To Annihilate Utopia

The war-drone rocketed over the mountain pass at Mach 3. Far behind lay home base, in control by radio; before it lay its target, a beautiful city bright-towered by the sea: Omelas.

Omelas! City of joy! City of happiness! Paradise! Utopia! Or so its inhabitants called it; but the drone’s furious senders gave it other names, for even Utopia has rivals and enemies. They sent the drone for good reasons and bad; for justice but also vengeance, for virtue but also power, for love but also wrath.

The Angel-class drone homed in on the city. The antimatter-powered flying machine, no longer than your leg, hurtled over the Green Fields at Mach 2. It passed over the Farmer’s Market at Mach 1; its sonic boom rang like a gunshot, for this was not a stealth mission. People looked up and pointed, but it was too late. The drone had already reached its destination; the Child’s Mansion.

It hovered high, balanced on its jets. It unfurled wings and powered down engines. It descended to ground level on flittering, glittering wings. It sought and found a cellar door. Seven searing slashes of laser light; the door’s charred fragments clattered to the ground.

Into the Mansion, down the hall. Turn left, turn right, and there, look; a locked door. Far away, the drone’s operators nodded to each other. They recognized that door, having seen it themselves.

Seven laser blasts; the door collapsed. Within, a small room. Two paces by three. Dirt floor. A bucket. Mops. And huddling in the corner, naked, wide-eyed, staring, shivering;

The Child.

Far away, the drone’s operators nodded to each other. Target acquired!

The drone said, “Fear not, and follow me.”

The Child glanced at the mops, then looked at the drone and shook its head.

“Those,” the drone said with disgust. A laser slash; the mops were ash. “Now quick, hurry, they’re coming, we haven’t much time.”

It flittered out the door, the Child tottering behind on spindly legs. Down the hall, turn left, turn right, and out the door, into the sunlight. The Child ran ten paces, then collapsed and lay on its back, panting, for it was years since it had walked so far. The Child clutched the grass and blinked at the sky; it gasped and sobbed.

The drone hovered above the Child. It said, “You poor child, I come to tell you the truth. And the truth is, you deserve better. None of your misery is your fault. It’s your problem, it’s your trap, it’s your torture, pain and torment, but it’s not your fault.”

The Child sobbed and wept.^[1] The drone said, “You should be clean. You should be warm. You should be well fed. You should be cared for. You should be loved. You should be healthy. You should be happy. You should be free.”

The drone rose on glittering wings. It started engines and blasted high into the sky, up, up and away.

Far away the drone’s operators nodded to each other. Payload delivered; mission accomplished.

It was not the Child’s rebellion that annihilated Omelas. They found her giggling and blowing seeds off a dandelion puffball, but that was not what ruined the City. She was never the same again; she wept no more, and sometimes she laughed; but that was not what doomed Omelas. She escaped, on her own, once, twice, a dozen times; eventually someone spirited her far away; but that was not what destroyed Omelas.

What destroyed Omelas was the fact that it was not destroyed. For after such a scandal, how dare the sky be blue? By what right did the crops keep growing, the electricity flowing, the float-lamps glowing? What possessed the sea to not rise, and the earth to not quake? Shouldn’t disaster have struck, within the day and hour that the drone spoke a kind word to the Child?

If only the drone had detonated! If only it had blasted Omelas to atoms! Had it vaporized the city with the fire of a thousand suns, then the few survivors would have suffered and mourned, but they would have rebuilt Omelas, bigger and better, happier and lovelier than ever; and within it another Child, writhing under even better tortures!

But that was not the plan of Utopia’s rivals and enemies. For good reasons and bad, their fury was too great to grant Omelas the mercy of death. They demanded no less than the city’s refutation.

For the people of Omelas, unharmed, had to ask each other; what now of the teachings? The drone spoke a kind word to the Child, yet the sky is still blue! Didn’t we know that our happiness, health, wealth, skill, beauty and delight depended wholly upon the Child’s abominable misery? Weren’t those the terms? Wasn’t that what our scholars taught? What then of their wisdom? Have we lied to ourselves, all these years, all those Children?

Nothing had changed, but everything was revealed. Omelas could no longer deny its absurdity. Omelas prided itself on its scientific enlightenment; but isn’t the first rule of science to abandon falsified theories?

Had the sky bled red, then Omelas would have survived; but no, the insolent sky stayed blue, as if nothing had happened at all. 

The city survived, and thus was annihilated. Omelas lived, but it was no longer Omelas.

[END]

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Commentary: Pantopian Omelas

“The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.” ^[3]

Then inspiration struck. My eyes flew open, I sat bolt upright in bed, and I cried out into the night:

“A weapon!”

Then I could lie down and sleep. Over the next few days, I wrote this story.

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Utopia means the Good Place, but also No Place. A credulous world took Thomas More’s sour jest as an ideal. Some attempted to make Utopia real, with predicably catastrophic results.

That disillusionment inspired the genre of Dystopia, the Bad Place. It’s an ancient genre, going back to humankind’s Hells; and young-adult fiction carries on the tradition. But blessed be the valiant hearts of the young, for modern young-adult dystopias end with the fall of the old order. That puts those stories in the “Pantopian” genre.

