Omelas Is Perfectly Misread

By Tobias Häberli @ 2025-10-02T23:11 (+34)

The Standard Reading

If you've heard of Le Guin's ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, you probably know the basic idea. It's a go-to story for discussions of utilitarianism and its downsides. A paper calls it “the infamous objection brought up by Ursula Le Guin”. It shows up in university ‘Criticism of Utilitarianism' syllabi and is used for classroom material alongside the Trolley Problem. The story is often also more broadly read as a parable about global inequality, the comfortable rich countries built on the suffering of the poor, and our decision to not walk away from our own complicity.

If you haven't read ‘Omelas’, I suggest you stop here and read it now^[1]. It's a short 5-page read, and I find it beautifully written and worth reading.

The rest of this post will contain spoilers.

The popular reading goes something like: Omelas is a perfect city whose happiness depends on the extreme suffering of a single child. Most citizens accept this trade-off, but some can't stomach it and walk away.

The Correct (?) Reading

Le Guin spends well over half the story describing Omelas before the child appears. She describes the summer festival, the bright towers, the bells, the processions, the horse race. Beautiful stuff.

She anticipates your scepticism, that you're expecting something dark lurking underneath. But no: "They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians."

Then comes the first part of the story everyone seems to skip over:

"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 Le Guin calling out us readers directly, that we can’t accept descriptions of unsullied happiness as real.

She tries again to describe this utopia. Maybe Omelas has technology? Or maybe not? "As you like it." She's almost begging you to help her build a version of this city you’ll accept, even offering to throw in an orgy if that would help. Or drugs, she wants to make sure that you won't think of the city as someone else's utopia.

The First Question

After all this setup, she asks the reader: "Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy?"

"No?"

"Then let me describe one more thing."

Then she describes the suffering child. You wouldn't accept the pure utopia. Let's see if you'll accept it at a cost.

Importantly, Le Guin provides no explanation for why the child has to suffer.

Read the passage again. The child exists "in a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings”. The people know "that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children [...] depend wholly on this child's abominable misery".

But why? What's the mechanism? Magic? A curse? A natural law? The story doesn't say. The child must suffer for Omelas to be happy because? Those are "the terms".

This is strange if you think the story is primarily about utilitarianism. A utilitarian thought experiment typically relies on at least some sort of causal mechanism, but here the mechanism seems purposefully absent.

The Second Question

After describing the child’s suffering in detail, Le Guin asks a second question:

"Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible?"

Are they more credible? She's not asking about the ethics of it all. She’s asking about the story’s plausibility.

And the implied answer is: Yes. You do find them more credible. You believe in Omelas now that it has a dark side.

I'd summarise this reading as: We can't accept stories about pure utopia. Le Guin demonstrates this by having you reject her perfect city until she adds suffering to make it believable.

[ETA: Why is the standard reading, what I'll call a misreading, so common? If you read the ending in isolation, it does feel like a critique of utilitarianism. But since the story introduces the suffering child, the 'utilitarian downside' of the calculus, as a clear farce, I find it not a plausible reading overall.

Taking the ending seriously is as bit as if you took the following argument against utilitarianism seriously: "Imagine there's a child drowning in a shallow pond. You're wearing a swimsuit and could easily save them. Sounds impausible? No, really, you can just save the kid. Don't trust it? Okay, let me make it more believable: imagine there's also a cute puppy guarding the pond that you'd have to kill to reach the child. Would you do it?"]

The Misreading Is Perfect

You might find the above reading kind of obvious. But I want to stress that this reading is very rare. Try to find any article, paper, or blog post that lays out this reading. I haven’t found one (but there is sometimes someone in the comments who seems to get it).^[2]

Maybe what I like most about this story is that the standard reading of Omelas, as a critique of utilitarianism, as a parable about global inequality, is itself in a sense what the story is critiquing.

The story is about our inability to accept pure utopia. And what do we do when confronted with this story? We immediately look for the ‘real’ meaning. We decide it must be about something serious and dark, a utilitarian calculus, moral complicity, capitalism.

It's kind of perfect. The story critiques our inability to take happiness seriously, and we respond by not taking the happiness seriously. We focus entirely on the suffering child and the people walking away. We refer to it in philosophy classes on difficult moral choices and cite it in discussions about necessary evils.

The story has this great quality: The common interpretation of the story proves its point more effectively than the story itself ever could. We do what Le Guin said we'd do. We make it about pain, because “only pain is intellectual, only evil is interesting”.

(This makes me wonder if ‘you can’t accept a pure utopia’ is sort of an anti-meme^[3]. Even when Le Guin tells you outright what she's doing ("we have a bad habit of considering happiness as something rather stupid"), even when she structures the entire narrative around your scepticism, even when she asks straight up whether you find the city more believable once it has suffering, you still walk away thinking the story is fundamentally about suffering, not about your relationship to happiness.)

Le Guin Disagrees

There's one problem with this reading: While Le Guin herself talked in vague terms about the story's themes, she did lean toward the direction of Omelas as a critique of utilitarianism, or would call it a psychomyth about scapegoating. In her introduction to 'The Wind's Twelve Quarters', she wrote that the story was inspired by William James's discussion of moral philosophy, specifically his example of millions living in happiness on the condition that one ‘lost soul’ remains in torture. She describes it as "the dilemma of the American conscience".

This seems to contradict what I just argued. So what's going on? Here are some options that might partially explain it:

A. The Standard Reading Is Mostly Correct

Maybe I'm focusing on patterns that aren't important. Maybe the story really is primarily about utilitarian ethics, and all the stuff about our inability to accept happiness is just a literary buildup before the main event in the last paragraphs. Maybe I'm focusing on a contrarian reading because it feels clever.

B. Le Guin Leaned Into The Irony

Maybe Le Guin realised what was happening and decided to go with it. The misreading itself proves the point better than any explanation she could give would.

C. Anti-Meme

This is the least likely but most entertaining explanation: Le Guin demonstrated our inability to accept pure utopia so effectively that even she couldn't see past it afterwards – she fell victim to her own anti-meme. She wrote the story, knew what she was doing while writing it, but when she looked back at it later, she could only see the suffering child and the utilitarian dilemma.

-

All of this still feels a bit like a puzzle to me. I don't know which explanation is right. What I do know is that Omelas is doing something far more interesting than being a thought experiment about utilitarianism.

People often cite Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" as the most commonly misread piece of literature. But knowing about that misreading has become almost more common than actually misreading the poem. Omelas is different in that the misreading is still winning.

1. ^{^}

   I’m aware of the irony of where the story is hosted

2. ^{^}

   ETA: @Callum McDougall found a video and @Garrett Baker pointed to Ozy Brennan's blog post making the same point.

3. ^{^}

    “A unit of information that prevents itself from being spread, often by erasing itself from any mind that it enters.”