#omelas

Taking place in superficially utopian "Um-Helat", this story presents a current of violent repression as the key to a progressive postcapitalist utopian society. The narrator, although describing them as "social workers" is implicitly part of a caste of citizen-police in Um-Helat who murder people for seemingly the only crime that is committed: learning about the world that Um-Helat came from. Our world. These "social workers" kill people who they have discovered taking part in underground comms to peer into the world of violent and unjust hierarchies that we live in, because to share the knowledge of this disgusting world is to taint or "infect" others with its "disease". They use a pike through the heart and spine "so it is quick and painless" and silent so that "nobody else will come to investigate". In the plot of this particular vignette, the "social workers" kill a father but realise that his young daughter has already been "exposed to the disease", and so they keep her in detention for a week after which she must choose between becoming one of the "social workers" for the rest of her life or implicitly, death.

I take is as best to read The Ones Who Stay and Fight as a sort of satire or critique, much as Omelas is. We don't assume that Ursula K Le Guin thinks Omelas would be a good place to live, and understand that she is posing a question, and we should understand Jemisin as posing a question as well. The way that this might slip past the reader is that although Le Guin's narrator is directly posing the conundrum to the reader, describing the suffering of the Omelas child as a bad thing that shouldn't happen, Jemisin's narrator really believes that this is the right thing to do, and is trying to recruit you, the reader, into the struggle as well.

The narrator derides Omelas explicitly in The Ones Who Stay and Fight as "a tick of a city, fat and happy with its head buried in a tortured child" - the implication is that how Um-Helat treats children is better, and the evidence given to us is questionable. Every child in Omelas except the one being tortured is brought to see the miserable child and made aware of the way the city works, folding them into the monstrous mechanism of the city. In Um-Helat, some children remain ignorant of the world of horrors from which their world developed, possibly for their whole lives, while for others the moment of their innocence being shattered also becomes a moment where they are made to choose (by the "social workers") between lifelong commitment to joining the epistemic police force or getting the pike, a coercive false choice by design. If Omelas is a tick, Um-Helat is a hornet's nest.

It seems everyone agrees the point of The Ones Who Stay and Fight is to present a third option besides Le Guin's complicity or abandonment: struggle. As I take it, the genius of the piece is that much like the options in The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, this third possibility does not deliver justice or liberation for the child whose suffering we are asked to contemplate. Living under a sort of benevolent capitalism that seems to have reformed incrementally from our present reality into the society of Um-Helat, the struggle of the "social workers" is not a revolutionary struggle. It is not a struggle rooted in care, or in solidarity, in class tension or in a belief in transformation. It is a purifying, authoritarian, repressive struggle to police the population into happy ignorant utopian subjects as long as they never expose themselves or others to the horrors of our real world.

In essence what Um-Helat describes is a utopian bubble policed by moral absolutists. If a conservative had made the same description of the political landscape of 2018 everyone would have rolled their eyes and carried on much the same, but I think we are in a moment now 8 years later when we can see there were some serious problems with how we conceived of making society better in the 2010s. Chief among those problems was our readiness to figuratively skewer people who we considered morally impure.

Here in the imperial core, we were born into a society that justifies the horrendous suffering of some, sometimes of children in fact, by the progress and glory and equality of our shining city. At a time when lots of people seem very taken with the concept of "woke 1" and "woke 2", using the fall from cultural prominence of progressive leftist politics to plot how the next movement can be stronger and better, I think it is entirely appropriate for us to recognise that what people are calling "woke 1" took many bubbles of progressive leftist culture from Omelas to Um-Helat.

I have been slowly building a theory of change in my work that centres utopianism, that is to say the perfect that exists in the heart of every person alive, in dialectical political change. In my working model of utopia and revolution, it is necessary for highly dogmatic bubbles of radical political belief to exist. These are cores of political change out from which spin versions of society that are more real and less utopian in shades as they conflict with the broader world and are tested in real time against the particulars of people's real world experiences.