Walking away from Omelas
Oct 28, 2004

Hello, some of you may or may not have noticed that I deleted the last recent entry about Lady Olivia, she now resides at Muse Sings (the main page of my collection of journals). That is just a minor side note. Today's entry I would like to discuss/think about a pretty good short by Ursual K Le Guin. It's called "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."

If you have not read this short, you really should, it's pretty darn good and if you let it, it can make you think. It's told in a very personable and yet still exquisite way. This captivating short is told in story-teller fashion (listening to someone tell the story like you would a grandfather or summat) and she makes it work wonderfully. You can find it here.

If you have not read it and do not want to spoil the story any, I suggest you try to find it before you read what I have to say/think about it. Leave now if that is your choice, you can come back once you've read it ^_^ For those of you who know me personally (as in in person), you can ask to borrow my copy of it to read.

So, one thing I know for certain in reading this story is that I would not go home and rage and cry over the poor child's fate and then go about my life. I can't even say that I would walk away from Omelas. I can say I may very well have gotten myself into trouble there actually. Such a poor child and I have such a huge soft spot for such pitiable creatures. If given the chance to think about the child, I would just walk away, I will not do that to the poor thing just so I can have "true" happiness. However, going to see this child, for the first time, I cannot say for certain that I would not toss all care and thought aside to comfort him/her. I wonder if Omelas had guards to keep impulsive people from doing something Omelas might really regret.

I would want to help the child, I might have stayed and campaigned for its release actually, tried to show people how wrong it was, at least get more people to leave Omelas for the child's sake. I would find it very hard to not tell the child how much all of this means, despite whether or not he would understand, s/he deserves to know why, perhaps to give him/her strength. It's not fair that s/he had no choice in the matter either, but that's the story. Maybe I could find a way to tell him/her without using a "kind" word to do so.

This story almost definitely reminds me of a stronger version of the theme behind Pandora's Box. All of man kind was happy, who is going to open the box and let the child out, and along with him/her, all the evils Omelas has been saved from thus far?

To be totally honest, if all of that hinged on the suffering of this one child, s/he would probably be heavily protected I'm sure and there would be little I could do. Ultimately, I would end up walking away. Perhaps, even, it would not be my choice to just walk away. If I had a choice to stay or walk away, it would have to be peaceably because the presence of a resistance to this method in Omelas would disrupt everyone's peace and happiness. Considering the confines of Omelas' magical peace, I'm more certain now that I would have been unable to do anything but simply walk away. What a true Paradox! The spell is broken if anyone says a kind word or is kind in anyway to the child or tries to ease its suffering--as long as it suffers, Omelas will have peace, as long as Omelas has peace, the child will suffer. One cannot truely make a move otherwise in such confines and therefore the child will always suffer, because anyone attempting to break the spell will just simply leave instead so that Omelas continues to have peace. For it to happen otherwise would not make sense in this contract. To fight it, would be to disturb the peace, which isn't possible because the child is suffering. All against having peace at such an awful price could do little more than leave. But that still doesn't mean I wouldn't try to do something.

A line in here though made me think of something that irritates me just a bit about today's gloomy philosophical way of thinking. "Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil is interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain." It goes along with the old saying, "The more you know, the less happier you'll be" and another one, "Ignorance is bliss."

This irritates me because I say, ignorance is not bliss, at least to those of some intelligence. I love knowing things, I love learning and knowledge. A lot of that knowledge is unsettling, disappointing, and depressing, but if I let it get me down, then I profit nothing from that knowledge and I am less likely to do or change anything about it.

There's another saying: "Happiness is fleeting" only those who are ignorant of most things can ever be truely happy. Anyone with a smidgen of intelligence knows that happiness never stays permenantly, it comes and goes, fickle and inconstant. So? That makes happiness a dream for the stupid? Go soak your shirts you pretentious magniloquent doddering old farts (I don't care if you are a woman or a young person, I'm calling you an old fart too!). That's what I say. Everything is fickle. Your sadness and depression is fickle because sometimes you experience those fleeting moments of happiness. No emotion permanently stays with us, it is always changing, just like nature is always changing her moods. Go with it. So, happiness is not real because you can't remain permanently happy, well then, no other emotion is real either. Anger? Not real. Depression? Not real either. You are not always feeling them, they come and go. So, it follows that if happiness is only for the truely ignorant, then depression is only for the truely ignorant, and so is anger and every other emotion you can think of. That would render change as the only thing real, inconsistency. Deal with it, accept it. Make some changes, it's about time we did so anyway.

Forgive me, everyone is entitled to their own opinions. You have the right to be depressed and oppressed by knowledge. I just feel that to consider knowledge a burden as it is being portrayed in philosophy today is foolish and it seems to me some intelligent people have plugged themselves back into the public mind (just when they thought they'd escaped!) when they all go trendy with the knowledge is pain and misery routine of today's most common philosophy. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. I personally find knowledge very liberating. The more I learn, the more liberated my spirit and my mind becomes. Sure, I'll admit to having a spell of depression at some sad knowledge, but I learn to deal with it, turn it around and put effort into changing it or changing myself. The more I do this, the freer I become.

Knowledge is bliss and so is the aptitude to balance its blows with a healthy dose of optimism and acceptance of the change necessary to keep it from getting you down. You can't do anything about it, so don't obsess and stress over it. Put it away, and do something with it when you can. Nothing gets done otherwise. Philosophy, knowledge, learning and the like are all wonderful tools that we should use, but they need to be balanced with acceptance and a willingness to change, to alter, transform (yourself among other things/people--depending on which needs it most) and just be, otherwise you'll let it pull you down into a slump of negativity from which no "real" good can come. Face reality, but don't let it (or anything else for that matter) rule you like a tyrannical monarch, always opressing and demanding.

--Saronai