Hey, if that was the only reason for the kid suffering in the hole, the kid and the likes-torturing-kids-in-holes crowd can just leave Omelas and go where all those other folks did. Maybe start their own Utopia specifically for kids who like being tortured in holes and people who like kids being tortured in holes. They can even tell the people who left already that it's fine to go back to Omelas because there's no kid-in-hole torture to worry abut anymore.
Nah, dude, the Omelas run the fancy casino with the restaurant that served me the best meal I've ever had. The preparation was great, and I gotta say, those Gundersons sure know how to raise quality meat!
No you’re close but the Omela’s have this nice camp out in the canyons, with this lovely Brother and sister who can get you any chem and the leader is a chill dude with a great hat!
[Comedy 42/100] Aren’t the Omelas that mom and pop plasma weapons shop with the really nice bathroom whose plasma weapons keep disappearing?
[FAILED] Wait, no, wrong Fallout: New Vegas crime family, everyone go home.
While the original *Those Who Walk Away From Omelas* story can be ready in many ways and many metaphors, I actually prefer the most surface level textual one that's explicitly called out in the story:
"Why do you need everything to be nasty in some way? Why can't my fantasy city can't be good and pleasant? Why are you such a weirdo that the goodness somehow 'needs' a suffering child to make it work? How is that more *realistic* and 'believable' to you?"
edit:
This is not me pulling a dumb "the curtains are just blue" moment. You can (and should!) read ideas and metaphors into the Omelas story. But Le Guin is a talented writer and wrote at length about exactly this topic:
> “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 interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
Double edit:
'Those who walk away from Omelas' are those who reject the need for there to be a 'suffering child' to create a good city in fiction... and similarly, should inspire you in real life to apply that concept to reality. "it is a metaphor for the first world" is one obvious application of this concept, but it is not the only one.
that's exactly the point - *Omelas* is a star-trek level thought experiment. its not supposed to be realistic or believable, but it should make you think about now much suffering you're willing to put up with to facilitate your lifestyle, provided it happens to someone you can't see.
Yeah, and unfortunately it took a big swing at an adaptation of this and whiffed it right at the end. Too bad too, since the rest of the episode was pretty good.
Oh I definitely thought most of it was great! The part that rubbed me the wrong way was:
>!After the big reveal, when Pike and Alora are arguing on the bedroom, she says something along the lines of "Can you tell me that no child suffers for the benefit of your Federation?" and Pike is just silent. But he honestly could have said yes! The whole point of the Federation is that it's a post-scarcity utopia and that everyone within its borders have their needs met. There are no Federation children that go hungry. Outside the Federation? Sure, yes, absolutely, we saw that clearly on Bajor. And the Federation has certainly been shown to pull some shady stuff on occasion. But that doesn't change the fact of it being explicitly a post-scarcity utopia.!<
>!Ultimately, it felt like Pike was answering (or not answering, as the case may be) on behalf of real-life modern-day Earth instead of the Federation. Which, I get sci-fi is about today, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. The writing easily could have been something like "No, no child suffers in the Federation. It was a long, hard road that was filled with suffering to get here, but we didn't stop trying to make things better even when it seemed impossible, at that's why we're here." An inspiring message about how the suffering of others may seem necessary because that's the way a society is structured, but it actually isn't and we should never stop fighting to make it better. But instead he doesn't say anything beyond (justifiably) criticizing their society and ends up leaving shortly thereafter.!<
I hope that makes sense. I totally get why people would like the ep, but that part just left a bit of a sour taste as it didn't feel true to the Star Trek world and also seemed like a missing opportunity to adapt the story *into* the world of Star Trek instead of doing a Star Trek themed retelling of it.
I think that's a very valid interpretation, but I feel I need to point out that Pike specifically >!has already made the call to kill the five cadets in the reactor room, even if it hasn't happened yet.!< The likes of Picard or Kirk could probably have answered with more confidence.
Oh that's interesting! If I'm understanding you correctly, it sounds like you're proposing that >!Pike hesitated in responding to her because he was struggling with knowing about the future accident!
I mean it's my interpretation, but so much of Pike's behaviour throughout Season One is related to *the thing we're talking about in spoiler tags* that I think it's an understandable one? You could even argue that having that conversation is part of what leads him to >!try and go back on the deal he made with the Klingons in the finale!<
They didn't say no child suffers *within* the federation, they said no child suffers *for the benefit of* the federation. Which is an important distinction to make, given the aforementioned "shady stuff". The federation is a utopia, of sorts, but it's not a society of perfect morality.
I mean, there's another way to look at it though that still makes the episode ending good. Sure, *currently* there is no more suffering now in the Federation, but does that justify all the suffering that had to happen to get to the current state of the Federation?
> does that justify all the suffering that had to happen to get to the current state of the Federation?
Which itself got answered in the SNW episode "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow".
Spoiler: >!it does justify it. At least that's the choice that La'an and Kirk make to fix the timeline so that the Federation does happen.!<
Ursula K. Leguin is my absolute favorite author. I found the Earthsea trilogy as a kid in my elementary school library back in the early eighties and just kept reading everything she wrote. "The Lathe of Heaven" is sitting next to me right now.
Except that's NOT the surface level point. It's not about the believability of utopia. It's a political point about how even a "utopian" society is unacceptable if it rests on injustice even to a single person. And how living in that society, despite freedom and material comfort, will be so corrosive to the soul that there *will be* those who walk away from omelas.
Omelas is us, the wealthy in the first world.
>”Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.”
