Episode 163: Should I Stay or Should I Go? (Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas")

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_03]: Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having

[00:00:06] [SPEAKER_03]: an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.

[00:00:09] [SPEAKER_03]: Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing

[00:00:14] [SPEAKER_03]: my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:16] [SPEAKER_00]: Think it might have something to do with me being drunk all the time?

[00:00:19] [SPEAKER_00]: I'm an alcoholic, I have a problem, I'm just not ready to deal with it yet.

[00:01:12] [SPEAKER_06]: Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston,

[00:01:16] [SPEAKER_06]: and Dave, did you know that pigeons die right after they have sex?

[00:01:22] No.

[00:01:23] [SPEAKER_06]: Well, at least the one that I just f*****g did.

[00:01:27] [SPEAKER_04]: It's been a long time since you told a stupid joke as an opening question.

[00:01:31] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, I think that's a classic.

[00:01:34] [SPEAKER_04]: It is.

[00:01:35] [SPEAKER_06]: The delivery might have been a little messed up, but…

[00:01:38] [SPEAKER_04]: Is your dog jealous that you're f*****g other animals?

[00:01:41] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:01:41] [SPEAKER_06]: One of them is.

[00:01:42] [SPEAKER_06]: The other one's just like good.

[00:01:44] [SPEAKER_06]: Compersive?

[00:01:45] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, exactly.

[00:01:47] [SPEAKER_06]: Omar is compersive.

[00:01:48] [SPEAKER_06]: Charlie is pissed.

[00:01:50] [SPEAKER_06]: He is like…

[00:01:50] [SPEAKER_04]: He's from a culture of honor.

[00:01:53] [SPEAKER_06]: I actually, I didn't even kill the pigeon.

[00:01:55] [SPEAKER_06]: The pigeon was actually pretty happy with our encounter, but Charlie killed him.

[00:02:00] [SPEAKER_04]: No, I thought it just died of AIDS.

[00:02:04] [SPEAKER_06]: My AIDS can't go to the pigeon.

[00:02:07] [SPEAKER_06]: It's not how it works.

[00:02:08] [SPEAKER_04]: I think that's a joke I should remove.

[00:02:13] [SPEAKER_04]: All right.

[00:02:14] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm David Pizarro from Cornell University, and I'm kind of tired, so I apologize.

[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_04]: What are we talking about today, Tamla?

[00:02:21] [SPEAKER_06]: Today we are going to talk about the short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

[00:02:28] [SPEAKER_06]: We're making an executive decision to pronounce it omelas because that's how we heard it

[00:02:34] [SPEAKER_06]: pronounced, but we have no idea.

[00:02:36] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:02:37] [SPEAKER_04]: Forgive us.

[00:02:38] [SPEAKER_06]: There's some sort of government conspiracy to prevent us from finding out, too.

[00:02:42] [SPEAKER_06]: Like the web is dark on that question.

[00:02:47] [SPEAKER_04]: And she's dead.

[00:02:48] [SPEAKER_04]: She's no longer with us, so we can't answer.

[00:02:50] [SPEAKER_06]: She just died recently?

[00:02:54] [SPEAKER_06]: It's a beautiful story.

[00:02:56] [SPEAKER_06]: It's really interesting.

[00:02:57] [SPEAKER_06]: It's got all sorts of connections to utilitarianism, but not in kind of obvious or reductive

[00:03:03] [SPEAKER_06]: ways, I don't think.

[00:03:05] [SPEAKER_06]: I had never read it.

[00:03:07] [SPEAKER_06]: I signed it for my class just because I kind of wanted to read it, and a lot of listeners

[00:03:11] [SPEAKER_06]: have recommended it for us.

[00:03:14] [SPEAKER_06]: And yeah, I was impressed, kind of blown away by it.

[00:03:18] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:03:19] [SPEAKER_04]: There's actually a lot more.

[00:03:21] [SPEAKER_04]: I had read it before, but in reading it for this is a lot more there than I thought

[00:03:27] [SPEAKER_04]: in my memory.

[00:03:28] [SPEAKER_04]: But let me ask you this.

[00:03:30] [SPEAKER_04]: What is the direction of causality?

[00:03:31] [SPEAKER_04]: You always say that you assign things for class, and then we talk about it on the show.

[00:03:36] [SPEAKER_04]: And I feel like you're just double dipping in a way that pisses me off.

[00:03:40] [SPEAKER_04]: Like, I never get to do that.

[00:03:42] [SPEAKER_04]: Why?

[00:03:42] [SPEAKER_04]: You should.

[00:03:43] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I don't teach.

[00:03:44] [SPEAKER_04]: So I don't, you know, if we, if we, if you were willing to talk about a really boring

[00:03:49] [SPEAKER_04]: journal article, maybe we'd get away.

[00:03:52] [SPEAKER_06]: Maybe you should teach more interesting glasses.

[00:03:55] [SPEAKER_04]: That is true.

[00:03:56] [SPEAKER_04]: That is true.

