San Fransisco: The city of Omelas.

Or not?

Me to a colleague: “Have you ever been to San Fransisco”

My French colleague: “No. I wanted to, but then I started working in a startup and heard the stories from people who have been, and now I don’t want to go.”

Introduced to me on the latest podcast episode of Very Bad Wizards, Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away’, describes a fictional city called Omelas. The city is not only described as utopian, but Le Guin invites the reader to add whatever they would need for this city to be the perfect utopian city to them: Be it religion or not, the addition of the mega-drug drooze or orgies on demand. To each individual reader, the city is inarguably utopian.

However, the flipside is an idea borrowed from William James’ ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’, (and maybe a little bit from Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’). The idea is that all the happiness of the entire city’s population is dependant upon the unimaginable suffering of one small child. 12 years old, the child can remember the sunlight and its mother's voice, however now lives in a windowless, 2 by 3 paces, dark cellar, with two mops and a bucket which it is scared of, living in its own excrement with negligible contact to the outside world.

At risk of joining the San Francisco bashing bandwagon, and admittedly drawing a massive bow when comparing it to Omelas, as someone who often visits San Francisco for work, the similarities between the two, and the dilemmas it brings up in me, was kinda scary.

Suffering

While the child (who is never given a gender) is kept in a cellar, every inhabitant between the ages of 8 and 12 of Omelas is educated about the child, in order to fully understand how good their lives are. So while the child is literally hidden, knowledge of it is with every inhabitant at all times. Similarly, the walk down Market Street in San Fransisco could not paint a bleaker picture of human life. I used to think that homelessness was either-or, but the level of suffering here makes for a terrible impression when getting off the Bart at the Civic Center.

Inequality

San Fransisco is not a city where everyone is suffering, there are a few who have benefited hugely from the tech boom that has happened there, plenty has been written on this topic. Similarly, the inhabitants of Omelas live not only content lives, but lives of joy, the story is set on one day of a festival, with equally happy horses, and a boy playing the flute, all to the backdrop of the child in the cellar. (It is important to note that the suffering of the child in Omelas, has a clear causational relationship to the happiness of the masses. This relationship in San Fransisco is debatable, if existent at all).

Pointlessness.

However, the most striking similarity between the two cities is that the suffering is completely unexplained, it makes absolutely no sense. San Fransisco twists my mind inside out, it makes no sense that such a wealthy country should have people living in that way. Similarly, Le Guin explicitly leaves out why the child must live in suffering in Omelas; no deal with the devil, no black magic, it just is that way and is clear that it must be so (although it is alluded to that some people of the city know why it must be so, it is never explained to the reader).

Not only is the situation pointless or unexplained, but a solution to the problem is also far from clear. The story only talks of those who either live with the knowledge of the trade-off they’re taking part in, and those who walk away, out the city gates, through the dark fields, north-west, towards “a place even less imaginable” than the paradise city of Omelas. The options of the inhabitants of Omelas seems to match that of those in San Fransisco, the alternative far from clear.

It would be silly to say that San Fransisco is the same as Omelas. I don't mean that I also don't mean to draw any allegorical conclusions from the story or my experiences in San Fransisco. Nevertheless, as a society, we’re going to have to answer some hard questions soon, and looking at situations in parallel to such a story, shocking or not, can bring to light different solutions and ideas.

I don't enjoy visiting San Fransisco, I’m not sure if my discomfort is from the guilt of my own privilege and/or inaction; from the frustration of not knowing what to do, or both. Either way, I hope that we can as a society address these shocking instances of inequality, and needless suffering, to make San Francisco a place where one can actually enjoy all that it has to give. Perhaps even my French colleague will give it a crack too.