growth, and, even, to generosity and compassion. One in which, finally, all restrictions, discomfort, impotence and grief are concentrated and embodied in the smallest possible area of our magnificent life: in that small creature sitting on the filthy floor of the basement broom closet. The ‘utopia’ that Le Guin rejects is at the core of our society, in which the widespread belief in general happiness and personal fulfillment come together with the acknowledgment that someone is paying a price – to be sure, a minimal price, in the sense that it is paid by a minority (of people, situations, or places), and, in any case, a price that, while well-known, is not exposed to the public. This ‘minimal price’ could also be considered a supplement, as Derrida called the pharmakon (Derrida, 1981: 169), namely, that ‘one more thing’ (Le Guin, 1979: 256) that seems to come as an afterthought in the literary description of the city, but which is in fact fundamental to its organization.

It has been rightly noted that Omelas’s utilitarian politico-economic paradigm, namely, the Western rationalization of exploitation, is supported by the religious archetype of the ‘suffering servant’ canonized in redemption theology (Collins, 1990: 531). In that reading, it is the resemblance between the two models that makes it culturally difficult to reject them: ‘The same ur-story (or ur-ur-story) is involved: exploiting the peoples of the third world or one’s indigenous unprivileged groups (blacks, women, the poor generally) is homologous to being redeemed by the “suffering servant”’ (Collins, 1990: 531). Indeed, this is probably what Le Guin had in mind when she mentioned both James and Dostoyevsky in her brief remarks introducing ‘Omelas’. What I wish to emphasize here, however, is that, counterintuitively, the acute problem revealed in the story is not only the suffering, seen as a least necessary evil or as a redeeming sacrifice, but the Omelians’ shared power and conception of the good life. That is, the difficulty of our times is not so much that there must be a scapegoat, but that (almost) everyone agrees on the definition of the good life which requires that scapegoat, and that, therefore, the only imaginable way of improving this life is by reducing the number affected by the sacrifice, not eliminating it altogether.

The problem, therefore, is that there is no alternative to the Omelian way of life: it is universally regarded as the absolute best – and Le Guin made sure her readers would be convinced of this by asking them to construct their own utopia: ‘It would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids’ (Le Guin, 1979: 254). The conundrum of the Omelas situation – and of late capitalism – is that there is no one to rebel against, because all (but one) are convinced that it represents the best possible bargain, and that, therefore, there is nowhere else to go. What may exist beyond Omelas is ‘even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness, I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist’ (Le Guin, 1979: 259). Omelas’s version of happiness seems to have destroyed all other potential and even imagined versions of it, reminding us of Mark Fisher’s notion of ‘capitalist realism’, i.e. ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher, 2009: 2; see Jameson, 2005: xii). One point must be added here. ‘Omelas’ was written in the 1970s, at the time neoliberal practices, as we know them today, were just beginning to be implemented (Harvey, 2005: 1–2). The transparent distrust of popular sovereignty, formulated by Friedrich Hayek in his 1973–9 opus Law, Legislation and Liberty, and manifested later on not only by world market agencies but also by national policies, had not yet become totally apparent. For that reason, ‘Omelas’ represents a critique of a system endorsed by citizens who are actively part of it and responsible for it, a system in which popular sovereignty has not yet been overtly questioned.

Leaving Omelas

The fact that some people leave Omelas is extraordinary – ‘quite incredible’ (Le Guin, 1979: 259). Le Guin presumes that in life, as in her utopia, most people would stay. In the story, however, the act of walking away has no clear meaning. If, indeed, those who walk away do so because of their opposition to the injustice of the broom closet, their way of expressing that opposition is not unambiguous. Walking away does nothing to either liberate the child or change the Omelas system. Those who leave sacrifice their perfect lives, but, apparently, they do this neither for the child’s sake nor for a visible common cause. They renounce joy in favor of a lonely existence that will make no difference to anyone but themselves. One may therefore wonder: if their own welfare counts less than the anguish generated in them by the suffering of the child, namely, if they are generous enough to surrender their own rights and good life – why then do they protect the good life enjoyed by the other Omelians? Ready to forgo their own personal contentment, why do they not go one step further and liberate the child, at the cost of destroying Omelas’s prosperity?

We can imagine two immediate answers to this question. The first is that those who walk away from Omelas authentically believe that they cannot make a difference – that nothing can be achieved (or perhaps only that they can achieve nothing) to reshape Omelas’s politico-economic organization. They are too few; they are isolated and have no means of identifying others who might share their disagreement; and they lack the tools – political inspiration, material resources, physical strength – to envision an alternative collective welfare and a path to build it (Roemer, 1991: 14). Perhaps they are even ignorant of the political implications of their feelings. Quoting Arendt’s 1943 paper ‘We Refugees’, we could say that those who leave Omelas care ‘less about political events but more about [their] dear own selves … [they] became witnesses … of worse terrors than death – without having been able to discover a higher ideal than life. Thus … [they] became neither willing nor able to risk [their] lives for a cause’ (Arendt, 2007: 266). Their opposition is purely individual, and for that reason, as Arendt would have it, it is arguably selfish.