[00:03:56] [SPEAKER_04]: I should just assign like the intro psych textbook chapter on perception.

[00:04:02] [SPEAKER_06]: Or William James.

[00:04:05] [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, yeah, William James.

[00:04:06] [SPEAKER_06]: Why don't you do a William James seminar for once?

[00:04:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Because I don't do seminars.

[00:04:12] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, I've been forbidden because I teach the big intro site course

[00:04:16] [SPEAKER_04]: and I get a course relief.

[00:04:19] [SPEAKER_04]: And I could do one if I choose, but when I choose, I usually co-teach.

[00:04:23] [SPEAKER_04]: But yeah, William James, I actually took a great William James

[00:04:25] [SPEAKER_04]: seminar in, when I was in grad school in philosophy.

[00:04:29] [SPEAKER_04]: We read both principles that both both volumes.

[00:04:35] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, we did too, actually.

[00:04:36] [SPEAKER_06]: I did the same in grad school.

[00:04:39] [SPEAKER_06]: It was yeah, it was amazing.

[00:04:40] [SPEAKER_06]: And I, but I, it was so it was long ago.

[00:04:43] [SPEAKER_06]: I don't remember it.

[00:04:43] [SPEAKER_06]: So I would love to do that.

[00:04:45] [SPEAKER_04]: We should actually do.

[00:04:46] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, we should do some chapters and maybe we can do a free will

[00:04:50] [SPEAKER_04]: another free will episode.

[00:04:51] [SPEAKER_04]: He's got a chapter on the will.

[00:04:52] [SPEAKER_04]: It's actually kind of interesting.

[00:04:55] [SPEAKER_06]: All right.

[00:04:55] [SPEAKER_06]: Well, in the first segment, we're going to talk about, we just met up

[00:04:59] [SPEAKER_06]: in Vancouver for a conference for the American Philosophical Association.

[00:05:05] [SPEAKER_06]: You were there because you are a philosopher at heart.

[00:05:09] [SPEAKER_06]: I was there because I am a philosopher by profession.

[00:05:13] [SPEAKER_06]: And then we also talked briefly about the meetup that we had in

[00:05:17] [SPEAKER_06]: Vancouver, which was pretty, pretty fun.

[00:05:22] [SPEAKER_06]: While it lasted being fun for me, but I'll talk about that.

[00:05:30] [SPEAKER_04]: So I thought I thought it might be nice at least to say what we talked about.

[00:05:33] [SPEAKER_04]: We both gave talks at the APA Vancouver.

[00:05:36] [SPEAKER_04]: Sort of as an ex, but we both independently had been invited.

[00:05:40] [SPEAKER_06]: Neither of us attended the other session.

[00:05:43] [SPEAKER_04]: No, that would be too weird.

[00:05:46] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:05:46] [SPEAKER_06]: Well, I talked about predictively restorative justice.

[00:05:49] [SPEAKER_06]: And I defended it against a particularly annoying objection that

[00:05:55] [SPEAKER_06]: retributivists and desert theorists, desert theorists.

[00:06:00] [SPEAKER_06]: Desert theorists make what about you?

[00:06:05] [SPEAKER_06]: I heard about yours.

[00:06:06] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:06:07] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:06:07] [SPEAKER_04]: So I spoke on a panel about moral disgust.

[00:06:11] [SPEAKER_04]: And the main argument that I was making was that

[00:06:15] [SPEAKER_04]: there is no separate emotion called moral disgust.

[00:06:18] [SPEAKER_04]: Some people believe that that the emotion of disgust of being grossed

[00:06:22] [SPEAKER_04]: out was sort of co-opted by the by evolution to become a moral emotion.

[00:06:26] [SPEAKER_04]: Now you did know it's just that it's just grossness and that

[00:06:30] [SPEAKER_04]: sometimes we metaphorically apply it to to immoral acts.

[00:06:34] [SPEAKER_04]: And sometimes we just apply it because some immoral acts are actually gross,

[00:06:39] [SPEAKER_04]: but that there's not a separate thing.

[00:06:41] [SPEAKER_04]: And I talked about the relationship between disgust, sensitivity

[00:06:44] [SPEAKER_04]: and political orientation.

[00:06:46] [SPEAKER_04]: And then Jesse Prins gave the wrap up talk and tried to shit on my conclusions.

[00:06:52] [SPEAKER_04]: And so in the panel, we kind of got in an argument about his shoddy use of science,

[00:06:58] [SPEAKER_04]: selective use of P-hacked studies from 10 years ago.

[00:07:03] [SPEAKER_04]: But you know, what was his problem with what you did exactly?

[00:07:07] [SPEAKER_04]: He had a weird number of problems about the even studying

[00:07:11] [SPEAKER_04]: political orientation by asking people these survey questions across the world,

[00:07:16] [SPEAKER_04]: which he could criticize if he wanted.

[00:07:19] [SPEAKER_04]: But his problem was that it's too reductive.

