Imagining Omelas means imagining the Child, it means having this image in your head of a place that doesn't exist but *could* exist and is so much better than the here and now around you that you'll excuse or commit atrocities in that here and now
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
The future being more real and more solid than the present Abstractions taking priority over the concrete
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
Taking this virtue ethics stance instead -- "utopia" is in the actions you personally choose to do or not do to the people around you right here and right now, not in the imagined future payoff that will make your present actions moot
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
The people of Urras, after all, justify everything exploitative and harmful about their system by what it makes, and dream furiously that someday it will make enough stuff that all the oppression will be paid for They make that case to Shevek as strongly as they can
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
That's why they want *him*, they're thirsting for the magic engine they think his new theorem can create, they can taste the utopia they can build with that tech
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
They aren't unaware of the pain and suffering to all the children in all the closets their system has caused, they're acutely aware of it, they only grow more aware of it the more work they do to hide it, and they push *harder* to try to push *through* to when it will all pay off
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
In this set of stories Le Guin makes it really clear her feelings about omelettes and eggs, I think Anarres' ambiguous utopia is such because Anarres is dirt poor and the people live in relative poverty and yet the system is still worth defending in that poverty
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
It is not the kind of "utopia" where the political and economic system is so productive and profitable it lets the people invent a magic perpetual motion engine, Atlas Shrugged-style Indeed Shevek's story is about how their system works *against* that possibility
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
Le Guin was not a friend to gee-whiz futurism of the kind that characterized old-school Golden Age science fiction (just as Ayn Rand honestly was kind of an ultimate reductio ad absurdum of that mindset) Haber in Lathe of Heaven is kind of an avatar of that ideology
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
And just in terms of his personality he embodies what's repulsive about it He's just such a douche He's gets so *annoyed* whenever you bring up a child in the closet in Omelas "Fuck you, who says there has to be one? Dream bigger man"
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"If I had a dream machine, I would simply imagine a second City of Omelas, inside the closet, and therefore that Child would not be suffering but be happy And then assuming there was a smaller closet with a smaller Child, I would address the infinite regress with Cantorian sets"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
I do think about the wacky fact that all the new worlds created in The Lathe of Heaven are literally inside Orr's mind That there's one reading of the story where literally nothing is happening but Orr having a dying hallucination after a nuclear war
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Replying to @arthur_affect @iridienne and
Le Guin is careful not to say anything about the objective external universe in The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas It's not the *world* that says the Child has to exist, it's not God who says it, it's not "natural law" It's *you*, it's *your imagination* that can't handle it
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