One source of the power in Ursula Le Guin’s writing is in the unreality of the world she is describing.

It is hard to imagine it.

Which is just as well. By taking the reader away from the familiar, and from fascinating tropes such as the magical carpets and the Disc-shaped world and the luggage that follows its owner (as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld does), she brings to high relief the human nature of her characters.

In this very short story, Le Guin describes a carnival celebration in the city of Omelas.

Her descriptions aren’t there to excite us. She talks of people happy at the triumphant sense of life. People having unfettered access to pleasure-enhancing and yet non-habit forming drugs. Children playing around and rejoicing, riding on horses.

It is a utopia, in which the residents are truly happy. This isn’t the happiness of the soldier whose happiness comes from the sense of vanquishing an opponent. It is true, wholesome happiness, in the best sense of the word.

But.

The one caveat to this happiness is that it depends on the misery of one child, locked up in a dungeon of the powerful.

A rite of passage for any residence is witnessing this child’s misery. They witness the child, deeply unhappy, sobbing on the dirty floor of the windowless cold dungeon room.

But for me, the child’s misery, immense as it is by itself, is not important. Maybe it comes from my position of relative privilege.

The important part for me is: the individual’s struggle with the idea that their happiness depends on the misery of the child. There are roughly two responses:

  1. Accepting - The individual concludes that the world is a harsh, unequal, unfair place. And that one should be happy with their own lot in the world.

  2. Rejecting - The individual concludes that this is a trade-off that they are incapable of making. They can’t be complicit in a social system that derives its stability from the misery of others. They leave. They are the rebels, they don’t accept the status quo. Their act of rebellion is not towards a utopia. Their act of rebellion is a profoundly human rebellion, against a world order that has codified an unfair rule.

This reminds me of the trolley problem.

The Trolley Problem

Michael Sandel introduces his Harvard philosophy lectures with the Trolley problem. The crux of the problem is: You see a train running towards a track where there are 5 people standing, unaware of its approach. You are in charge of the course of the train. You can actively change its course to another track, where there’s only one person standing. Will you switch the track, to bring down the loss of life from 5 to 1, but in the process martyring the one person?

This philosophy problem, and its variations, are an abstraction of the many real-life dilemmas that we face.

The material luxury of laptops and ACs we live in depends on a System that also involves people working slave-like at mines. It depends on sweatshop workers in fast-fashion factories inhaling toxic fumes. The fact that they are removed from us in time and space does not quite reprieve us from responsibility. So how do we react? Do we shrug and accept, or do we rebel?

Le Guin’s interest is in the ones who rebel. That’s where she leaves us. What are they thinking?