In “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, Ursula K. Le Guin describes an imaginary city called Omelas, where everybody is constantly happy and satisfied. In Omelas, the summer solstice is a very important event which the local community celebrates with joyful processions, music, food and horse races. Despite Le Guin’s detailed and accurate description of Omelas, a number of passages clearly indicate that the city is a mere utopia, i.e. an imaginary place whose society, economy and political system are absolutely perfect. In Omelas, there are no social classes, priests, secret police, slaves, kings or soldiers. All of those things that most of us dislike about the modern world do not exist in Omelas, where everybody is intelligent and culture, even though technology is not particularly advanced.

Unlike real cities, which are grey, polluted, crowded and stressful, Omelas is characterized by open spaces, great parks, red roofs, painted walls and avenues of trees. It is utopian cities like Omelas that inspired Sir Ebenezer Howard and other visionary architects to develop self-sufficient garden cities featuring proportionate green belts and areas of residence in order to allow residents to live peacefully and harmoniously without having to choose between nature and modern comforts. In Omelas, people can benefit from a range of natural elements and features that cannot be found in modern cities: mountains, water, greenery, clear air and a pleasant breeze, to name but a few.

Since many of us tend to associate happiness with stupidity and pain with intelligence, the author points out that despite its perennial happiness, the local community is actually complex and cultivated. She also specifies that even though Omelas lacks advertisements, financial markets, bombs and well-defined social strata, its residents are not barbarians who live in the past. In fact, everybody is free to do whatever they want without ever getting punishes for their actions, as in Omelas there are only a few laws – which suggests that the local community has strong ethical principles and does not need anybody to tell them what is right and what is wrong.

Compared to the real world, where people get robbed, scammed, abused, attacked, insulted and even murdered on a daily basis, a place like Omelas sounds certainly refreshing. Who wouldn’t like to live in a place where everybody respects and trusts each other and children are free to go out at any time without their parents having to worry about them? Interestingly, despite Omelas being such a peaceful and safe city to live in, its younger inhabitants are not naïve at all. In fact, the author describes its children as happy, mature, and intelligent. Omelas is so perfect that even the author admits that it sounds like a city in a fairy tale. The imaginary nature of Omelas becomes even more obvious when the author fails to specify whether the city has subways, trains and other modern infrastructure. The city could be equipped with all of the above facilities or none of them – “it doesn’t matter”, she says, as the reader can imagine Omelas as they like. In fact, the narrator invites us to picture whatever details would make Omelas seem happiest to us – if it pleases us, we may even add “an orgy” or recreational drugs.
Here, it is evident that the utopian city of Omelas serves as a tool to introduce an unexpected philosophical theme, i.e. scapegoating. By stressing the fact that the people of Omelas owe their happiness to a the pain and desperation endured by a single child being kept in a dirty basement, Le Guin informs the reader that in a fair world, only a great deal of evil can counterbalance the kind of perfection found in Omelas.