[00:07:21] [SPEAKER_04]: And he said it in this weird, postmodern annoying way that made it sound

[00:07:25] [SPEAKER_04]: like he was rejecting the even the task of doing science.

[00:07:29] [SPEAKER_04]: But then at the same time, he was pointing to all these

[00:07:31] [SPEAKER_04]: like stupid embodiment studies from like, you know, two thousands

[00:07:35] [SPEAKER_04]: that nobody believes anymore.

[00:07:38] [SPEAKER_04]: But we had lunch afterwards.

[00:07:39] [SPEAKER_06]: So the takeaway lesson for our listeners, don't criticize Dave's talk or his work.

[00:07:46] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, if you do come with some real shit.

[00:07:50] [SPEAKER_06]: That's a challenge, Jesse Prins.

[00:07:53] [SPEAKER_04]: People disagree with you?

[00:07:54] [SPEAKER_06]: No, it was a sympathetic audience for what I was selling.

[00:08:00] [SPEAKER_06]: Everybody there is in some form concerned about the criminal justice

[00:08:06] [SPEAKER_06]: system and interested in reform.

[00:08:08] [SPEAKER_06]: It was a cool session.

[00:08:10] [SPEAKER_06]: I enjoyed it.

[00:08:11] [SPEAKER_06]: I don't typically like philosophy talks, as you know, but I actually

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_06]: I enjoyed every single one in our session.

[00:08:19] [SPEAKER_06]: That's awesome.

[00:08:20] [SPEAKER_06]: So then we did a meet up in Vancouver.

[00:08:24] [SPEAKER_06]: We were we kind of did an over and under for how many people we thought.

[00:08:28] [SPEAKER_06]: And I think we said 10 or something.

[00:08:30] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:08:31] [SPEAKER_06]: Just based on a little interest from Reddit and Twitter, although not that much.

[00:08:36] [SPEAKER_06]: And certainly only a few people said, I'll be there.

[00:08:39] [SPEAKER_06]: You know, right?

[00:08:41] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:08:41] [SPEAKER_06]: And we get there and it's this big huge table at the bar of people.

[00:08:47] [SPEAKER_06]: It was a cool thing.

[00:08:49] [SPEAKER_06]: Now I had taken an edible not too long before, but enough that it was

[00:08:56] [SPEAKER_06]: starting to kick in just as we walked up those stairs.

[00:08:59] [SPEAKER_06]: And then you walk up these stairs, which are kind of fucked up

[00:09:02] [SPEAKER_06]: and lynchion on their own.

[00:09:04] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:09:05] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it was like the entrance to like a secret club.

[00:09:08] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, exactly.

[00:09:09] [SPEAKER_06]: And then yeah.

[00:09:10] [SPEAKER_06]: And then everyone's like, hey, and so we sat down and talked to I don't know.

[00:09:15] [SPEAKER_06]: There's probably at the outset, like 15, 20 right there.

[00:09:20] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, right at the outset.

[00:09:22] [SPEAKER_04]: And then and then it wasn't a particularly big bar, but by the end,

[00:09:25] [SPEAKER_04]: the whole bar was full.

[00:09:28] [SPEAKER_04]: I didn't even get to meet everybody like much.

[00:09:30] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't think I did either.

[00:09:31] [SPEAKER_04]: Disappointment, I'm sure.

[00:09:33] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:09:35] [SPEAKER_06]: And then the bartender, she who's also the manager, she started out giving me shit

[00:09:40] [SPEAKER_06]: about this like we should have warned them.

[00:09:42] [SPEAKER_06]: But then she also said she had a friend that couldn't be here, but that

[00:09:46] [SPEAKER_06]: liked the podcast.

[00:09:47] [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, no way.

[00:09:48] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:09:49] [SPEAKER_06]: She was making fun of me, giving me a hard time, but she didn't.

[00:09:53] [SPEAKER_06]: But then she did say I promised I would buy a shot for you from him.

[00:09:59] [SPEAKER_06]: And so she bought it.

[00:10:02] [SPEAKER_06]: I did it.

[00:10:03] [SPEAKER_06]: I think I brought one over to you.

[00:10:04] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, you did.

[00:10:05] [SPEAKER_06]: We did that one.

[00:10:06] [SPEAKER_06]: And then she said she wanted to do one with me too.

[00:10:10] [SPEAKER_04]: And, you know, by the way, let me just, can I preface this with a

[00:10:13] [SPEAKER_04]: conversation we had at dinner where I talked to Tamler about pacing,

[00:10:18] [SPEAKER_04]: the importance of pacing and Tamler was on board 100 percent.

[00:10:23] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, it's just not, it's never been a strength of mine, but you're

[00:10:26] [SPEAKER_06]: right. I'm in theory, in principle, I'm totally for pacing myself,

[00:10:31] [SPEAKER_06]: but I'm not also one to turn down a shot or however many shots.

[00:10:37] [SPEAKER_06]: And, you know, people were buying us drinks too.

[00:10:39] [SPEAKER_06]: And it was very overwhelming.