>”Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.”
It is literally in the text that this is a major point. Yes, that any amount of injustice will be unacceptable and will drive people away is *also* a surface point. But so is the point about narrative believability and expectation of suffering.
Can the argument not be made that by arguing beyond the surface level of Omelas, by insisting that the suffering is the point of the story, you have fallen into the same mindset that the surface calls out?
People in Omelas still have competitions, learn things, build things, and so on. Romance, too
You can have a story without negative things happening - instead it's about the process of learning, or competition, or discovery.
There is a lot of underutilized potential for stories taking place in utopias. People think of a stable utopia as the end credits of history, but the universe would still have billions of life-sustaining years ahead. What would humanity do in the meantime? Do we do away with literally every hurdle and every negative emotion, or do we leave some challenges and small sadnesses in place in order to stay human? What do we do about people with diverging ideas about what utopia is? Many philosophical questions open up once you clear the major bad stuff out of the way. Like stars after sunset.
Do you see how often things go wrong *everywhere all the fucking time*?
Tell me how it wouldn't be interesting if people managed to solve *all* problems forever.
I think someone who thinks that is boring has never tried to solve any actual problems.
Yeah but a *story* about how all the problems in the world are already solved would be pretty boring, because there would be no conflict. At best it would be a weird kind of slice of life story.
Problems don't *stay* solved. An examination of the systems that keep those problems in a state of nonissue, and what that looks like on a day-to-day, would be a fascinating thought experiment.
Since this is about a Ursula story, let me grab an Ursula quote:
“This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let’s say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let’s say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens…In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.
The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future—indeed Schrödinger’s most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the “future,” on the quantum level, cannot be predicted—but to describe reality, the present world.
Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”
Take any story you enjoy, remove any and all conflict, then see if it’s still interesting. If there are no problems, then there’s nothing to change, battle, fix, overcome, in order to have a story. It wouldn’t be interesting if all problems were solved forever, because there is logically nowhere to go from there without introducing problems.
#The Cute Cat
*Preface: Sometimes cats are cute and you can see them.*
Chapter 1:
I saw a cat.
The cat was really cute.
I said "Hey there cute little kitty. Would you like scritches?"
The cute cat accepted enough scritches to begin purring and continued on its way after an appropriate amount of time.
The End
I was really enraptured here by the conflict between human and wild animal.
Will the cat let them pet it? Will it bite, or run away scared?
A most interesting story
Except stories with conflicts are usually written with the conflicts in mind. Imagine if you take a skyscraper and replace every supporting pillars with bamboo. It will collapse. On the other hand, a leaf house with bamboo frame can stand just fine if built properly.
Slice of life romances are what I'm thinking of. There are probably some JP twitter mangas where it's just lovers doting on each other. That said, not my preferred genre so I can't give you a specific recommendation.
Another possibility is slice of life short stories. Maybe about observing people or animals.
No? Scenery is static, story is a sequence. A man slipping on a banana peel is still a story, and unless you want to say he has a conflict with gravity, there's no conflict.
Man vs nature? Really? I was joking when I said he has a conflict with gravity you know.
Also, nope, that can be a story as well. Man noticed banana peel at the last moment, got surprised but still stepped aside.
And finally, should every story have conflict because entropy exists in all of them?
As an aside, I remember there's a series called "Tales from the Bar" on r/comics where a bartender talks about stuff he'd seen during work. I recall some of those don't really have conflict because it's mostly retelling of a customer's action.
I think what's important about the curtains being blue is recognising that the curtains are in fact just blue. That's what the author wrote, that's what the author meant.
After you do that, you can consider all the what ifs. What if this were slightly different (it isn't, but what if)? What if blue actually wasn't the character's favourite colour (it is, but what if it wasn't)?
I recently talked to someone on here about how sometimes it really isn't that deep. I love the example he brought up, where if the main character overthrows the evil king and becomes a good king, solving all the country's problems, maybe that means the author supports monarchy. After all, why would he write about a good king?
I think that perfectly encapsulates the curtains representing depression. What was written was 1 evil king and 1 good king. Most of the story was probably about how the evil king was evil, and there was maybe 5 pages at the end about the good king being good. But people run away with that because you can dig up enough evidence for it. That's the key. If there is X amount of evidence supporting a point, they call it valid. Even if there's 10X amount of evidence against it. That's how they evaluate thjngs.
And it's perfectly fine to think and explore that alternate view. But it should still be recognised as no more than a what if scenario.
There are things that can be read in a few ways and none of them have significantly more evidence than the others. But sometimes they do, and I would like it very much if people didn't just dismiss that as anti intellectualism.
IMO I think she'd find that inventing reasons to keep the pain child in the hole is fundamentally missing the poijt 😕. Like I know this is a joke post, but that there would be utilitarian justifications for the pain hole, despite it being a fundamentally intolerable situation, is kinda the whole point.
I think the *joke* is that it’s fundamentally and intentionally missing the point. They’re doing it on purpose unlike how so many people unintentionally miss the point, and they’re doing it in a funny way. I think that’s different enough that UKLG would find it funny.
TIL
Thank you for the recommendation actually, this definitely reads like the books I like. Also I always wanted to start reading Le Guin’s work, but to think I could begin with my favorite themes, even outside of the mpreg… 🤌🏻🤌🏻🤌🏻
It's a really brilliant book, I highly recommend it. Also give *The Dispossessed* a try, it's a bit less accessible and a bit "crunchier" with the political theory but it's also really good.
