The Kid In The Omelas Hole Doesn’t Matter

I recently read Isabel Kim’s Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole, and it brought back a lot of thoughts about Ursula Le Guin’s original The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. When looking up people’s thoughts on the original piece, the debate seems to inevitably revolve around the kid in the hole, and the moral implications of their existence. Would you live in Omelas, or would you choose to walk away? Granted, that is unquestionably the most seemingly direct concern, the most shocking aspect of the story, the one that creates the biggest emotional impact after the first read-through, but to think that Le Guin would create such a nuanced allegory with the sole purpose of holding up a glorified trolley problem to the reader is, I feel, diminishing.

The question itself (Would you leave or stay in Omelas?) is inconsequential, the suffering of the kid in the Omelas hole is completely irrelevant, and the reason for this is twofold.

Firstly, the author is not really asking whether you would stay or not — rather, she is making the path that you have taken clear to you by distilling it into its barest bones. To wonder what stance one would take in this hypothetical scenario is fruitless, when in fact most adults living in first world countries, such as myself, have made that choice. Le Guin herself made that choice. Instead of exchanging the pain of one “load-bearing suffering child”, as Isabel Kim puts it, for the perfect utopia, we have outdone the premise completely by accepting the suffering of millions for the sake of a deeply flawed society. The choice at the core of it all is, fundamentally, the same. It changes only in scale. The point is not to wonder about what you would do, but rather to consciously (and conscientiously) come to realise that this is, in fact, a choice that we, as a society and as individuals, are already making.

Le Guin was a vocal critic of capitalism. A quote comes to mind: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” However, with this story I do not feel like she’s criticising only capitalism. In Omelas, she criticises social democracy itself: she shows us how we’ve grown comfortable under our green, democratic, progressive governments, all while the hard labour is outsourced from faraway places that we need only be superficially aware of. This superficiality is even more effective than trying to hide the fact of the matter outright: let the people be aware, just like everyone in Omelas was taken to see the kid in the hole. At the end of the day, the kid still rots — and everyone else’s lives are made easier for it.

I found Kim’s story to hit particularly well on this point, as she plays out the story on a modern stage, describing authentically how social media would be used to quiet people’s moral qualms without the need to bring about effective change. I remember the visitors’ words as the final notes of the story ring: “What a pit in the ground. What a fucked up little trolley problem. What a lesson for us. Thank God we don’t live there. Thank God we know it exists.”

Secondly, the author makes it clear from the start that the kid in the hole is a mirage, a mere device to make Omelas more believable. At the start of the story, she invites us to imagine the city as whatever we’d like it to be, our own personal utopia, challenging us to envision something truly good without it seeming completely unrealistic (“If so, add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate”). She comes down harshly on the widespread idea that joy only makes sense when cast against a backdrop of suffering. She blames “pedants and sophisticates” for this idea, tearing into the customary artistic idealisation of pain as the only legitimate way towards intelligent, nuanced, meaningful art. In this way, we are encouraged to believe in the pragmatism of the utopia: a better world, rid of suffering for all, is possible. Joyful art should be made — and taken seriously. The fact that the discussion around The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas tends to orbit around the suffering child seems to prove Le Guin’s point rather ironically: “Only evil is intellectual, only pain is interesting.” It is the kid in the hole that makes Omelas credible to the reader, it’s the suffering that gives happiness its meaning — such is the author’s underlying critique.

The question that inevitably remains is: does Ursula fall prey to her own conundrum? At the end of the story, the people who walk away from Omelas do so in response to their experience of witnessing the child in the hole. One could reasonably assume that it’s their anguish and disapproval of the situation that leads them to seek out a better way of doing things. Does this not mean that whatever true utopia they go on to build will also depend on the load-bearing suffering child? Was the child not necessary in order to instil the sense of responsibility and duty that led to the building of a better tomorrow? Will the children and grandchildren of these true utopians have what it takes to maintain this idyllic civilization standing, without ever having been exposed to suffering? The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas doesn’t touch on these questions, but I have recently dived into The Dispossessed, and I might come somewhat closer to what Le Guin thinks about them.

A good friend argued that the ones who leave Omelas have not truly experienced suffering, but rather a passing down of societal experience, and thus this whole line of questioning does not need to be put forth in the first place. This doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t think anything short of anguish and true loss of innocence would trigger such a strong desire for direct action. It must take enormous courage to leave everything you know in search of — or in the hope of building — something new.

We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?