[00:10:42] [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, wasn't it?

[00:10:43] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, it was.

[00:10:43] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:10:44] [SPEAKER_06]: Totally.

[00:10:45] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, our expectations were not set properly.

[00:10:50] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:10:51] [SPEAKER_06]: Then I saw you, you were at a table and you were talking to three young women.

[00:10:58] [SPEAKER_06]: Yes.

[00:11:00] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:11:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Who were not at all.

[00:11:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Who were like three people I found who had no idea why everybody was there.

[00:11:08] [SPEAKER_04]: They did not know about the podcast.

[00:11:10] [SPEAKER_04]: And actually, I thought of it as like a little respite from

[00:11:13] [SPEAKER_04]: from sort of like all the other conversations.

[00:11:15] [SPEAKER_04]: I was like, oh cool.

[00:11:17] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:11:18] [SPEAKER_06]: And I agree.

[00:11:19] [SPEAKER_06]: Anyway, yeah.

[00:11:20] [SPEAKER_06]: So you were talking to them, then I started talking to them.

[00:11:22] [SPEAKER_06]: You left.

[00:11:23] [SPEAKER_06]: So I'm just there, like you said, just to get a respite a little bit.

[00:11:27] [SPEAKER_06]: Then a very bad wizards listener also comes and joins and says,

[00:11:33] [SPEAKER_06]: are you talking to them about Emmanuel Kant?

[00:11:36] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, we're talking about Emmanuel Kant.

[00:11:39] [SPEAKER_06]: And then I was explaining to the women, oh, it's a joke

[00:11:44] [SPEAKER_06]: because I hate Emmanuel Kant.

[00:11:47] [SPEAKER_06]: And then the German, there's a German.

[00:11:50] [SPEAKER_06]: One of them is German.

[00:11:52] [SPEAKER_06]: She's kind of blonde Hitler kind of youth look.

[00:11:56] [SPEAKER_06]: And she said, I love Emmanuel Kant.

[00:11:59] [SPEAKER_06]: And she's and I said, really, you do.

[00:12:02] [SPEAKER_06]: She says, yeah, I mean, you want to be able to control the car.

[00:12:06] [SPEAKER_06]: You have a car.

[00:12:07] [SPEAKER_06]: You bought the car.

[00:12:08] [SPEAKER_06]: You want to be able to control the car.

[00:12:12] [SPEAKER_06]: And I said, what the fuck?

[00:12:15] [SPEAKER_06]: And then I still had enough wits about me at this point

[00:12:19] [SPEAKER_06]: because she keeps going in and it's all about the car

[00:12:22] [SPEAKER_06]: and controlling it and having a sense of it and not giving up that control.

[00:12:27] [SPEAKER_06]: And then I realized that what she thought was the we were talking

[00:12:32] [SPEAKER_06]: about was a manual car, like a stick shift, a stick shift.

[00:12:38] [SPEAKER_06]: Yes.

[00:12:40] [SPEAKER_06]: But so that was like a three or four minute misunderstanding.

[00:12:44] [SPEAKER_06]: And the funny thing is I agree with her about a manual car,

[00:12:48] [SPEAKER_06]: just not a manual car.

[00:12:52] [SPEAKER_04]: I agree as well.

[00:12:54] [SPEAKER_04]: I just don't have the luck of having all my car.

[00:12:57] [SPEAKER_06]: I've never owned an automatic.

[00:12:59] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:13:01] [SPEAKER_06]: So then this this is the prelude to to an early end to my night.

[00:13:08] [SPEAKER_06]: A yeah, right?

[00:13:10] [SPEAKER_04]: Like it's like 1045.

[00:13:12] [SPEAKER_04]: I look over and Tamler is on the booth.

[00:13:15] [SPEAKER_04]: Like I don't think it was 1045.

[00:13:18] [SPEAKER_04]: It was.

[00:13:19] [SPEAKER_06]: So what did I make it like almost three hours?

[00:13:23] [SPEAKER_06]: Right?

[00:13:24] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, the thing is some UBC students, they're like undergrads

[00:13:27] [SPEAKER_06]: come over to me while I'm talking to those women.

[00:13:31] [SPEAKER_06]: They say, hey, we're going to go out and get stone.

[00:13:33] [SPEAKER_06]: You want to come and fuck me.

[00:13:36] [SPEAKER_06]: I forget the guy's name.

[00:13:37] [SPEAKER_06]: He wanted me to mention that he was the one that I think

[00:13:41] [SPEAKER_06]: he was like Archie or something.

[00:13:42] [SPEAKER_06]: Well, I can't find it.

[00:13:45] [SPEAKER_06]: That's what happens.

[00:13:46] [SPEAKER_06]: So yeah, they take me outside and I you know, I definitely

[00:13:49] [SPEAKER_06]: shouldn't be doing this.

[00:13:50] [SPEAKER_06]: I've been drinking and then I had also taken an edible already.

[00:13:53] [SPEAKER_06]: I took, I don't know, two or three fairly big hits

[00:13:57] [SPEAKER_06]: and they just knocked me on my ass.

