English Literature

Long long time ago, people lived in small law-less societies. As civilization grew, so are the rules. Today, we have laws for almost everything  from crossing the street to migrating to another land, from resolving family conflicts to wars between nations, from giving birth to burying the dead. We either live by the societys rules or suffer the consequences. Yet we call ourselves free.

Ursula K. Leguin and Kurt Vonnegut presented utopian societies in Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas and Harrison Bergeron respectively. Both stories reflect the discord between individuals interests and the societies limitations. Echoing Leguin and Vonneguts ideas, this paper believes that societys rules exist to balance conflicting human interests and preserve order. However, it should not restrain peoples potential to grow and become productive members of the society.

Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
The story is about Omelas, a place where happiness, celebrations, friendships, health and abundance thrives. The people in Omelas are not barbarians and not less complex than us but they are happy. They are not bothered by the issues and problems we face in our society. According to the author, Omelas do not have cars or helicopters, stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb or any of the destructive things that plague our society. What they have is comfort and the ability to be happy, something Lenguin believes people in our society have lost. However, Omelas is not that simple. Behind all the celebrations and joy, people know that something else is there. According to the story, people knew and some have seen it. Some have cried at the injustice, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their cityeven the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this childs abominable misery. Despite the guilt and the pain, people accepted the injustice as part of their lives. Those who could not bear it left Omelas and never returned.

    According to Bennett, the story is Le Guins way of showing the Western worlds indifference to the sufferings of other people (65). The miserable child represents the less fortunate members of our society- the victims of war, people in Africa, children living in the streets, people working in sweatshops and others which we are fully aware of but chose to ignore. People lost their homes but the bank and lending industry cannot lower interest rates because it could harm the economy. Some people need to be sacrificed to save the majority and that is a fact of life.   

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut
In Harrison Bergeron, Vonnegut described a society where everyone is equal. People who are more beautiful or smarter than others are given handicaps to level the field. People are not allowed to use their brains. There is no competition in the workplace or anywhere else. People had become nothing but robots, all for the sake of equality. In the story, George was quoted saying, If I tried to get away with itthen other peopled get away with it-and pretty soon wed be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. Vonneguts utopian world views a society where people are free to do what they want and think what they want as the dark ages. In Vonneguts society, majority of the people need to sacrifice and give up their natural advantages in order to remain equal with the rest of the population. There are no individual growths, everything is for the society. Harrison Bergeron is the rebel who wanted to be something more than what the society allows him to be.   

In a twisted way, Vonnegut portrays the society of our dreams- a society where everybody is equal, where being better, smarter or quicker is a liability, where natural gifts need to be repressed to prevent individual progress. In this society, only the mediocre is sacred. It is a satire of our law-laden culture. While laws are needed to preserve peace and cooperation, too much of it could lead to a robotic society where people need to rely on written rules rather than make use of their talents and aptitudes. Another consequence of this society is that, people were not exactly equal because they are under the control of Diana Moon Glampers, the United States Handicapper General and her armies. Equality was just an excuse to repress people like Harrison Bergeron from achieving their full potential. Handicaps were provided not to promote equality but also to preserve the power of the authorities.

According to Fish, meanings are not extracted from the text but made by the audience who are touched by it (cited in Cox 35).  In the same way that fables are told for their moral lessons, stories are supposed to teach something. As allegories of our modern society, the stories depict how our society thrives on the sacrifices of the lesser fortunate and the containment of those who are threats to what we believe to be right. One illustration of this allegory is the recent financial crisis brought by the subprime properties and lending fraud.  

Subprime Lending and Mortgage Fraud
    The recent financial crisis that rocked the world is mainly attributed to unregulated subprime property lending. The growth of the real estate business contributed to the increase in the US gross domestic product (GDP) in the previous years (Baily  Elliot 6). Baily and Elliot added that the real estate boost is accompanied by increase in demand for furniture, appliances, carpets and other household goods which resulted to increase in real estate prices and household wealth (6). The boom in real estate industry attracted both local and international investors to the market. Homeownership became a symbol of wealth (Griffin 2), however, some minority groups like African Americans and Hispanics were discriminated from the bank lending guidelines. To advance their causes, Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1997 relaxing lending rules to accommodate the minority. This law evolved and resulted to the creation of Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and Federal Home Loan Corporation (Freddie Mac) which enabled the mortgage of subprime properties (Griffin 3). This law provided equal opportunity for the minority to buy their own homes. However, it also opened the door to unethical investors and professionals who were driven by greed (Griffin 4).

This is similar to Vonneguts society where equality turned out to be a self-defeating end. People who had the capability exploited the law to promote their own selfish motives and the people who were supposed to benefit from it ended as the scapegoats. They lost their homes because they were unable to pay for their mortgages. In the midst of the crisis, the government ended up bailing the banking and lending corporations while their victims lost their properties.

Does the government know Yes. Do the people know Yes. But what have we done Nothing. Because like the citizens of Omelas we know it is not fair, we have seen the news, we have heard the people and seen their faces but we cannot do anything about it. We feel helpless and overwhelmed and thus we just accept is as the way things are. The victims of the mortgage fraud were hurting but like the child, they know their screams and cries for help will not be heard, so they speaks less and less often. They just sat in their cells and lived their life as it is, a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is not enough and it is not fair but it is life and there is nothing they can do.


Society exists to govern and safeguard the collective interest of the people. In the Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas and Harrison Bergeron, society is portrayed not just as a group of people and their laws but also their beliefs about what the society is and their roles as members of that society. In Vonneguts story, people accept the authority of the Handicapper General and her idea of an equal and advanced society even at the expense of their personal freedom and growth. In Omelas, people are willing to overlook the suffering of the child in order to maintain their happy and abundant lives. We might be wondering why people cannot just give up a little of their own comforts and ease the suffering of the child Or for something closer to home, why didnt the lenders just lowered the interest rates and let the people keep their homes, after all a lower profit would have been better than nothing. That could have surely made a difference, yet they chose not to and people suffered.

Like some of the courageous people of Omelas, it is tempting to walk away but unlike them there is no other place to go, at least nothing that guarantees a better life. That is a good reason for staying but if we are truly honest to ourselves, we know that we are not leaving because we are the citizens of Omelas, we are aware of the suffering in our society, in other countries, in the world in general but we are immune to it. Lastly, leaving Omelas is not the answer. Leaving Omelas will not change Omelas or make it go away, we need to change society into something that is more than just rules and norms, something that helps everyone to realize their full potential, whether they are gifted Harrison Bergerons or just a naked, imbecile child. Life is Omelas is about freedom and choice for everyone, unfortunately we are not living it yet.