Omelas: How We Talk About Utopia

“this is actually dumb as hell” fav joel quote

I don't think the statement "there's no good without evil yada yadda" is true even in a purely "language just works that way". Even if nobody in the world could see and it had always been that way, I don't see a reason why people wouldn't be able to come up with words for sightedness and blindness. We come up with words for abilities and senses that don't exist all the time, that are just part of our imagination. We can make words for people that are wizards or telepathic and can think of words for the absence of those senses that would describe our state (normie, muggle, mundane). The whole "there's no pleasure without pain" thing is silly and wrong and kind of mean most of the time.

Isn't Omelas pretty much the movie Snowpiercer with the little boy running the engine?

"This is actually dumb as hell" -Person witnessing child torture beautiful explanation btw

I totally get it. Love you Joel!! He's totally exposing these supposed nuggets of wisdom for what they are....all bullshit.

Right I’d say phoebe is correct on this one. What I’m trying to say isn’t “trolly problem bad” but that the story isn’t best read as a trolly problem and is in some way a critique of our need to conceptualize good things as a thing born of trolly problems.

Big Joel

I get that, but I'm still torn on this one. I could see this as a solid critique of neoliberalism, and all the horrible things people are taught to accept as the price of the best of all possible worlds, when in fact society would much better if we didn't sacrifice individuals like this. On the other hand, some of his commentary came off to me as "let's not examine our moral principles, since this exact situation would never happen."

He's not critiquing the hypothetical itself, I think he's critiquing the fact that we immediately accept the necessity of the kid getting tortured to make the society utopian. Also the fact that ppl have taken this very explicit commentary by Le Guin about our need to include pain in pleasure and just made it a moral dilemma, proving her point by accepting the completely unrealistic terms of the question.

Gorgeous video. I love this kinda stuff. Questions the way we think about morality and narratives on a very fundamental level. You mention the trolley problem, and I've been wondering a similar thing about that: why are in the story exactly 5 people tied to the railway tracks? Why not 2, or 100? Would it matter? Who came up with that number?

Teun

I’m not sure I get this one. Yeah it’s a hypothetical it’s not meant to be realistic it’s just meant to test moral principles. Criticizing a hypothetical for not being realistic is like criticizing schindlers list for not being funny

Neat video. Honestly I'm a bit stunned that people manage to read it in any other way than what you lay out here. Most of her stories are a lot more open to interpretation, this one she just straight up tells you what it's about over and over in the text. Anyway everyone should read The Dispossessed

Sixfoot Ant

Good video! An extra-textual support for your reading of Omelas is Le Guin's commentary on her short story "The Day Before the Revolution". The story is about Laia Asieo Odo, the founder of the anarchist society explored more in-depth in The Dispossessed. Le Guin describes Laia as "One of the ones who walk from Omelas." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Before_the_Revolution

Alice