[00:14:00] [SPEAKER_06]: I knew when I was coming up those stairs that that was

[00:14:02] [SPEAKER_06]: a big mistake coming back up the stairs.

[00:14:04] [SPEAKER_06]: And yeah, then I go over to the booth with those guys

[00:14:07] [SPEAKER_06]: who are just awesome.

[00:14:08] [SPEAKER_06]: I love those guys.

[00:14:10] [SPEAKER_06]: And I just stay there.

[00:14:12] [SPEAKER_06]: And then it was just a struggle for me from then on to keep

[00:14:15] [SPEAKER_06]: my eyes open.

[00:14:16] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, and I was really embarrassed and I just it just sucked.

[00:14:19] [SPEAKER_06]: I saw you see you over there kind of entertaining the table

[00:14:23] [SPEAKER_06]: and I'm just sitting there with like my eyes barely open.

[00:14:26] [SPEAKER_04]: I know you left you left me like you.

[00:14:29] [SPEAKER_04]: You I felt like like abandoned, betrayed.

[00:14:33] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know what the right word is.

[00:14:34] [SPEAKER_04]: You were fine with it.

[00:14:37] [SPEAKER_06]: You liked it.

[00:14:38] [SPEAKER_06]: That was the way I could see you want to go home already.

[00:14:41] [SPEAKER_04]: You were like, let's go home.

[00:14:43] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, we didn't get home till like midnight.

[00:14:45] [SPEAKER_06]: So yeah, clearly that's right.

[00:14:49] [SPEAKER_04]: But anyway, thank you Vancouver listeners who came out.

[00:14:52] [SPEAKER_04]: That was really fun.

[00:14:53] [SPEAKER_04]: And and next in the future, we can come to your city

[00:14:57] [SPEAKER_04]: and you can get Tamler even more fucked up.

[00:14:59] [SPEAKER_06]: I'm going to pace myself.

[00:15:01] [SPEAKER_06]: I've learned my lesson.

[00:15:02] [SPEAKER_04]: You fully admitted to this one, but I take it this is not

[00:15:07] [SPEAKER_04]: your guilty confession.

[00:15:10] [SPEAKER_06]: No, it is not.

[00:15:13] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, should we do guilty confessions?

[00:15:15] [SPEAKER_06]: We haven't time.

[00:15:15] [SPEAKER_06]: It's time to bring back guilty confessions.

[00:15:28] [SPEAKER_04]: Who wants to go first?

[00:15:30] [SPEAKER_04]: I'll go first.

[00:15:32] [SPEAKER_06]: All right.

[00:15:32] [SPEAKER_06]: Took me a while because are you with the music has already played.

[00:15:36] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:15:37] [SPEAKER_04]: When I go to other people's houses and I use their rest room.

[00:15:43] [SPEAKER_04]: I can't help myself but look through their medicine cabinet.

[00:15:48] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm ashamed of this behavior.

[00:15:50] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, I got this is there is just this curiosity

[00:15:53] [SPEAKER_04]: that comes over me to see what people have in there.

[00:15:57] [SPEAKER_04]: And even though it's usually the guest rest room, you know,

[00:15:59] [SPEAKER_04]: sometimes people have some like drugs, you know?

[00:16:04] [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, are we going to have this conversation?

[00:16:06] [SPEAKER_06]: Are we doing this?

[00:16:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, there you go.

[00:16:10] [SPEAKER_04]: I already said it.

[00:16:12] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm not going to say how many times I've taken drugs.

[00:16:16] [SPEAKER_06]: I know.

[00:16:17] [SPEAKER_06]: I certainly know to hide my drugs anytime, you know,

[00:16:21] [SPEAKER_06]: we're sharing a place or anything like that.

[00:16:23] [SPEAKER_06]: No, but I mean, I wonder how common this is.

[00:16:26] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't actually like I wouldn't steal drugs from somebody.

[00:16:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Like it's more that, you know, my mom has caught me stealing

[00:16:34] [SPEAKER_04]: like the, you know, the Vicodin

[00:16:35] [SPEAKER_04]: that she didn't use for her operation.

[00:16:37] [SPEAKER_04]: Right.

[00:16:37] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, my sister, my sister once had cough syrup

[00:16:41] [SPEAKER_04]: with codeine in it and she goes for it.

[00:16:44] [SPEAKER_04]: She's like, what the fuck?

[00:16:46] [SPEAKER_04]: And so I'm like, oh, shit.

[00:16:49] [SPEAKER_04]: So the art is to, you know, not take above the just noticeable

[00:16:54] [SPEAKER_04]: difference threshold.

[00:16:55] [SPEAKER_04]: Like the it needs to look like nothing's happened.

[00:16:58] [SPEAKER_06]: And also that it has to be long enough

[00:17:02] [SPEAKER_06]: that they're clearly not suffering

[00:17:04] [SPEAKER_06]: from whatever they suffer.

