the ones who walk away from omelas by ursula leguin

Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. “The trouble is that we have a bad habit,” she writes, “encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. To LeGuin, then, happiness is a complex and precarious emotion, an idea that she believes challenges entrenched ideas about happiness. They do not have technologies that are wholly unnecessary, though, like “cars or helicopters in and above the streets.” Such things, LeGuin suggests, are too pleasurable-much like addictive drugs-and they therefore would invite emotions destructive to happiness, upsetting the careful balance the town must strike to preserve its joy. The town is bountiful in necessities, and it has non-necessities that make life more pleasant without making it too complex: subway trains, for instance, or air conditioning. They state, “Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.” For this reason, the townspeople are discerning about what aspects of life they embrace and reject. However, happiness does not exist solely due to the child’s suffering the narrator also suggests other, secondary conditions for the town’s happiness. Therefore, the story suggests not only that suffering enables joy, but also that suffering and joy are always intermingled, and that achieving happiness requires an intimate understanding of grief.

The price of happiness, in other words, is suffering, and without one the other cannot exist. The fundamental condition of life in Omelas is that, in order for society to be happy, the child must suffer without reprieve. Even in her imagined city of perfect happiness, LeGuin insists that one child must suffer extreme neglect and torture so the other citizens may experience joy. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” posits that there can be no happiness without suffering.

The ones who walk away from omelas by ursula leguin