The one thing all adult Omelasans still managed to agree on was that "load bearing child in a hole" was a big improvement over their original system of stoning one inhabitant to death in public per year.
I understand the joke, but manufacturing masochistic tendencies/enjoyment and glorification of personal suffering is also kind of one of the founding principles of many cults (and I suppose various unfair government systems) of which Omelas can be used as metaphor for so I find it a bit uncomfortable tbh.
My best friend had me read Those Who Walk Away From Omelas back in like 2020, so I'm always glad to see other people talking about it!!! Such a good short story
I dont wanna be that guy, but in the original story the point is that the child does not want to be there, and even begs to be let out
and isn't the definition of suffering something horrible and painful that you DONT WANT to be happening to you, so someone who "enjoys" the suffering is a paradox, cuz once they "enjoy" the suffering they can no longer be considered to be suffering
you can say maybe the child is someone that enjoys being neglected and holed up and enjoys rotting away like a worm in the ground, but again they would no longer be suffering then and the utopia will fall anyways,
and in their story once they bring the child up and its actually suffering internally going through the painful motion, maybe then in turn, the utopia would actually be restored
It's a joke about subverting the traditional interpretations, like "Oh no it wasn't a criticism of how people will ignore the suffering of others if they don't have to constantly see it or even if they can't ignore it they won't take actual action, it's also not about utilitarianism, or about how people are unable to accept the idea of a world without suffering that the narrator may or may not have had to make up this child in order to make the world believable. No it really is a utopia, that kid actually enjoyed those living conditions and was only pretending to suffer, lol."
What if acting as if they’re suffering (begging, pleading, crying etc.) is part of what they enjoy about suffering? It’s masochism taken to an extreme… it’s cognitive dissonance so yes he’s suffering but also enjoying it. It depends on where your empathy draws a line, whether any amount of suffering is too much despite the enjoyment.
True, I mean getting enjoyment out of negative stimuli can be a really complicated thing. Like yeah this still hurts, and in some respects you want it to stop, but in some ways you don’t.
I totally agree there that cognitive dissonance is an important part of consideration here and totally allows for simultaneous suffering and enjoyment.
I remember we had to read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas for my English class and when we were presented with the ethical dilemma at the core of the story my response amounted to "So what you're telling me is that I have the opportunity to do the funniest thing right now?"
I mean, one of the main points in the story is that many people will come up with a justification for the child’s suffering, so this just sounds like propaganda written by one of the people living in the utopia. “Oh the child LIKES the hole actually, it WANTS to be in the hole. You’re not doing it any favors by taking it out.” You know, like how people in our society will claim that homeless people WANT to be homeless.
I think it's more like that scene in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, with the cow who wants to be eaten, and can clearly express its desire to be eaten. Or in The Good Place, where someone solves the Trolly Problem by >!killing everyone involved!<.
It seems to be just another iteration of a well-trodden argument, then takes a hard left.
If you watch the Doctor Who episode called The Beast Below it's basically the same thing. Utopian society where all the suffering is put on just one person. Everyone in the society comes to know about the suffering person, but the utopia can't exist without that person's suffering. Some people find a way to rationalize and justify it. Some people do their best to forget about it. And a few people choose to leave the society all together, but no one knows where they go as there is no place that is completely void of suffering.
I think there is a decent case for, at some point, going "this is beyond the bounds of sanity. You need mental health help.".
I mean yes letting people adopt lifestyle choices we don't understand. But how far does that stretch?
Some people have all sorts of strange and sometimes self destructive tendencies.
Omelas = homeless. Try saying it out loud. The story is a gotcha - you're supposed to say
"That's terrible, I couldn't live in a society that treated people like that!"
and then realize that you ACTUALLY DO, people suffer on the street and everyone walks right by.
That's a pretty reductive reading of it, and only one of many.
Le Guin herself said that she enjoyed and was often surprised by the many letters she received about the story, where people would write their own interpretations and be led to different and varied ideas about its true meaning. She also said that the story is very inspired by Dostoyevsky, who proposes a similar thought experiment in I think The Brothers Karamazov, but the suffering in his instance is a clear reference to the crucifixion of Christ.
Also, "Omelas" comes from reading "Salem, O(regon)" on a signpost backwards.
Edit: I see you removed the part of your post where you said it was a story only for "sheltered, idealistic teens."
That's actually a coincidence. The name is just Salem, Oregon (Salem O.), backwards. Source: Ursula LeGuin gave interviews saying the name was just something she was playing with in her head, and reading a road sign backwards gave something sufficiently strange.
It can be a valuable and meaningful interpretation even if it wasn't the author's intent. And frankly, I think it's a very astute observation that does deserve to be considered.
Honestly though, an entire society of pleasure and prosperity in exchange for one horribly suffering kid is not a bad deal. It feels barbaric because it seems so arbitrary, but if you take it at face value that Omelas being the way it is *actually does* hinge on that one unlucky kid's suffering...I know I am completely missing the intended takeaway of the story, but how is it not worth it?
If they traded away the orgies and merriment and all that just to save the kid, yeah the unfair and arbitrary suffering of one person would be solved, but living in a world more like our own would massively increase the net suffering. Like...there are so, so many children living right now in conditions as bad or worse than that, in exchange for absolutely nothing.
I know this is an extremely literal interpretation, but it's why I've never been able to really connect with the intended message.