[00:17:06] [SPEAKER_06]: Sure.

[00:17:06] [SPEAKER_04]: For sure.

[00:17:07] [SPEAKER_04]: For these are these are people who like, who like, oh, yeah,

[00:17:09] [SPEAKER_04]: I just have a bottom there because it's their guest bathroom.

[00:17:12] [SPEAKER_04]: Like if they were in pain, you know, yeah.

[00:17:14] [SPEAKER_06]: And like you can see from the date that it was like eight

[00:17:18] [SPEAKER_06]: months ago and if you've had a bottle of Vicodin

[00:17:21] [SPEAKER_06]: in your house for eight months, you don't like Vicodin.

[00:17:24] [SPEAKER_04]: Exactly.

[00:17:25] [SPEAKER_04]: And you know, we're going to do flush it.

[00:17:27] [SPEAKER_04]: That would be horrible.

[00:17:29] [SPEAKER_06]: Well, this could be my guilty confession to this affair.

[00:17:33] [SPEAKER_06]: Hide your drugs, people.

[00:17:35] [SPEAKER_06]: Anytime.

[00:17:37] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:17:38] [SPEAKER_06]: So I mean, but there is an ethic to it and I am very strict

[00:17:42] [SPEAKER_06]: about my ethic.

[00:17:44] [SPEAKER_04]: For sure.

[00:17:44] [SPEAKER_04]: I would say I was really going more for the small guilt

[00:17:50] [SPEAKER_04]: I feel for just looking like I like that.

[00:17:54] [SPEAKER_04]: That's really what I was going for because I it's rare

[00:17:56] [SPEAKER_04]: that I'll take anything.

[00:17:57] [SPEAKER_04]: And when I do, it's usually like, like I said

[00:18:00] [SPEAKER_04]: from my own parents or sister.

[00:18:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Your child.

[00:18:05] [SPEAKER_04]: No, not for my child.

[00:18:06] [SPEAKER_04]: But it's more the guilt of like I'm like, I feel

[00:18:08] [SPEAKER_04]: like I'm violating their space.

[00:18:09] [SPEAKER_04]: But like, you know, if you have a guest bathroom,

[00:18:11] [SPEAKER_04]: you shouldn't be putting anything too private in there.

[00:18:13] [SPEAKER_04]: It's more of a voyeuristic need to see how people live.

[00:18:18] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, do you have Q tips in there?

[00:18:20] [SPEAKER_04]: Like what's in there?

[00:18:21] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, I don't know.

[00:18:23] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:18:23] [SPEAKER_06]: So it's like searching through their like underwear drawer

[00:18:26] [SPEAKER_06]: or something like that.

[00:18:28] [SPEAKER_06]: Sniffing it.

[00:18:28] [SPEAKER_04]: Like that.

[00:18:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Not at all like that.

[00:18:31] [SPEAKER_04]: There might be some soap that, you know, I'd rather use, you know,

[00:18:35] [SPEAKER_06]: kind of a papaya.

[00:18:38] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, that's right.

[00:18:39] [SPEAKER_04]: And did like they put out the blueberry soap,

[00:18:41] [SPEAKER_04]: but there's a fresh papaya soap in this medicine cabinet.

[00:18:45] [SPEAKER_04]: And I want that.

[00:18:47] [SPEAKER_02]: All right.

[00:18:48] [SPEAKER_06]: All right.

[00:18:49] [SPEAKER_06]: These are this is something I'm genuinely not proud of

[00:18:51] [SPEAKER_06]: because it's the end of the semester and students are

[00:18:56] [SPEAKER_06]: inclined to pull some shit at the end of the semester.

[00:19:00] [SPEAKER_06]: And I tend to really

[00:19:04] [SPEAKER_06]: be a hard ass about not letting them get away with stuff.

[00:19:08] [SPEAKER_06]: And part of that is because I remember myself as a college

[00:19:12] [SPEAKER_06]: student, some of the shit that I would try.

[00:19:15] [SPEAKER_06]: Like I think I've already said that I once pretended to have

[00:19:17] [SPEAKER_06]: pink eye and pink eye is one of those things that nobody

[00:19:21] [SPEAKER_06]: questions it.

[00:19:22] [SPEAKER_06]: Like if you have better shape than sorry.

[00:19:25] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, they're just like I don't want to hear about it.

[00:19:27] [SPEAKER_06]: Like, OK, yes, when do you want to turn in the paper?

[00:19:29] [SPEAKER_06]: Fine. But the one I really am not proud of.

[00:19:33] [SPEAKER_06]: So I was at

[00:19:34] [SPEAKER_06]: it was my my senior year.

[00:19:37] [SPEAKER_06]: I was taking an acting class purely for my own,

[00:19:40] [SPEAKER_06]: you know, edification and the the teacher said,

[00:19:45] [SPEAKER_06]: keep a journal every day like an acting journal.

[00:19:47] [SPEAKER_06]: We just kind of observe people and what they do

[00:19:51] [SPEAKER_06]: and their mannerisms and and just keep it every day.