Seen this way, leaving Omelas is an expression of noncompliance, but one in which a political crisis has been converted into a ‘crisis of consciousness’ (Khouri, 1980: 55) and has thereby been entirely defused. Leaving is equivalent ‘to not vot[ing], to not act[ing]’ (Wyman, 2012: 230) and, thus, to ‘betraying the social contract and abdicating responsibility for the child’s lot’ (Wyman, 2012: 228). As we saw earlier, Omelas’s social contract consists precisely of taking responsibility for the child’s torment, and only of that. Rejecting it means refusing not only the contract’s benefits but also all political commitment and accountability. For that reason, this form of resistance can hardly be regarded as political action. Withdrawal is here founded on a moral opinion, but it repudiates or abrogates the political meaning and consequences of that opinion. As a result, and unsurprisingly, this position is indifferently received in Omelas. Nobody cares if conscientious objectors leave. Not only will the structure of Omelas remain unchanged by their departure, but its basic idea, its justification, is left unaffected.

We must emphasize here the absence of barbed wire to keep dissenters in, or pursuit and repression of those who disagree with the system. Discussions of noncompliance and defection generally focus on ‘those individuals in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Cambodia, or Bosnia who chose to risk serious harm and even death in order to separate themselves from a system of normalized violence’ (Mohamed and Murray, 2017: 233). The case of Omelas, however, is different: those who leave risk nothing but loneliness and the loss of a happiness of which they had already been deprived the moment they saw the child. Their position is far less dangerous and, accordingly, less heroic than that of individuals who separate themselves from a repressive tyranny.

The absence of violent despotism, however, makes the Omelas dystopia even more appalling. The Omelians so deeply associate the good life with their ‘constitution’ that the desertion of some members becomes insignificant. Terror and punishment are unnecessary because the citizens of Omelas are authentically convinced, with no doubt whatsoever, that they are in the right. They acknowledge the cruelty of the child’s fate and they feel compassion, but their faith in the perfection of their social organization is so strong that it is wholly unmoved by other perspectives. Indeed, we can go even a step further and argue that the freedom to leave, the absence of walls or gates, is yet further evidence, for the Omelians, that their city is the best possible polity. It is an organization that, like capitalism itself, makes dissent not only possible but necessary – proof, once again, that a society able to accept such dissent is the best possible one (Fisher, 2009: 9).

There is a second way to understand the individual response to the political problem of Omelas. By this reading, the reason those who leave Omelas do not act to put an end to the horror – the reason they merely walk away – is that they are convinced, like everybody else, that Omelas offers the best possible life. They cannot bear to see the child’s suffering, but they are still part of the hegemonic discourse: they believe that the joy of the city is a perfect joy. Like other Omelians they tell themselves that the child cannot be saved, that ‘after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in’ (Le Guin, 1979: 258) – an echo of the widespread belief that, for example, children who labor in sweatshops would be poorer and suffer more abuse without such work. Those who leave Omelas do so not because they think Omelas should be changed and they cannot change it, but because they cannot personally face the price needed to keep the system going.

Not only is noncompliance in this case not an act of resistance; it does not even express or derive from a disagreement with the system as a whole. The discomfort of those who leave is an emotion (as James suggested) triggered by a specific element of the political order, but one which does not put that order into question. It is, however, strong enough to spoil the feeling of perfect happiness. Therefore, the fact that those who leave Omelas renounce joy should not be completely deprecated. Those who walk away have been so altered by what they saw that they cannot continue to be part of the feast. They no longer delight in Omelas’s communal life, they can no longer act the part. They can only withdraw and seek a place to heal and restore their balance, while the child in the broom closet continues to moan and endure the kicks of visitors. Leaving Omelas, in this context, is comparable to a spiritual retreat or ascetic separation, or even psychological breakdown. It is what happens when people lose their ability to deal with society’s trade-offs and respond by removing themselves. There is no way to ascertain that these individuals are making a moral and political choice rather than following the only option available to them psychologically.