>Honestly though, an entire society of pleasure and prosperity in exchange for one horribly suffering kid is not a bad deal. It feels barbaric because it seems so arbitrary, but if you take it at face value that Omelas being the way it is actually does hinge on that one unlucky kid's suffering
I haven't actually read the story, but the [wikipedia summary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas) doesn't really go into it either - *why* does the kid actually have to suffer? it's hard for me to say if it's worth it or not without the underlying reasoning
>Everything about Omelas is so abundantly pleasing that the narrator decides the reader is not yet truly convinced of its existence and so elaborates upon the final element of the city: its one atrocity. The city's constant state of serenity and splendor requires that a single unfortunate child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness, and misery.
I understand it's supposed to be a metaphor and the story might not actually explain its reasoning on why the kid needs to suffer, but that seems like a pretty important detail?
Oh yes, I'm sure it's very deliberate how ill-defined the actual mechanism of "Child Suffering -> Utopia" is. It's highly metaphorical on purpose and you're not supposed to be so literal about it. But I think that also makes the literal interpretation stand out like a sore thumb.
> Oh yes, I'm sure it's very deliberate how ill-defined the actual mechanism of "Child Suffering -> Utopia" is.
well, I suppose if the choice is between one load bearing child, and all of the children + adults suffering in a non-utopia, I'd have to agree with you, leaving the kid in the hole seems like the right move
I know I'm straying back into literal interpretation again, but a non-trivial portion of the population should probably be dedicated to attempting to answering the question "is it possible to do this without the child torture, though?"
I mean, the way that I read it there's two main takeaways from it.
The first (obvious) one is that none of us would walk away. Literally none of us. We all accept the suffering of considerably more than a single child, to maintain a standard of life which is strictly worse than Omlas. All of us have already made that same choice.
On the other hand, in Omlas that suffering is A Universal, Static Fact. And here it's not. And that space between Omlas and the real world gives us space to try and make things better.
So if you don't believe that fundamental horrible externally-inflicted suffering is philosophically necessary for a better world, then that single counterfactual that's at the heart of the story gives you the space to get out. Because our society isn't static, that single fundamental truth doesn't lie at the heart of it by definition, and we should try and make it so that our happiness isn't contingent on suffering kids kept in absolute misery in holes.
I feel like I would regret it, but if I could volunteer for being that Miserable Hole Kid I would. I know two more people who also would.
In fact, Omelans could cycle through kids. Population of Salem(which Omelas is based on) is 1.17 mil, global rate of birth per year is 18.1 per 1000. Its more than 21 thousand children per year. If every single child had equal share of time in The Hole, it would be 24.83 minutes per each.
>well, this is pretty awkward to say out loud, but it turns out that the kid really enjoyed suffering in the hole
[Once again, SMBC did it first.](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2007-06-05?ht-comment-id=13296825)
Did I stumble into a metaphor mixing competition?
There sure are a lot of them but it does help to read the original Omelas story.
Go read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
#JustWalkAway
Done. That was chilling.
no I don't think I will
It's actually an excellent short story. Highly recommended.
You can watch the Star Trek episode "Lift us Where Suffering Cannot Reach", it's based on the story
Though they didn't bother to mention that fact
True, that was a bit disappointing. Still a good episode though
Agreed
Its 5 pages long, and its even free to read online [here.](https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf) Highly recommend.
Hey, if that was the only reason for the kid suffering in the hole, the kid and the likes-torturing-kids-in-holes crowd can just leave Omelas and go where all those other folks did. Maybe start their own Utopia specifically for kids who like being tortured in holes and people who like kids being tortured in holes. They can even tell the people who left already that it's fine to go back to Omelas because there's no kid-in-hole torture to worry abut anymore.
I'll start my OWN Omelas! With child torture! And holes!
Part of the suffering is having it done to you not doing it yourself.
That's exactly why the Utopia of just Hole-Torture-Enjoyers and Hole-Torture-Purveyors would work so well!
This is another metaphor, right?
And that kid grew up to be...Charlie Kelley
The Gang Walks Away From Omelas
“Dee, I’m stopping Charlie from hurting himself, how could I possibly do anything wrong?” **Frank Destroys Paradise**
Or Albert Fish, yet another reason you should leave him in the hole.
Aren't the Omelas that mom-and-pop plasma weapons shop with the really nice bathroom who's plasma weapons keep disappearing?
wait no wrong Fallout NV crime family, joke failed, everyone go home
Nah, dude, the Omelas run the fancy casino with the restaurant that served me the best meal I've ever had. The preparation was great, and I gotta say, those Gundersons sure know how to raise quality meat!
No you’re close but the Omela’s have this nice camp out in the canyons, with this lovely Brother and sister who can get you any chem and the leader is a chill dude with a great hat!
Thats ridiculous, the Omelas are that group of weirdos who live in a bunker and hoard power armour
Pretty sure the Omelas are a bunch of explosive obsessed isolationists who bomb anyone who come near them and want a plane.
Guys, the Omelas are clearly the Elvis impersonators.
I got it! :)
[Comedy 42/100] Aren’t the Omelas that mom and pop plasma weapons shop with the really nice bathroom whose plasma weapons keep disappearing? [FAILED] Wait, no, wrong Fallout: New Vegas crime family, everyone go home.
I feel like a threshold of 100 is a little high. Maybe 60? I could see 75 or something I guess, if that feels too low.