[00:19:54] [SPEAKER_06]: And then at the end of the semester, turn it in to me.

[00:19:58] [SPEAKER_06]: This is would be this is a great idea.

[00:20:00] [SPEAKER_06]: And it's especially good idea if you're an actor,

[00:20:02] [SPEAKER_06]: just kind of seeing how people are.

[00:20:04] [SPEAKER_06]: I think it would have been good as a writer,

[00:20:07] [SPEAKER_06]: which I wanted to be to just really pay attention

[00:20:10] [SPEAKER_06]: to what was going on around me.

[00:20:13] [SPEAKER_06]: And I immediately just didn't do it.

[00:20:16] [SPEAKER_06]: I don't know if I had this plan all along,

[00:20:18] [SPEAKER_06]: but I just didn't do it.

[00:20:19] [SPEAKER_06]: I don't think I ever did it like a page of it.

[00:20:21] [SPEAKER_06]: I'm not sure if I even bought one.

[00:20:22] [SPEAKER_06]: And then at the end of the semester, I went to him

[00:20:26] [SPEAKER_06]: and like looked him in the eye and said,

[00:20:29] [SPEAKER_06]: I I don't know what to say.

[00:20:31] [SPEAKER_06]: I I've been I was keeping it.

[00:20:33] [SPEAKER_06]: It was really cool.

[00:20:34] [SPEAKER_06]: I just came up with this story that I lost it

[00:20:37] [SPEAKER_06]: and I have no idea where it was.

[00:20:39] [SPEAKER_06]: And I and I it's like I can't.

[00:20:42] [SPEAKER_04]: I like you were just doing that convincing thing

[00:20:45] [SPEAKER_04]: where you're like, like, oh my God, I can't.

[00:20:48] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. And like kind of banking on the fact

[00:20:51] [SPEAKER_06]: that even if he suspected it, he couldn't prove,

[00:20:55] [SPEAKER_06]: you know, that I didn't really lose.

[00:20:56] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. That's when you say, look, I'll take a zero.

[00:20:59] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm sorry. Like, you know, I hope that you don't.

[00:21:02] [SPEAKER_04]: But like I lost it and I can't do anything about it.

[00:21:03] [SPEAKER_06]: Exactly. That's I'm sure I did that.

[00:21:05] [SPEAKER_06]: I was like, I totally understand if you need to fail me

[00:21:08] [SPEAKER_06]: or whatever, you know, for fail fail me for this assignment

[00:21:11] [SPEAKER_06]: or give me a zero.

[00:21:12] [SPEAKER_06]: But I'm just telling you what happened.

[00:21:15] [SPEAKER_06]: I hope you can understand.

[00:21:17] [SPEAKER_06]: You know, like just such bullshit and it's so dishonorable.

[00:21:21] [SPEAKER_06]: It's just disgraceful.

[00:21:23] [SPEAKER_06]: And like the fact that I would do that I did that in college,

[00:21:26] [SPEAKER_06]: the fact that I just turned down the opportunity to do something

[00:21:30] [SPEAKER_06]: that was really cool and then lied about it.

[00:21:32] [SPEAKER_06]: I hate that.

[00:21:33] [SPEAKER_06]: I hate. I think I think about that with a lot of shame

[00:21:35] [SPEAKER_06]: for whatever reason.

[00:21:37] [SPEAKER_04]: I honestly like all these confessions, except for the jokey ones,

[00:21:42] [SPEAKER_04]: like it's not because we're laughing and making a lot of them.

[00:21:45] [SPEAKER_04]: It's because I actually feel shame.

[00:21:48] [SPEAKER_06]: Totally.

[00:21:49] [SPEAKER_06]: And if any students listen to this, that I'm only stricter

[00:21:54] [SPEAKER_06]: because of that, because I know that you don't have to be

[00:21:56] [SPEAKER_06]: a irredeemably bad person.

[00:22:00] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know. You know, a lot of my colleagues disagree with me,

[00:22:02] [SPEAKER_04]: but but I always sort of have this attitude that, you know,

[00:22:05] [SPEAKER_04]: you're the ones paying fifty thousand dollars to get an education.

[00:22:08] [SPEAKER_04]: Like if you don't want to take it seriously, fuck it.

[00:22:12] [SPEAKER_06]: Like I don't agree.

[00:22:14] [SPEAKER_06]: I'm like, I'm with your colleagues.

[00:22:16] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. No, I don't mean it's just our job to give them an education

[00:22:19] [SPEAKER_06]: and and not let them cheat to the best of our ability.

[00:22:23] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, but I'm not a babysitter, you know, it's like if you're going

[00:22:27] [SPEAKER_04]: to go go out of your way to lie to me, I just don't want them

[00:22:30] [SPEAKER_04]: to cheat in front of me.

[00:22:31] [SPEAKER_04]: That's a violation of that's an honor violation right there.

[00:22:35] [SPEAKER_04]: Like I've caught people on a test just completely looking at like,

[00:22:39] [SPEAKER_04]: you know, a cheat sheet or somebody else.