Noncompliance and Political Agency

So far, it seems that we can interpret the leaving of Omelas in two ways. One way is as an expression of ideological dissent. In this case, walking away is an act of resistance; but it cannot be considered political action because it in fact represents a disengagement from political responsibility. The other way is as a reaction to sadness and discomfort. In this case, the act of leaving is merely an emotional expression of disagreement: it cannot even be considered resistance. Either way, however, it can be argued that those who leave Omelas necessarily have the material means and resources to do so. Being healthy and well-fed, they can choose not to face the horrific source of their health and wealth. They abandon their perfect lives and their beautiful city, but we have no indication that they leave empty-handed. Perhaps they withdraw simply to rebuild a life of privilege somewhere else. It is, therefore, important to emphasize again the difference between noncompliance in repressive and non-repressive regimes. In situations of political oppression, noncompliance defies the regime, and may contribute to overthrowing it and ending the repression. At the very least, it represents a remnant of decency in a society that has become ruthless. As Arendt wrote, under conditions of terror ‘most people will comply but some people will not … no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation’ (Arendt, 1994: 233). In such circumstances, it is just the ‘possibility of “nonparticipation” … that is decisive if we begin to judge, not the system, but the individual, his choices, and his arguments’ (Arendt, 2007: 469). In a free society based on atrocious but localized injustice, however, disagreement and disengagement are yet another means of expressing a freedom that is founded, precisely, on that injustice. In other words, disagreement and disengagement do not lead to any kind of political ‘invention’ but rather to the ‘sterilization’ of thinking and acting (Stiegler, 2015: 76).

Le Guin never revealed whether or not she supported this criticism of those who leave the city, leading scholars to wonder and argue (Mamola, 2018: 151; Wyman, 2012: 228). However, in ‘The Day Before the Revolution’, the story that follows ‘Omelas’ in the volume The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, she indicated that some of those who walk away do show political initiative, and she provided a favorable portrait of their political invention (Roemer, 1991: 13). That story, first published in 1974, focuses on Laia Asieo Odo, the creator of the doctrine that led to the establishment of the utopia described in The Dispossessed, also published in that year. The day in the life of Laia Odo that constitutes the subject of ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ takes place generations before the plot of The Dispossessed. This day is seemingly the last before her death and the general strike that will lead to the foundation of an ‘Odonian’ society on the planet Anarres, in The Dispossessed. In her introduction to the story, Le Guin explains the meaning of Odonian anarchism, whose ‘principal target is the authoritarian state (capitalist or socialist) … [and whose] principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid)’. She concludes her remarks with the sentence: ‘This story is about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas’ (Le Guin, 1979: 260).

What Le Guin means by ‘authoritarian state’ seems ‘classical’ in light of her references to Shelley, Kropotkin, Goldman, Goodman, and Taoist thought (Le Guin, 1979: 260), and of the decentralized society depicted in The Dispossessed. The mention of Omelas, however, reveals that the problem of the authoritarian state is not only, or even not essentially, its centralized power and restriction of individual freedoms, but more acutely the fact that its sovereignty exists and operates at somebody’s expense, in terms of both political identity and material reality. As a result, the antidote to such ‘authoritarianism’ is a cooperation which is by definition universal: there cannot be solidarity and mutual aid in a society founded on the suffering of anyone sequestered in a broom closet (or elsewhere). The political invention emphasized by Le Guin in ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ is a transformation not of the human condition but of the structures of power: misery, waste, cruelty will probably continue to exist, but not as ‘the source of profit and the means of power for other people’ (Le Guin, 1979: 274).

Thus, the real utopia seems to be not the incredible happiness of Omelas but the unimaginable non-place that is far away from it (Collins, 1990: 531), on another planet, as described in The Dispossessed. When ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ is read together with ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ and The Dispossessed, it becomes possible to envision that those who leave Omelas include people with political imagination, creativity and hope. Their noncompliance may not entail a renunciation of political responsibility but, quite the opposite, a wish to create a new framework for that responsibility. The ones who walk away from Omelas are not looking for happiness, freedom, equality, security, or abundance, but for a form of power that is not defined at the expense of others, and that is regulated neither by popular rule nor by utility criteria, but by remembrance of the suffering child in the broom closet.

What appears, however, is that in conditions of general satisfaction based on injustice, change is possible only away from the satisfied community. So long as a society has a strong sense of its own freedom and happiness, its injustices cannot be reformed from within. And indeed, the fact that creative agency is possible only outside the general consent to injustice means that the child in the broom closet will never be helped. However important reforms might be, they will not change the essence of Omelas. Liberation is possible only if the Omelians can be convinced that there exist radically different forms of happiness. Obviously, when this happens, it will be too late for the child now in the broom closet. Therefore, Le Guin’s vision of resistance does not call for the emancipation of those who suffer but promotes a universal transformation of society. She imagines parallel alternatives that would satisfy those able to eschew the common conception of happiness. Interestingly, moreover, she makes it clear that those who suffer are not capable of agency. There is no rebellion in the broom closet, and no collaboration between the tormented one and his or her fellow citizens. Those who walk away are not the wretched of the earth, but privileged residents able to question and relinquish their privilege, who will possibly create a better society. If ‘Omelas’ is a fable about our current society, it is our entire conception of the good life that must be reconsidered.