Spoilers for "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and The Dispossessed!
I'm not sharing my thoughts because I think I'm so brilliant and clever for my interpretation but because I want to inspire conversation on this topic (–and I welcome anyone to elaborate on or challenge my interpretation!). I just wanted to get this disclaimer out of the way because I'm afraid of accidentally sounding pretentious!
I first read "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" in the short fiction Norton Anthology my freshman year of college. We read the story to ourselves, and then afterward the teacher asked us one question and then freed us to discuss: Would you walk away from Omelas?
To myself, and likely many others in that classroom, her question was the "point" of the short story. Simply put, TOWWAFO was a philosophical dilemma meant to make the reader squeamishly ruminate on one's own morals and desires.
After reading The Dispossessed six-ish years later, I remembered that Le Guin had written this short story and reread it. Only now, with the juxtaposition of Anarres against Urras in the back of my mind — the juxtaposition of an anarchist society against a capitalist one — do I realize how reductive is my former interpretation of the short story as only a utopian / dystopian trolley problem.
What I'd previously missed is the importance of the narrator repeatedly accusing the reader of being unable to imagine a true, pure utopia because of the common-held belief that happiness is "stupid" and "pain is intellectual." So too do the people of Omelas need the suffering child to inspire compassion and give art meaning. They are no better than us, unable to believe in happiness without cost, without sacrifice; and because they are all complicit in the decision to leave the child to suffer, there is no guilt in Omelas. There are, however, those few who choose to leave, much like the Odonians chose to leave Urras to establish a world without the unnecessary cruelty posed necessarily for the function of capitalism.
Now the question I ask myself is no longer "would I leave?", but it is instead: Are the people who walk away from Omelas leaving because, as I'd previously assumed, they were wracked with guilt; or are they leaving because they can imagine the "unimaginable": a post-capitalist utopia not founded on needless suffering? Are the ones who walk away simply anarchists in the style of an Odonian?
"You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere." — The Dispossessed
by Frogs-on-my-back