Omelas: a Mirror of Our World

Can happiness exist if it is built upon the suffering of others?

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Verónica A.V. Blanco Gandía

In conversation with one of the students selected to take part in the Olimpiada Filosófica de España, I was reminded of a short story I read several years ago. When I first read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin, something broke inside me. Not because of what the story reveals—because, deep down, we already knew it—but because of the clarity, the almost revelatory way in which it is presented. There are texts that are not merely read; they are endured. This is one of those texts.

As a philosophy teacher, I often find myself contemplating what kind of knowledge truly transforms us: The kind we deliberate over, or the kind that pierces us to the core? This story reminded me that lucidity always demands a price.

Omelas is an incredible utopia—a city without monarchies, without police, without crime, where happiness flourishes and is shared by all. But there is one non-negotiable condition for this happiness: a child, locked away, alone, filthy, naked, reduced to a state of perpetual humiliation. “its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores”, Le Guin writes with brutal honesty. And everyone knows. At least, all the adults do. There is no ignorance—only acceptance.

How often is our daily comfort sustained by the silenced pain of others? How many of our luxuries and conveniences are underpinned by a network of exploitation we simply choose not to acknowledge? How many Omelas exist in our world?

The hidden cost of happiness

Le Guin’s story distils, in just a few pages, some of the most profound philosophical tensions of our time: the tension between justice and happiness, between the individual and the collective, between morality and the system. Omelas exists in a state of calculated harmony, not unlike many of our liberal democracies: seemingly free, yet firmly rooted in deeply unequal structures.

Our global economy, apparently based on efficiency and free markets, obscures a harsh reality: entrenched and structural inequality. The clothes we wear, the food we consume, the technology that connects us—all are produced through supply chains that, more often than not, begin in conditions of hardship.

We know there are children working in coltan mines in the Congo. We know that T-shirts are sewn in Bangladesh for pitiful wages. We know that much of our fruit is harvested by migrant hands under inhumane conditions. We know. And, as in Omelas, we choose to continue.

It is here that the words of William James—whom Le Guin cites as an inspiration—resound: “Even if we were tempted to grasp such offered happiness, only a very particular and independent emotion could make us feel the utter repugnance of enjoying it at the price of accepting such a bargain”. That particular emotion is, without a doubt, our ethical sense—the ability to refuse to look away, even when doing so means breaking the pact.

Privilege: A willing blindness

In my classroom, I often reflect on how to convey this discomfort without descending into cynicism. For ethics, ultimately, is not about knowing what is right or wrong, but about acting upon that awareness. And that is the real turning point in Le Guin’s story: there are those who know, who feel the indignation—and remain. And there are those who walk away. The ones who leave Omelas.

We do not know where they go. We do not even know if such a place exists. But they leave. They break the pact. And that act—profoundly uncertain, solitary—is perhaps the only ethical gesture available. I like to believe that walking away from the system, even when we do not know where the path leads, is itself a form of resistance.

Perhaps Le Guin is not calling on us to destroy the system (after all, this is not a story of revolution), but rather to open our eyes and take responsibility for the price of our comfort. And if we choose to remain, then at least let us do so with full knowledge, aware of the cost we are willing to bear. “Their tears at the injustice dry when they begin to perceive and accept the terrible justice of reality”.

An ethics of dissent?

Ultimately, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is not so much a denunciation as an invitation: to look at the world without anaesthesia, to perceive it through an ethical and compassionate lens. It presents us with a question that the ancient Greek philosophers also grappled with: is it preferable to suffer an injustice, or to be complicit in committing one?

I do not have definitive answers—only the certainty that no joy can be genuine if it is built upon the suffering of others. Omelas reminded me that ethics begins where comfort ends. And that, while walking away from the city may be fraught with uncertainty and risk, it is sometimes the only path that allows us to preserve our humanity.

Thank you, Lucía.

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Le Guin, Ursula K. (2016). Los que se marchan de Omelas. Traducción y edición: Biblioteca Anarquista La Revoltosa.

James, William (1897). The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. En The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Longmans, Green, and Co.

Bauman, Zygmunt (2003). Vidas desperdiciadas: La modernidad y sus parias. Paidós.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

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