The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Variations on a theme by William James) is a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. It won the Hugo Award (in science fiction) for short stories in 1974.
In the story, Omelas is a utopian city of happiness and delight, whose inhabitants are smart and cultured. Everything about Omelas is pleasing, except for the secret of the city: the good fortune of Omelas requires that a single unfortunate child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness and misery, and that all her citizens should be told of this on coming of age.
After being exposed to the truth, most of the people of Omelas are initially shocked and disgusted, but are ultimately able to come to terms with the fact and resolve to live their lives in such a manner as to make the suffering of the unfortunate child worth it. However, some few of the citizens, young or old, silently walk away from the city, and no one knows where they go. The story ends with “The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
You can read the story in its entirety at http://harelbarzilai.org/words/omelas.txt The following is a brief excerpt—
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.
The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect.
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.
Le Guin’s commentary—
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas
“The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat”, writes Le Guin, “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.”
The quote from William James is:
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 torture, what except a specific 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?
Le Guin hit upon the name of the town on seeing a road sign for Salem, Oregon, in a car mirror. “[… People ask me] ‘Where do you get your ideas from, Ms. Le Guin?’ From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?”
We all are living in Omelas right now
I’m sure that, given all the recent on-line debates over the current health care bill, it’s pretty obvious where I’m going with this. According to the best of our American values, what we should have gotten was what citizens in every other part of the developed world take for granted—access to health care for all citizens, no exceptions. Apparently the best we can manage is eventual access to inadequate insurance for most of us, and what we got reflects our very worst values, chief of which is that your access to health care should depend only on how much money you have. Our brave new call to solidarity is “An injury to one is, after all, only an injury to one. Just ignore it and count your blessings.”
Yes, with more subsidized access to insurance, even inadequate insurance, fewer will die. Given that in nine years 35 million will still lack such access, instead of 46,000 dying a year, there will be 15,000 or fewer dying nine years from now. Kids with pre-existing conditions will no longer be denied coverage as of right now, but their parents will have to wait until 2014. Young adults 23-26 can remain on their parents’ plan, except for those whose parents don’t have insurance, can’t afford to add them, or kicked them out of the house years ago.
We have indeed made a start on emptying out our room full of non-persons, though we are nowhere near getting the number down to one as the fictional citizens of Omelas did. You see the big problem with the slowly emptying room, I hope. The lower the number of people still in it, the easier it will be for everybody else to ignore them permanently.
That has been our biggest political problem in trying to achieve universal health care all along—about 85% of us are never going to get really expensively sick. 5% of the population in every age group accounts for 50% of the health care expenses for that group. 15% account for 85%, and line of least resistance for the remaining mostly healthy 85% is to just ignore the unfortunates hidden in the basement. The healthy majority remains free to think that such insurance as they have is probably pretty good, an opinion about as well-informed as their opinions about how good their fire extinguishers are. 46,000 dead is less than a tenth of a percent of the population; 350,000 bankruptcies amounts to only 1% of the population. According to the California Nurses, 21% of claims are denied, which means that four out of five are not denied. If most people are just fine, it’s very easy to ignore the small minority who are not.
No, I am not happy at all about “reform,” and even the batshit crazy sociopathology of its right wing opponents doesn’t change that for me. Le Guin’s fictional solution of just leaving Omelas won’t work for me either, though it has for people like one of the former chairs of Health Care for All-WA. Dr. Bramhall used to be the only MD psychiatrist in Washington State who would see Medicaid patients. Her reimbursments had dwindled for years. She gave up her car and moved to an apartment on Pill Hill near her practice to save money and keep helping the desperate people she worked with. Eventually, she could not afford health care for herself, a very bad situation for someone of late middle age to be in. Luckily for her, New Zealand was very happy to pay for her health care in exchange for making her professional skills available to their population.
Permanently breaking down the door to the basement room is the only thing that will get everybody out of our Room of Non-Persons. I truly believe that most of the people cheering in the streets for the release of some fully intend to go back down at some time or another for the rest. But, based on quite a bit of past history, if that were really likely to happen Le Guin would never have felt the need to write her story at all.