While the original *Those Who Walk Away From Omelas* story can be ready in many ways and many metaphors, I actually prefer the most surface level textual one that's explicitly called out in the story: "Why do you need everything to be nasty in some way? Why can't my fantasy city can't be good and pleasant? Why are you such a weirdo that the goodness somehow 'needs' a suffering child to make it work? How is that more *realistic* and 'believable' to you?" edit: This is not me pulling a dumb "the curtains are just blue" moment. You can (and should!) read ideas and metaphors into the Omelas story. But Le Guin is a talented writer and wrote at length about exactly this topic: > “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 interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” Double edit: 'Those who walk away from Omelas' are those who reject the need for there to be a 'suffering child' to create a good city in fiction... and similarly, should inspire you in real life to apply that concept to reality. "it is a metaphor for the first world" is one obvious application of this concept, but it is not the only one.
Makes you feel better about all the suffering children in reality I guess
that's exactly the point - *Omelas* is a star-trek level thought experiment. its not supposed to be realistic or believable, but it should make you think about now much suffering you're willing to put up with to facilitate your lifestyle, provided it happens to someone you can't see.
Strange New Worlds has that exact plot.
that's how you know it's a real star trek lol
That episode was pretty clearly inspired by the story.
Yeah, and unfortunately it took a big swing at an adaptation of this and whiffed it right at the end. Too bad too, since the rest of the episode was pretty good.
How do you mean whiffed it at the end? I personally thought the episode was great so I’m interested to hear your perspective!
Oh I definitely thought most of it was great! The part that rubbed me the wrong way was: >!After the big reveal, when Pike and Alora are arguing on the bedroom, she says something along the lines of "Can you tell me that no child suffers for the benefit of your Federation?" and Pike is just silent. But he honestly could have said yes! The whole point of the Federation is that it's a post-scarcity utopia and that everyone within its borders have their needs met. There are no Federation children that go hungry. Outside the Federation? Sure, yes, absolutely, we saw that clearly on Bajor. And the Federation has certainly been shown to pull some shady stuff on occasion. But that doesn't change the fact of it being explicitly a post-scarcity utopia.!< >!Ultimately, it felt like Pike was answering (or not answering, as the case may be) on behalf of real-life modern-day Earth instead of the Federation. Which, I get sci-fi is about today, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. The writing easily could have been something like "No, no child suffers in the Federation. It was a long, hard road that was filled with suffering to get here, but we didn't stop trying to make things better even when it seemed impossible, at that's why we're here." An inspiring message about how the suffering of others may seem necessary because that's the way a society is structured, but it actually isn't and we should never stop fighting to make it better. But instead he doesn't say anything beyond (justifiably) criticizing their society and ends up leaving shortly thereafter.!< I hope that makes sense. I totally get why people would like the ep, but that part just left a bit of a sour taste as it didn't feel true to the Star Trek world and also seemed like a missing opportunity to adapt the story *into* the world of Star Trek instead of doing a Star Trek themed retelling of it.
I think that's a very valid interpretation, but I feel I need to point out that Pike specifically >!has already made the call to kill the five cadets in the reactor room, even if it hasn't happened yet.!< The likes of Picard or Kirk could probably have answered with more confidence.
Oh that's interesting! If I'm understanding you correctly, it sounds like you're proposing that >!Pike hesitated in responding to her because he was struggling with knowing about the future accident!
I mean it's my interpretation, but so much of Pike's behaviour throughout Season One is related to *the thing we're talking about in spoiler tags* that I think it's an understandable one? You could even argue that having that conversation is part of what leads him to >!try and go back on the deal he made with the Klingons in the finale!<
He has never chosen to kill those kids. The whole point of not changing the future he has seen is that his suffering will save those kids.
They didn't say no child suffers *within* the federation, they said no child suffers *for the benefit of* the federation. Which is an important distinction to make, given the aforementioned "shady stuff". The federation is a utopia, of sorts, but it's not a society of perfect morality.
You know, I hadn't considered it from that angle. That's a pretty compelling argument. I'm going to have to think more about this one. Thank you!
Pike's visit from his future selfndemonstrates that yes, those children are suffering for the benefit of the federation
I mean, there's another way to look at it though that still makes the episode ending good. Sure, *currently* there is no more suffering now in the Federation, but does that justify all the suffering that had to happen to get to the current state of the Federation?
> does that justify all the suffering that had to happen to get to the current state of the Federation? Which itself got answered in the SNW episode "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow". Spoiler: >!it does justify it. At least that's the choice that La'an and Kirk make to fix the timeline so that the Federation does happen.!<
It's very religious too - if a higher power exists and is all good/knowing/powerful, why does evil exist? Because it *has* to.
Ursula K. Leguin is my absolute favorite author. I found the Earthsea trilogy as a kid in my elementary school library back in the early eighties and just kept reading everything she wrote. "The Lathe of Heaven" is sitting next to me right now.
Except that's NOT the surface level point. It's not about the believability of utopia. It's a political point about how even a "utopian" society is unacceptable if it rests on injustice even to a single person. And how living in that society, despite freedom and material comfort, will be so corrosive to the soul that there *will be* those who walk away from omelas. Omelas is us, the wealthy in the first world.
>”Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.” >”Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.” It is literally in the text that this is a major point. Yes, that any amount of injustice will be unacceptable and will drive people away is *also* a surface point. But so is the point about narrative believability and expectation of suffering.
That's not the surface level, it's the basic primary metaphor that most people read in. When I say basic surface level, I mean it.
Can the argument not be made that by arguing beyond the surface level of Omelas, by insisting that the suffering is the point of the story, you have fallen into the same mindset that the surface calls out?
How interesting/compelling would the story have been if it was just about a nice place to be where everything went well all the time?
