The City of Joy

Ursula K. Le Guin’s story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas describes a type of paradise that human beings have been striving to create physically or spiritually, since the dawn of history. It is interesting that every society, religion and person has their own concept of “how things ought to be.” Growing up as the daughter of intellectuals in Berkeley, of all places, surrounded by demonstrations of “make love, not war,” idealism and a great mixture of world religions, it is no surprise that the author demonstrates uncanny insight into this generalized utopian vision. Utopia, Zion, Jerusalem or Salem (Omelas backwards, which is identical to “Shalom” in the Hebrew, meaning “Peace”) are all synonyms for paradise, but they are simply the “historical formula” of a primordial “archetype” according to Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist who theorized the “collective unconscious.” To better understand the intent of this short story, I will critique the symbolism of the story looking for links to the psycho-myth: such as the scapegoat, the inner child, and the unconscious drives of human beings.

First, let’s see examine the inhabitants of Omelas: what they are, and what they are not. The narrator describes the citizens of Omelas as, “Joyous!” “happy,” “mature, intelligent, passionate adults,” and that they are “not simple folk,” “there was no king…did not use swords, or keep slaves [which is a lie].” “They were not barbarians…not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians… They were not less complex than us,” defends the narrator. The narrator also informs us that they did without “stock exchange,” “advertisement,” “secret police, and the bomb [referring to the atomic bomb].” Consciously, or not, the narrator has expressed the dream of the libertarian world and the Utopian myth described in the song “Imagine,” by John Lennon: world peace, free love, equality, pure democracy, legalization of drugs, freedom from religion and to be recognized as intellectual, beautiful, just and industrious people. A gilded dream: hollow as a drum, unrealized and unpractical in our world.

The narrator admits that it is difficult to describe them and their society accurately and believably:

“How describe the citizens of Omelas?” “I wish I could describe it better… I wish I could convince you.” She adds, “I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody… Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh.”

The narrator reassures you that if such is the case you are free to elaborate on the scene with anything you wish to make it more desirable and believable: orgies, drugs, anything, with no fear of being “puritanical,” or “goody-goody” or feeling guilty. She asserts: “One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.” Interestingly enough, guilt is what pushes our frustrated desires back into the unconscious, so, in effect; Omelas is a place where our psychic inhibitions are swept away. It would seem that the citizens of Omelas have found the happy medium: to be totally free, while avoiding injuring others. But it only seems that way, there’s a catch.

In many of the world religions there exists the archetype of “the scapegoat,” or escape-goat, which Biblically was one of two goats who were selected by the High Priest and chosen by chance: one to bear the sin of the people, and the other to be set free (the escape-goat) as a symbol of the Israelites’ absolution before the Lord (Leviticus 16:7-26). Over time, people have inverted the meaning to denote a scapegoat as one who suffers the penalty by proxy, or vicariously, for others. In the Christian religion, it is Jesus, the Son of God, who suffers for the world and rises again. In Islam, a sheep is sacrificed before Allah upon completing the pilgrimage to Mecca. Many forms of human and animal sacrifice exist in mythology: Greek, Roman, Chinese, Norse, and Native American, to name a few. The myth of Omelas is no different; it can’t be or else no-one can believe it: “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.”

The image of the child, the retarded, wretched child, is also an archetype. Gollum, the village idiot, the court jester, the whipping boy, is essentially a mirror image of the “inner child” (a phrase coined by psychologist John Bradford) on whom we all take pity: cold, afraid, helpless, imbecile, ripped from its mother’s womb, born in sin and fallen from heaven. The inner child, locked away in the dark cellar of the unconscious, bears the weight and feels the pain of the person. We all have one. So why not displace the weight and the guilt of all onto one? If there can be no clergy, if there is no pain, or war or inequality, there must be something, some symbol of justice to believe in, some tangible evidence that the Universe is balanced. This is the function of the child. The narrator is right—there are very few laws in Omelas, only one really—the child must stay there and suffer. “Now do you [the reader] believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.”

Those who walk away, are those who face their inner child and take responsibility for their existence, as Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, would say: “existential analysis interprets human existence, and indeed being human, ultimately in terms of being responsible." The citizens who choose to stay “know that they, like the child, are not free.” They exhibit the phenomena known as “learned helplessness.” But those who choose to leave accept the need to do all in their power to free themselves. They chose to become “pedants, and sophisticates," rather than live a care-free life of apathy for one who suffers unjustly.

The story is indeed an attempt to bring out “the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe," or the collective unconscious, but not under the influence of drooz as the inhabitants of Omelas, but by observation of ourselves: our behavior, our thoughts and our emotions.

Freud observed that the two most powerful drives of man are the primal pursuits of pleasure, and violence, noting that these are the two things human beings are most interested in. The author portrays them both alive and well in this paradoxical city. The inhabitants of Omelas have not transcended them, or their need of the “social contract” (the original government myth theorized by Rousseau) as the reader is led to believe in the beginning of the story. Their society is another “historical formula” of the ancient archetypes. Perhaps it is a prediction or critique of our current society that lives lavishly at the expense of the underdeveloped world, and puts the elderly, the disabled, the homeless and hungry out of sight and out of mind in order to avoid the pain and guilt we feel upon seeing them and having empathy.

The story does not tell us where the ones who walk away are going or what they will do when they get there, only that, “they seem to know…” and that it is, “even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness… I cannot describe it at all…It is possible that it does not exist." I wish she would tell us, and how to get there! But apparently it is something we have not thought of, or dreamed of, or even desired yet and can’t until we, too, chose to walk away.