I’ve got a whole study guide on it! Well, “Ones” (not “Those” that student use more often than not) suggests the individual as meaningful; the allusions in it to Dostoyevsky, James, & Arendt on power; & the contrasts among deontological, consequentialist, & virtue ethics.
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Replying to @GiffordJames @nberlat and
Despite recognizing the evil some would commit to achieve a utopia, she shows the ones who leave rather than fight to impose their own new utopia. We don’t know where they’re going or what it will be, only that they’re not contributing to the banality of evil.
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Replying to @GiffordJames @cheerlessdrudge and
okay I just read it and OMG must Russ have *hated* that story. The Two of Them seems specifically like an outraged response to it!
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Replying to @nberlat @GiffordJames and
you don't walk away! you rescue the kid, if you can!
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Replying to @nberlat @GiffordJames and
Well I mean I feel like people kind of read this story backwards Like if you want Omelas, a completely imaginary place, to exist without the kid, you can just stop reading before she makes it up She openly says this, it's all out on the table
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Replying to @arthur_affect @nberlat and
She puts the kid in because otherwise Omelas isn't a real place, it's literally unimaginable It would be a pointless and unpublishable story, just someone masturbating over an impossibly idyllic paradise for no reason
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Replying to @arthur_affect @nberlat and
In the meta, literal sense, Omelas cannot exist without the kid That's its REASON for existing, it's where the story comes from No one ever tells stories about utopias except to expose their hidden flaw and falsity
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Replying to @arthur_affect @nberlat and
It could be a statement about the nature of the world or just the limits of human imagination Anytime someone starts telling a story about how "everyone in this society is just nice to each other and there's no oppression" it feels fake, we don't buy it, it's irrelevant to us
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Replying to @arthur_affect @nberlat and
"Those who walk away" are only seen on the road, never at their destination It's her own dig at herself, the notorious difficulty of trying to actually describe a world without governments, without property, without police, without violence
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Replying to @arthur_affect @nberlat and
All these words for what you don't have (even the word "anarchy" is a negative word for a lack of something) and so few words for what you think you'd have instead
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Hence why even in her attempt at a utopia with The Dispossessed it's not actually a utopia That's the subtitle, "An Ambiguous Utopia" The whole story only even happens because Shevek leaves Anarres for Urras
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Replying to @arthur_affect @nberlat and
In a sense, this is why I kept going back to the ending of Tombs of Atuan in the thread. There's no topos of arrival for Le Guin, only a way of going that is difficult & without end, and hence a choice made not a gift given. Shevek too.
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Replying to @GiffordJames @arthur_affect and
I was supposed to visit the archives this year to look at her correspondence around the open ending change to Dispossessed… Alas, maybe next year.
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