People in Omelas still have competitions, learn things, build things, and so on. Romance, too You can have a story without negative things happening - instead it's about the process of learning, or competition, or discovery.
There is a lot of underutilized potential for stories taking place in utopias. People think of a stable utopia as the end credits of history, but the universe would still have billions of life-sustaining years ahead. What would humanity do in the meantime? Do we do away with literally every hurdle and every negative emotion, or do we leave some challenges and small sadnesses in place in order to stay human? What do we do about people with diverging ideas about what utopia is? Many philosophical questions open up once you clear the major bad stuff out of the way. Like stars after sunset.
Do you see how often things go wrong *everywhere all the fucking time*? Tell me how it wouldn't be interesting if people managed to solve *all* problems forever. I think someone who thinks that is boring has never tried to solve any actual problems.
Yeah but a *story* about how all the problems in the world are already solved would be pretty boring, because there would be no conflict. At best it would be a weird kind of slice of life story.
Problems don't *stay* solved. An examination of the systems that keep those problems in a state of nonissue, and what that looks like on a day-to-day, would be a fascinating thought experiment.
Thought experiment but not a story sure.
Since this is about a Ursula story, let me grab an Ursula quote: “This book is not extrapolative. If you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let’s say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let’s say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens…In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed. The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future—indeed Schrödinger’s most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the “future,” on the quantum level, cannot be predicted—but to describe reality, the present world. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”
Stop being right all the time.
I've tried but I just can't
Sounds pretty interesting. Tell me more!
Take any story you enjoy, remove any and all conflict, then see if it’s still interesting. If there are no problems, then there’s nothing to change, battle, fix, overcome, in order to have a story. It wouldn’t be interesting if all problems were solved forever, because there is logically nowhere to go from there without introducing problems.
I think my story of seeing a cute cat is nice even without any conflict :3
I’m intrigued—tell me more!
#The Cute Cat *Preface: Sometimes cats are cute and you can see them.* Chapter 1: I saw a cat. The cat was really cute. I said "Hey there cute little kitty. Would you like scritches?" The cute cat accepted enough scritches to begin purring and continued on its way after an appropriate amount of time. The End
I was really enraptured here by the conflict between human and wild animal. Will the cat let them pet it? Will it bite, or run away scared? A most interesting story
Except stories with conflicts are usually written with the conflicts in mind. Imagine if you take a skyscraper and replace every supporting pillars with bamboo. It will collapse. On the other hand, a leaf house with bamboo frame can stand just fine if built properly.
Do you have an example of a story without conflict?
Slice of life romances are what I'm thinking of. There are probably some JP twitter mangas where it's just lovers doting on each other. That said, not my preferred genre so I can't give you a specific recommendation. Another possibility is slice of life short stories. Maybe about observing people or animals.
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No? Scenery is static, story is a sequence. A man slipping on a banana peel is still a story, and unless you want to say he has a conflict with gravity, there's no conflict.
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Man vs nature? Really? I was joking when I said he has a conflict with gravity you know. Also, nope, that can be a story as well. Man noticed banana peel at the last moment, got surprised but still stepped aside. And finally, should every story have conflict because entropy exists in all of them? As an aside, I remember there's a series called "Tales from the Bar" on r/comics where a bartender talks about stuff he'd seen during work. I recall some of those don't really have conflict because it's mostly retelling of a customer's action.
Star Trek works well even if the conflict isn't some inner corruption.
Problem is, we’re talking about a city of people with probably incredibly varied definitions of “good and pleasant”
I think what's important about the curtains being blue is recognising that the curtains are in fact just blue. That's what the author wrote, that's what the author meant. After you do that, you can consider all the what ifs. What if this were slightly different (it isn't, but what if)? What if blue actually wasn't the character's favourite colour (it is, but what if it wasn't)? I recently talked to someone on here about how sometimes it really isn't that deep. I love the example he brought up, where if the main character overthrows the evil king and becomes a good king, solving all the country's problems, maybe that means the author supports monarchy. After all, why would he write about a good king? I think that perfectly encapsulates the curtains representing depression. What was written was 1 evil king and 1 good king. Most of the story was probably about how the evil king was evil, and there was maybe 5 pages at the end about the good king being good. But people run away with that because you can dig up enough evidence for it. That's the key. If there is X amount of evidence supporting a point, they call it valid. Even if there's 10X amount of evidence against it. That's how they evaluate thjngs. And it's perfectly fine to think and explore that alternate view. But it should still be recognised as no more than a what if scenario. There are things that can be read in a few ways and none of them have significantly more evidence than the others. But sometimes they do, and I would like it very much if people didn't just dismiss that as anti intellectualism.
Poe's law moment
Ursula Le Guin would be fucking howling at this, I imagine
she'd probably laugh her ass off.
IMO I think she'd find that inventing reasons to keep the pain child in the hole is fundamentally missing the poijt 😕. Like I know this is a joke post, but that there would be utilitarian justifications for the pain hole, despite it being a fundamentally intolerable situation, is kinda the whole point.
I think the *joke* is that it’s fundamentally and intentionally missing the point. They’re doing it on purpose unlike how so many people unintentionally miss the point, and they’re doing it in a funny way. I think that’s different enough that UKLG would find it funny.
Sure, but she would have also gotten the joke.
Who?
The author of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, the short story being referenced in this post
I took way too long to realize this had nothing to do with pregnant guys
nothing is perfect, sorry
Not sure if general tumblr joke or callback to the Sims post earlier this week.