I propose Pantopia as the dialectic synthesis of the thesis Utopia and its antithesis Dystopia. Pantopia is the “All Place”, where everything that always happens, always happens. Love, death, survival, beauty, loss, hope, miracles and the quotidian. In Pantopia, the weather is chaotic, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, bread falls buttered side down, work expands to fill the time allotted, employees in a hierarchy rise to their level of incompetence, there is no free lunch, satisfaction is not guaranteed, bad money drives out good, communication cannot cross a power gap, power corrupts, freedom creates, what is now proven was once only imagined, and any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ^[4]

Just like here! And just like Omelas!

And in pantopian Omelas, justice and injustice are inseparable. Their high ideals are firmly founded upon low hypocrisy. The people of Omelas cry out in their hearts for the Child, but most are too comfortable and complicit to walk away.

Just like us!

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Le Guin tries describe Omelas, the city of happiness, but she stops to confess incredulity.

“Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.” ^[5]

She describes the wretched Child, and then she says:

“Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible?” ^[6]

Is she praising our worldly wisdom, or mocking our cynicism?

Omelas is no Utopia, nor even a “flawed” utopia, for its flaw runs down to its heart. In some ways it is one of the most horrific Dystopias in all of literature. For Le Guin wrote: 

“They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms… They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.” ^[7]

So even the fairest of their joys is shadowed and contaminated by that filthy broom-closet. Yet Le Guin also writes:

“One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.” ^[8]

Nonsense! Omelas has nothing but guilt! It’s a city of sell-outs!

“They know that they, like the child, are not free.” ^[9]

Consider this quote by Joseph Stalin, the Communist dictator:

“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” ^[10]

Le Guin acknowledges Stalin’s wicked wisdom, and even uses it, but in a way opposite to Stalin’s; for Stalin favored statistics, and Le Guin favored tragedy. The tyrant used the numbness of large numbers to stabilize his dystopia; but the writer used the keenness of uniqueness to validate hers.

She minimizes material torment, to maximize the spiritual torment of everyone in Omelas. Life in Omelas is cooperative and orderly because everyone there is under firm psychic control, by guilt. They have no alibi.

Thus, the writer was more tyrannical than the tyrant! Her cruelty is so refined that I am sure that a society could indeed be built along Omelas lines, and it would work!

LeGuin’s system would work because it’s adaptable, and that’s because she specified as little as possible about Omelas. Her elliptical style raised questions that she did not answer. She intended to provoke thought. I too wrote elliptically, for I too intend to provoke thought.

Here’s a provocation: compare the gendered styles of Le Guin and myself. What are we to do about Omelas? She advocated quiet withdrawal. Don’t make a fuss. Just walk away. How yin of her. Whereas I imagine launching a supersonic anti-matter-powered laser drone to blast through the door, lead the Child outside, say a kind word, and fly away, just to prove a point. How yang of me!

In my defense, my story does not “vaporize” Utopia, though the drone had a Hiroshima’s worth of boom in its gram of antimatter. It “annihilated” Utopia; it made it as nothing.

The drone was a spiritual weapon. Its payload was a kind word. It did nothing more than call a bluff, but Omelas itself was made of bluffs.

The first bluff of Omelas was:

“… they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery…The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child…” ^[11]

In my story, the drone called that bluff. It spoke a kind word to the Child, yet their sky stayed kindly. So Omelas was destroyed because it was not destroyed. In science, any theory falsified by experiment must change; not so in fantasy. Is Omelas science fiction, or fantasy?

Another bluff of Omelas was that even if freed, the child could not fathom the state of freedom.

“… they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.” ^[12]

Thus, the people of Omelas consoled themselves. How very Pantopian. How easy, how comforting, how convenient for them!

The child’s torture has this preservative effect; it teaches shame and hypocrisy to the people of Omelas. That stabilizes society; for anyone prone to dangerous idealism must either conform to the lies, or leave. How conservative of Omelas; for as Benjamin Disraeli said,

“A conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.” ^[13]

The most dastardly bluff of Omelas is in this passage:

“They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the 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 Omelas.”^[14]

And so do I. For what is the land from whose bourne nobody returns? Unimaginable and indescribable? Possibly nonexistent?

What but Death? That is the exit offered by generous Omelas!

Pantopia plays the same mean trick; for what other escape is there from Everywhere? And short of that, what defense is there from Everywhere’s cruelty?

That is why I could not sleep that night, and why I reached for a spiritual weapon.

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But what right have I to complain? Doesn’t pantopian Omelas describe Everywhere? Doesn’t my own society have scapegoat Children, whom we knowingly torment for no reason but power? Not just one Child, but millions; so many that they blur into a mere statistic, as wise and wicked Stalin predicted. 

I tell myself that I have an alibi. I didn’t do it! It’s not my fault! Yet I also tell myself that I would be heroic and saintly enough to walk away. But am I? Are you? Face it, dear reader, you’re probably as big a hypocrite as I am. It’s easier to stay just as we are. How Pantopian! 

In truth I wrote this reply-story to protest, not injustice, but inconvenience. How dare Le Guin call me out! And how inconvenient that my only self-defense weapon is a kind word!

Therefore, I tell you, fellow sell-out:

You deserve better.

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