Here.
Please don’t read comments until you’ve read this. It is very short and fast to read. It is radicalizing. It is a good short story to send to your friend who needs to understand what capitalism is. LeGuin wrote this in 1973, cementing her status as Chad Supreme of Fuck Mountain. Bow before her might.
Let’s discuss in the comments below.
Worth noting omelass is a better world than ours.
Most things about our world suck and we have countless lives being fed into worse meatgrinders than that closet
That closet basically describes a fairly average persons stay in solitary and we have thousands of people doing just that in america. Only, the upside we get from that is some guy who owns a prison can buy a fancier jetski. He was gonna buy a jetski anyway, but the extra money he gets from the extra torture just means he can have a nicer one.
Critique? Im a utilitarian and id have ten kids rotting if thats what it takes to have utopia for a million people. As long as its not some “your kid might be next woooo spoopy” setting like hunger games sure, and even then hunger games is dystopic.
That is exactly why capitalism is fucked up, actually, is that prosperity comes at the cost of suffering of others. Your utopia simply isn’t if others must suffer for it.
Sure but in capitalism 80% of us suffer or are axploited while a top 5% gets benefits from this. A system with a single suffering individual is simply not comparable to a continuous tragedy such as the status quo
That’s a fascile analysis.
For we have two peoblems. One, having a person be the scapegoat like that does represnet a signficiant existing negative utility. Every person has to consider that their children could be next ans that represents a unadressed negative utility.
Seccond, that presumes disutility is fungible. It is fact not. This plan wouldn’t work. The assumed gimmick is that everyone belives it works and acts like it does. It is the belief and actions of thr people that being about utopia. The negatve externality is ignored out of tradionion. In that way it describes out current world not a hypothetical one.
Powerful read but don’t know how well it will radicalized anyone who already doesn’t have doubts about the status quo. An English teacher I had tried saying utopia wasn’t possible because you need slaves nevermind the prison labor that exists now and things suck for the majority of us.
Call it another tool in the belt, my man. My personal recommendation is you throw everything against the wall to see if it sticks. You might think you know what’s going to work, but I’ve found I never truly do. This has helped me in the past so I thought I’d pass it along.
You’re right, I won’t dismiss it just because I think they might not get it. I’ll see about passing it on to someone else when given the chance. If it works it works.
I think it just twigs with some folks. Like that child reminds them like, oh right, we use child labor for our clothes. How fucked is that?
Thats a bit bleak. You don’t need slaves, infact slaves are undesirable.
Letting alone the peoblem of how slavery isn’t actually a useful system. The gimmick is that in our world there isn’t enough work to go around. If you only accounted for useful work we could have a society on the level of ours with people working two hour days or so. There just wouldn’t be shoe salesmen.
Sorry wasn’t advocating some utilitarian idea about slaves or anything just was saying things are horrible for so many under the current system against that teacher’s logic against utopia. I understand that in order for a better world to be possible we shouldn’t and can’t sacrisfe anyone. Not just from whatever country we might be from but also around the world. We stand together in solidarity or get taken out one by one.
Oh no, I didn’t mean to imply you had. It is just a pet peve of mine when people describe slavey as efficent and abhorrent. When it is only cheap and abhorrent. It is actually highly inefficient but in the way of capitlaism that doesn’t matter. So I came off to hard, sorry.
This is a very anarchist story
