In pre-k, I was taught to raise my hand so that my voice could be heard; to either ask a question or to answer one and that I had to always sit in my assigned seat. Now in college, I still raise my hand even though I'm free to speak out and I, like many others, still sit in the same seat even though there are no assigned seats. I never questioned these things when I was younger because I didn’t think that I can. I believed it was just how things worked.
It was during a class discussion when my fellow peers and I had a “holy shit” moment. You know that moment when you realize that the voice actor of Zuko from Avatar the Last Airbender is the same guy that voiced Jake from American Dragon. Anyway, I learned that we were conditioned at a very age to view things in a certain way such as; appearance, gender, and perfection. It’s like we weren't allowed to have our own opinion or to hold our own thoughts as if it was taboo.
Our teachers from pre-k to, lets say, third grade practically brainwashed us into believing that perfection could not exist but also that it should not stop us to strive for it. From our parents, we learned that a girl needs to act, talk and dress differently than a boy should. As for social media, we learned that appearance means everything and I mean EVERYTHING! You can’t be beautiful if you weighed a certain amount or that you couldn’t be cool if you didn’t dress a certain way. It's honestly ridiculous because we don’t notice this until someone, like me, brings it up. You see the ridiculousness of it all now, right?
What I’m trying to get at is that we were thought to not think to just follow what was thrown to us and that is why it is so hard for us; humans, to believe in a Utopia. We were taught that a Utopia was perfect but we were also taught that perfection couldn’t exist. Even if a Utopia did exist we were conditioned to believe that something just HAD to be wrong with it. That the Utopian society probably makes weekly sacrifices, that they were probably cannibals or just did crazy shit in the middle of the night to maintain the illusion that it’s “perfect”.
Ursula Le Guin created a satire The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas, to address our conditioning of viewing a Utopia. She described Omelas as a beautiful city near the sea where the people and the animals were happy! They were self-governing people that lived in peace, were intelligent, had festivals, danced, sing. They were living life!
Le Guin taunts us by asking, “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy?” She already knows that it would be hard for us to break away from the conditioning that was drilled into us.
Le Guin then asks us to imagine that “In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room….In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded....it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect….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.” '
Le Guin explains that “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.” What she is trying to say that our thoughts are not our own! Our “bad habit” of being pessimistic when it concern a Utopia because we were raised that way by our teachers and parents.
Through The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas, Le Guin is trying to get us to realize that the little voice of doubt that’s implanted into our mind is not our own but was a voice that was conditioned over the years to make us believe that it was our own.
You might not see it but she is challenging our way of thought by asking us to imagine the faults in Omelas;“I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help…” She wants us to question ourselves; “Why does something have to be wrong with Omelas?” “Why can’t it just be a peaceful place?” “ Does it really have to need these bad factors to exists?”
We need to understand that we’re stubborn little shits that hates being wrong; we always want to be right and prove others wrong. And Le Guin uses this to her advantage because she WANTS us to prove her wrong, to break free from the conditioning that was drilled into us. So that we can not only imagine a place like Omelas without having faults, but also start to think for ourselves.
Alabi O.
Word Count: 882
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