All the people of Omelas need to do is nothing. Yes, nothing. If they do nothing, then they can keep enjoying the lives they have. They can keep their possessions. Their pleasures. Their prosperity. And the city of Omelas IS prosperous in all respects. The utopia that we all dream of. In Omelas, the people’s wants and needs are met. Imagine anything you ever wanted. Anything. Whether that’s healthy children. Or material possessions. Or all the sex you could ever want. Omelas has it. And it has all this, with the only consequence being that they do nothing for the one child below the city. The one child restrained by chains. The one child sleeping in his or her own feces. That’s the bargain. That the people do nothing for this child. If they keep the bargain, they keep their lives. If they so much as offer a clean rug to the child, it all disappears.
What They Say
The people know of the child. Every person is told of the child by the time they are ten, when they are mature enough to understand. Hurting the child is wrong. The people know that. They know that well. And they feel all the familiar feelings we all feel when we see something bad going on. They feel anger at this injustice. They feel outrage at what is being done to the child. Explanations are given as to why this needs to be done, but the feelings stay the same. They know that feeding the child would be good. It would be right. It would be kind. They are allowed to see the child. And every time they do, there is nothing but sadness in their eyes. They know it is wrong. They know this well.
What They do
But the bargain remains. Do anything kind to this child, and all you have come to enjoy is gone. And so no one does anything. Many of them have rationalized their inaction. Doing anything kind for the one child under the city will jeopardize the lives of the many children above it. Besides, the child has been under for so long, it is not a child anymore, but a feral animal. Why sacrifice so much for a child that could hardly fit in society, even with tremendous work to help it do so. At least its suffering means something. It is not wasted. And so the majority of people continue with their lives. But a small minority are unable to bear continuing with this knowledge. But rather than do anything, this small minority sets off into the mountains. No one knows what there is out the mountains. But this small minority sets out, seemingly knowing what they seek out there. These people are the ones who walk way from Omelas.
What Mr. K Says
Mr. K loves his country, for the most part. Mr. K wants the best for his country. But wanting the best also means that he recognizes that there are things that are imperfect about it. And one of the things imperfect about his country is the level of corruption. He knows corruption is wrong. He knows this well. And he is often both astonished and disgusted at the blatant disregard with which a lot of the corruption is perpetrated. He is aware of the cost of corruption. He knows how it affects the health system, mostly through his family members, who are part of that system. He knows how it affects young people looking for jobs, because not long ago he was one of those young people looking for jobs. He knows the cost. And this knowledge makes him angry. It makes him outraged.
What Mr. K Does
Mr. K recently came up against a bunch of trailers getting inspected, causing traffic to come to a halt. He decided, just as many others were, to overtake on a continuous yellow line. He got stopped by the police for doing so. And when the police came up to him, he bantered with them a little before handing over some cash to them. He hates that he did it, but he rationalized it away. He was in a hurry, to do something important. He values his time. He didn’t want to waste it. Besides, the system is extremely slow and expensive. It’s just easier to ‘buy them lunch’ and get it done with. This way, he doesn’t have to deal with a broken system. He said these same rationalizations when, during Covid, he got arrested for not wearing his seatbelt in a matatu. He uses these rationalizations when he needs to get a government service. He turns away when he sees a conductor going to ‘talk’ to the police behind the car. But when he’s asked about it, he says that it’s system that is rotten. All he is, is a victim of the system.
The Oppressor and the Oppressed
In the book “Man’s Search for Meaning,”, Viktor Frankl recites a story where he and and a fellow comrade from the concentration camps are returning to their stations. They come across a green field of crops. Viktor choses to avoid the field, but his comrade has other ideas. The comrade grabs Viktor and drags him across the field, menacingly stomping on all the crops, making sure they are as destroyed as they can be. Viktor questions him on why he’d do that. The comrade says that these people had taken everything he ever loved from him. That these people had made him suffer. And that his suffering had given him the right. The permission. This was a man that knew well what it meant to be oppressed. And he knew that oppression was not right. He knew it well. But the instant he got just a little power, a little agency, he chose to become the oppressor.
Shaun recounts of a passage from the graphic novel Maus where a concentration camp survivor named Spiegelman gets racist towards a black hitchhiker. He thinks that the black man is a thief. A comrade confronts him, asserting that his views compare to that of the Nazis towards his kind. Spiegelman pushes back against this, saying that one cannot compare a his kind to a black man. He seems to imply that what the Nazi did to him was unacceptable. That it was wrong. But that what he just did to the black man wasn’t.
It’s About to get Preachy
A lot of things are usually bad when someone else does it. But when it comes to ourselves, it makes sense. We can rationalize for our own actions. We are less willing to rationalize those of others. I have seen people call out things as bad. Things they go on to do themselves. And when you call out these things, one of the most common rebuttals you get is ‘well they did it too!’ But to quote Shaun from above, you cannot claim moral superiority when asking for support, then claim moral equivalence to excuse your actions. You cannot complain that what someone else is doing is wrong, but then go ahead and do it yourself, using the fact that someone else did it as an excuse.
And before I get accused of encouraging people to walk away with the story of the people of Omelas, I want to point out that there is one action that the people in that story fail to do. The most obvious action. The most moral one. They would much rather ignore and continue with their lives, or walk away, before they do the one thing they know is right. They have justified their actions for so long, that they have started to believe themselves.
I’m an scientist at heart. As such, I have a clear understanding that the direction in which any system moves is determined rarely by a big overarching decision, but by a series of small decisions on the individual level that aggregate into the big decision. So long as the aggregate of those small decisions point in the wrong direction, the overall system will too. I’m a big proponent of always starting with self. That’s the whole basis of a democracy. The power lies with the individual. If the individual doesn’t change, nothing will.
The thing about Mr. K above is that he seems to think that the system is an outside thing that exists outside of himself. When Mr. K above complains that the police are corrupt, he seems to think that the police can be corrupt by themselves, without the people, without him. And so he blames them. But the thing Mr. K misses is that the police expect the people to offer a bribe just as much as the people expect the police to ask for a bribe. It’s not a parasitic relationship. It’s symbiotic.