(very Chapochat voice) "have yall read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas? Le Guin is sooo woke"
I have not seen a single person stop to think about these workers all year long! This is particularly hilarious considering nuclear power is literally the only argument that lets these worthless class traitor redditors say "we can fight global warming without stopping production!!! I need to play my Nintendo games!!!" There is no material difference between this website and the Elon Musk death cult, the only thing you are fighting is the working class.
That's not the point. The point is that everyone in that society has had a face put on the suffering, that they are aware, and still choose to stay. Because the cost of leaving is so high, they find a way to justify it to themselves.
People focus on the ones that walk away because that's the title, but the actual point is most people don't walk away, and that only a few who for whatever reason cannot bring themselves to justify suffering leave.
That's why the story is so highly relevant. If you take the child as the Global South, whose suffering and exploitation enables the lifestyle of the first world (as many here are wont to do), you should consider what it would actually mean to completely disavow and not partake in that suffering. If you're posting on this website, you're not the ones who walk away, you're one of the ones that stays in Omelas.
Edit: I didn't mean to imply in my earlier comment that the allegory was the entirety of the story, only one aspect of it. It is "Part of" the message, where the conflict of abandoning the practical utopia, and the cost of such an action, are central. Resolving the "utility" in abandoning such a reprehensible cycle rather than acting to end it is what I'm trying to puzzle through, within the lens of the story/author anyway.
My takeaway was that the story serves to “simplify” the effects of an exploitative system down to the suffering of one child. From the meta-narrative standpoint, the story is putting a more recognizable human face, a more relatable scale on the exploitation. If I’m not way off base here, it serves as a direct analogy to the wide-scale suffering caused by the exploitative capital system for the purpose of this thought experiment, this allegory. Who walks away from the injustice? What do they have to face to reject that system?
I don’t think I’m articulating it very well but that’s kind of my point - the analogy is a distilled version of the conflicts we experience here. No doubt most of us are still living in Omelas, decrying the injustices heaped upon the unfortunate child but unwilling (not knowing what it means to?) to leave. That the situation is simplified from a global structure used to perpetuate exploitation (of the global south, or otherwise) to the suffering of a single child is to make an immediate and visceral analogy.
I have no idea if someone, unaware of this history of exploitation and imperialism, would come to such a conclusion without outside context, but I think my analysis is fair. As for “walking away from Omelas” in today’s society, I’m unsure what exactly that looks like in a way that will help to end the suffering of the metaphorical child. Is “walking away” as an individual more justifiable? Where does one go? Is there something to be done about the system of suffering?