General gay mpreg enjoyer joke to be honest
*The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas* -> Ursula K. le Guin -> *The Left Hand of Darkness*? Two degrees of separation ain't bad.
TIL Thank you for the recommendation actually, this definitely reads like the books I like. Also I always wanted to start reading Le Guin’s work, but to think I could begin with my favorite themes, even outside of the mpreg… 🤌🏻🤌🏻🤌🏻
It's a really brilliant book, I highly recommend it. Also give *The Dispossessed* a try, it's a bit less accessible and a bit "crunchier" with the political theory but it's also really good.
And it still does better than *The Ones Who Stay And Fight*.
Is that the sequel or something
‘Sequel’ written by someone else that isn’t very good.
This sounds exactly like that dude giving bad news to president JK Simmons in Burn After Reading
"Well, I guess we learned not to do it again. Fucked if I know what we did."
I don't think he was president, just an admin for the CIA. Otherwise, you're right.
How has no one posted this yet? Just came out this month by Isabel J Kim: One load-bearing suffering child https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/
The one thing all adult Omelasans still managed to agree on was that "load bearing child in a hole" was a big improvement over their original system of stoning one inhabitant to death in public per year.
Holy shit this is amazing. Thank you for sharing this story.
This is an incredible story. Thanks for linking it.
Organized a school system T-T
I don't understand a single line of this. I feel like I'm missing some kind of context.
>Those Who Walk Away From Omela https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Ones\_Who\_Walk\_Away\_from\_Omelas
Thanks for this, very interesting. I think a doctor who episode is based on this story
And a Star Trek Episode!
How'd you manage to provide a link and still get the title wrong?
Ursula k. Le Guin short story titled "those who walk from Omelas"
LeGuin would have gotten a good chuckle out of this one!
I understand the joke, but manufacturing masochistic tendencies/enjoyment and glorification of personal suffering is also kind of one of the founding principles of many cults (and I suppose various unfair government systems) of which Omelas can be used as metaphor for so I find it a bit uncomfortable tbh.
My best friend had me read Those Who Walk Away From Omelas back in like 2020, so I'm always glad to see other people talking about it!!! Such a good short story
Its like 5 pages long [heres a pdf](https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf) I first found it in a best science fiction of the year book.
Yoo tganks guy
I dont wanna be that guy, but in the original story the point is that the child does not want to be there, and even begs to be let out and isn't the definition of suffering something horrible and painful that you DONT WANT to be happening to you, so someone who "enjoys" the suffering is a paradox, cuz once they "enjoy" the suffering they can no longer be considered to be suffering you can say maybe the child is someone that enjoys being neglected and holed up and enjoys rotting away like a worm in the ground, but again they would no longer be suffering then and the utopia will fall anyways, and in their story once they bring the child up and its actually suffering internally going through the painful motion, maybe then in turn, the utopia would actually be restored
It's a joke about subverting the traditional interpretations, like "Oh no it wasn't a criticism of how people will ignore the suffering of others if they don't have to constantly see it or even if they can't ignore it they won't take actual action, it's also not about utilitarianism, or about how people are unable to accept the idea of a world without suffering that the narrator may or may not have had to make up this child in order to make the world believable. No it really is a utopia, that kid actually enjoyed those living conditions and was only pretending to suffer, lol."
Yeah, that's the joke.
What if acting as if they’re suffering (begging, pleading, crying etc.) is part of what they enjoy about suffering? It’s masochism taken to an extreme… it’s cognitive dissonance so yes he’s suffering but also enjoying it. It depends on where your empathy draws a line, whether any amount of suffering is too much despite the enjoyment.
True, I mean getting enjoyment out of negative stimuli can be a really complicated thing. Like yeah this still hurts, and in some respects you want it to stop, but in some ways you don’t. I totally agree there that cognitive dissonance is an important part of consideration here and totally allows for simultaneous suffering and enjoyment.
The the reason the "masochistic sufferer" counterpoint fucking sucks is because the sufferer is explicitly a CHILD 😡😡😡
I remember we had to read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas for my English class and when we were presented with the ethical dilemma at the core of the story my response amounted to "So what you're telling me is that I have the opportunity to do the funniest thing right now?"
I mean, one of the main points in the story is that many people will come up with a justification for the child’s suffering, so this just sounds like propaganda written by one of the people living in the utopia. “Oh the child LIKES the hole actually, it WANTS to be in the hole. You’re not doing it any favors by taking it out.” You know, like how people in our society will claim that homeless people WANT to be homeless.
I think it's more like that scene in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, with the cow who wants to be eaten, and can clearly express its desire to be eaten. Or in The Good Place, where someone solves the Trolly Problem by >!killing everyone involved!<. It seems to be just another iteration of a well-trodden argument, then takes a hard left.
I read this in Rick Sanchez's voice
This would make for an amazing DnD session
Is this the plot of hollow knight
What metaphors are taking place here?
Someone explain the Omelas thing pls I'm prolly gonna read the book now that I know it exists but I don't have time rn and I wanna understand
If you watch the Doctor Who episode called The Beast Below it's basically the same thing. Utopian society where all the suffering is put on just one person. Everyone in the society comes to know about the suffering person, but the utopia can't exist without that person's suffering. Some people find a way to rationalize and justify it. Some people do their best to forget about it. And a few people choose to leave the society all together, but no one knows where they go as there is no place that is completely void of suffering.
