In Ursula LeGuin's “The One's Who Walk Away from the Omelas,” the fictional author sells “Omelas” to the reader. The city is introduced with a celebration: “With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city of Omelas…In other streets the music beat fast, a simmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance” (307). The author tries to deceive us to believe that every day is a celebration, but this one is a Festival of Summer . Obviously not every day would be a party in Omelas, yet we ignore this fact as we imagine Omelas to be utopian society; therefore, the author advertises Omelas well to us .Frankfurt says, “The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept” (4). How the author uses bullshit to sell Omelas is to be established here:
They [a few people] go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place 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. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from the Omelas (311).
A few people left Omelas and they never returned to it. The author draws readers away from this by identifying Omelas as a place of happiness, identifying places outside Omelas as places of darkness. The author is ultimately concerned with how the reader views their town.. This relates to Frankfurt's idea of bullshit. Frankfurt says, “The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise” (12). The author's enterprise is Omelas. The author carefully depicts how Omelas is a happy place, and other places are opposite to the extreme that they may not exist.
The author does mention the mistreatment of the one crap-covered child: “They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, some do not…even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery” (LeGuin 310). The author does not lie, omit, the truth about the crap covered kid. The child could be released; the author acknowledges this truth; “If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place…all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed”(LeGuin 311). While we know the child could live a better life, but the author claims the opposite. The author wants us to believe the intent of Omelas' ruler, who is probably the author himself/herself, is sincere when s/he locks up the child.
But the child is locked up to show the citizens of Omelas how miserable their life could be, compared to how it actually is. This is to maintain the author's happy society. This relates to Rousseau because he discussed the necessity of certain individual sacrifices for the better of society (refer to the discussion of “The Lottery”). Rousseau would argue that the crap-covered kid, because he is a member of Omelas and its social contract, should be willing to die for Omelas. The child lives in darkness so the other citizens could live in happiness: “A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards…” (LeGuin 310). Why is it that the author in “Omelas” defines only Omelas as a happy place? Towns besides Omelas as darkness ; the crap-covered kid also lives in little light, essentially darkness. The author may relate the child and towns that are not Omelas to darkness to convince the members of Omelas not to leave it. The author is bullshitting; he is not concerned with citizens being happy nor with the degraded child, but with the reaction of the reader towards Omelas and with maintaining the population of Omelas. Therefore, because his/her only concern is selling Omelas to us, and keeping the current citizens “inside” Omelas, the author is bullshitting. Bullshit exploits truths to deceive us about the intent of the bullshitter; the author is a bullshitter and Omelas is his bullshit town.
Whether it is bullshitting or lying, society is constantly trying to deceive us. When we realize how social contracts concern with society instead of the individual, we may ask, “Is Rousseau bullshitting? Is he lying?” He deceives us into thinking that society, under the social contract, is concerned with individuals' civil liberties through the general will. Society is really concerned with regulating the State. It does this by marginalizing random individuals to make set an example: this is what happens outside of the social contract. But this is a product of the social contract. Social bullshit and social lies are all products of the social contract. Because we live under social contracts, we are up to our heads in lies and in bullshit.
I just wanted to comment that Le Guin uses Taoist themes in many of her stories. The idea is that the world is in a delicate balance. For light, there is darkness. The neglected child in Omelas creates the balance of the utopian society. The point of the story is that if the citizens of Omelas wish to continue living in bliss, they must see and acknowledge the suffering of the child. After you're done reading it, you're supposed to ask yourself if there's a child somewhere crying for your happiness and if you can keep on living with that knowledge. If you can't, you're like the ones who walk away from Omelas.
