‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ (1973) by Ursula K. Le Guin
Time To Walk Away From Israel
“Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”
— William James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life (1891)
I recently wrote an article for Seroxcats Salon on proposed new legislation on Assisted Dying in England. I always do some research on the subject I write about, and I came across an article on Antinatalism and a reference to a very short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas written by the great American sci-fi and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018). It is one that I had never read until today. And today I am stunned.
Her disturbing, dystopian story is just seven pages long. Yet, the contents of those seven pages are as philosophically and morally contentious and…