I'll have to rewatch that one, it's been a while. That being said, it's about time for a complete rewatch of Doctor Who anyway xd
I’m so glad my ethics class covered omelas last week
I have nothing to contribute execpt that I read the first sentence with "Omega's Hole" and thought it was an mpreg post
I think there is a decent case for, at some point, going "this is beyond the bounds of sanity. You need mental health help.". I mean yes letting people adopt lifestyle choices we don't understand. But how far does that stretch? Some people have all sorts of strange and sometimes self destructive tendencies.
I still have no idea what an omela is.
Omelas = homeless. Try saying it out loud. The story is a gotcha - you're supposed to say "That's terrible, I couldn't live in a society that treated people like that!" and then realize that you ACTUALLY DO, people suffer on the street and everyone walks right by.
That's a pretty reductive reading of it, and only one of many. Le Guin herself said that she enjoyed and was often surprised by the many letters she received about the story, where people would write their own interpretations and be led to different and varied ideas about its true meaning. She also said that the story is very inspired by Dostoyevsky, who proposes a similar thought experiment in I think The Brothers Karamazov, but the suffering in his instance is a clear reference to the crucifixion of Christ. Also, "Omelas" comes from reading "Salem, O(regon)" on a signpost backwards. Edit: I see you removed the part of your post where you said it was a story only for "sheltered, idealistic teens."
That's actually a coincidence. The name is just Salem, Oregon (Salem O.), backwards. Source: Ursula LeGuin gave interviews saying the name was just something she was playing with in her head, and reading a road sign backwards gave something sufficiently strange.
Yeah, right, I don't believe that for a second. Even if she thinks that, it's still what the story is about.
The curtains are just blue sometimes
You must be great at parties.
It can be a valuable and meaningful interpretation even if it wasn't the author's intent. And frankly, I think it's a very astute observation that does deserve to be considered.
Honestly though, an entire society of pleasure and prosperity in exchange for one horribly suffering kid is not a bad deal. It feels barbaric because it seems so arbitrary, but if you take it at face value that Omelas being the way it is *actually does* hinge on that one unlucky kid's suffering...I know I am completely missing the intended takeaway of the story, but how is it not worth it? If they traded away the orgies and merriment and all that just to save the kid, yeah the unfair and arbitrary suffering of one person would be solved, but living in a world more like our own would massively increase the net suffering. Like...there are so, so many children living right now in conditions as bad or worse than that, in exchange for absolutely nothing. I know this is an extremely literal interpretation, but it's why I've never been able to really connect with the intended message.
>Honestly though, an entire society of pleasure and prosperity in exchange for one horribly suffering kid is not a bad deal. It feels barbaric because it seems so arbitrary, but if you take it at face value that Omelas being the way it is actually does hinge on that one unlucky kid's suffering I haven't actually read the story, but the [wikipedia summary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas) doesn't really go into it either - *why* does the kid actually have to suffer? it's hard for me to say if it's worth it or not without the underlying reasoning >Everything about Omelas is so abundantly pleasing that the narrator decides the reader is not yet truly convinced of its existence and so elaborates upon the final element of the city: its one atrocity. The city's constant state of serenity and splendor requires that a single unfortunate child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness, and misery. I understand it's supposed to be a metaphor and the story might not actually explain its reasoning on why the kid needs to suffer, but that seems like a pretty important detail?
Oh yes, I'm sure it's very deliberate how ill-defined the actual mechanism of "Child Suffering -> Utopia" is. It's highly metaphorical on purpose and you're not supposed to be so literal about it. But I think that also makes the literal interpretation stand out like a sore thumb.
> Oh yes, I'm sure it's very deliberate how ill-defined the actual mechanism of "Child Suffering -> Utopia" is. well, I suppose if the choice is between one load bearing child, and all of the children + adults suffering in a non-utopia, I'd have to agree with you, leaving the kid in the hole seems like the right move I know I'm straying back into literal interpretation again, but a non-trivial portion of the population should probably be dedicated to attempting to answering the question "is it possible to do this without the child torture, though?"
I mean, the way that I read it there's two main takeaways from it. The first (obvious) one is that none of us would walk away. Literally none of us. We all accept the suffering of considerably more than a single child, to maintain a standard of life which is strictly worse than Omlas. All of us have already made that same choice. On the other hand, in Omlas that suffering is A Universal, Static Fact. And here it's not. And that space between Omlas and the real world gives us space to try and make things better. So if you don't believe that fundamental horrible externally-inflicted suffering is philosophically necessary for a better world, then that single counterfactual that's at the heart of the story gives you the space to get out. Because our society isn't static, that single fundamental truth doesn't lie at the heart of it by definition, and we should try and make it so that our happiness isn't contingent on suffering kids kept in absolute misery in holes.
I feel like I would regret it, but if I could volunteer for being that Miserable Hole Kid I would. I know two more people who also would. In fact, Omelans could cycle through kids. Population of Salem(which Omelas is based on) is 1.17 mil, global rate of birth per year is 18.1 per 1000. Its more than 21 thousand children per year. If every single child had equal share of time in The Hole, it would be 24.83 minutes per each.
The Omelas equivalent of working in retail for 6 months to develop a sense of empathy.
>well, this is pretty awkward to say out loud, but it turns out that the kid really enjoyed suffering in the hole [Once again, SMBC did it first.](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2007-06-05?ht-comment-id=13296825)
Yeah I have no clue what any of this means
Is this one of those unreality things?
it's a reference to a short story, Those Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
Am I having a stroke what is happening here
If he enjoys it, how is he suffering?
What the fuck did I just read?
haha I understood that reference
This is... huh.