[00:22:41] [SPEAKER_04]: And that that offends me.

[00:22:43] [SPEAKER_06]: It should I mean, it's a strike on your honor if they cheat period.

[00:22:48] [SPEAKER_06]: If it's in front of you, maybe it's extra blatant, like

[00:22:52] [SPEAKER_06]: kind of calling you out, do something about it.

[00:22:55] [SPEAKER_06]: Almost maybe a cry for help, a cry for discipline.

[00:23:01] [SPEAKER_04]: But yeah, if they do it on their own, they're the ones not learning.

[00:23:06] [SPEAKER_04]: That's all that's all.

[00:23:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I guess.

[00:23:10] [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, no, I totally disagree.

[00:23:13] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm actually curious listeners, you can chime in.

[00:23:16] [SPEAKER_06]: But yeah, don't do it.

[00:23:17] [SPEAKER_06]: Here's the thing about college that and it was one of my big regrets.

[00:23:22] [SPEAKER_06]: And, you know, one of the reasons I really thoroughly enjoyed

[00:23:26] [SPEAKER_06]: graduate school like every second of it, you know, it's an opportunity

[00:23:30] [SPEAKER_06]: to reflect and learn about yourself and about incredible thinkers and ideas.

[00:23:38] [SPEAKER_06]: You shouldn't waste it.

[00:23:39] [SPEAKER_06]: You shouldn't squander it because you don't typically get it again.

[00:23:42] [SPEAKER_04]: And you know what?

[00:23:44] [SPEAKER_04]: A lot of our a lot of our listeners and we've talked about this

[00:23:47] [SPEAKER_04]: and we even met some of a lot of our listeners don't have the opportunity

[00:23:50] [SPEAKER_04]: to take classes on these topics that they like.

[00:23:53] [SPEAKER_04]: And they would do anything to be able to do that, right?

[00:23:57] [SPEAKER_04]: They just didn't come up with the opportunity to do that.

[00:23:59] [SPEAKER_04]: They had to go straight to work after high school, you know,

[00:24:01] [SPEAKER_04]: and they listen and they they enjoy they enjoy the intellectual

[00:24:06] [SPEAKER_04]: and maybe not so intellectual part of the podcast.

[00:24:08] [SPEAKER_04]: They would jump at the chance to be in the position to to to learn like that.

[00:24:15] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, it really is an incredible time.

[00:24:17] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. And I think and that's true.

[00:24:21] [SPEAKER_06]: All right.

[00:24:22] [SPEAKER_06]: Let's take a break.

[00:24:24] [SPEAKER_06]: And now that our sins have been cleansed, we are ready to talk about

[00:24:29] [SPEAKER_06]: the ones who walk away from.

[00:24:33] [SPEAKER_06]: Omelas, Omelas, Omelas.

[00:24:35] [SPEAKER_06]: That's what we're doing.

[00:24:48] [SPEAKER_06]: Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

[00:25:27] [SPEAKER_06]: At this time, we like to take a moment and thank all of our listeners.

[00:25:32] [SPEAKER_06]: We're feeling especially grateful after that awesome turnout in Vancouver,

[00:25:37] [SPEAKER_06]: which was so flattering and just weird and overwhelming.

[00:25:43] [SPEAKER_06]: To have that many people there and joking around with us.

[00:25:48] [SPEAKER_06]: It was tons of fun.

[00:25:50] [SPEAKER_06]: And for those of you, of course, who weren't able to make it, but who get in touch

[00:25:54] [SPEAKER_06]: with us in all these other ways, know that we are so grateful and it's really

[00:26:01] [SPEAKER_06]: something special for us to get in touch with us.

[00:26:04] [SPEAKER_06]: You can email us very bad wizards at gmail.com.

[00:26:08] [SPEAKER_06]: You can tweet us at tamler at peas at Very Bad Wizards.

[00:26:13] [SPEAKER_06]: Follow us on Instagram.

[00:26:15] [SPEAKER_06]: You can rate us on iTunes.

[00:26:17] [SPEAKER_06]: That would be awesome if you rated us on iTunes, gave us a review.

[00:26:22] [SPEAKER_06]: You can join the subreddit, the lively discussion on if you would like

[00:26:28] [SPEAKER_06]: to support us in more tangible ways.

[00:26:31] [SPEAKER_06]: There are a number of different ways to do that as well.

[00:26:34] [SPEAKER_06]: And we so appreciate our Patreon supporters.

[00:26:38] [SPEAKER_06]: Go to patreon.com slash Very Bad Wizards.

[00:26:41] [SPEAKER_06]: There are three different levels with some bonuses for those of you who donate.

[00:26:48] [SPEAKER_06]: We really appreciate it.

[00:26:50] [SPEAKER_06]: Our last episode with Paul Bloom was a fairly big hit, I think.

[00:26:54] [SPEAKER_06]: People liked it.

[00:26:55] [SPEAKER_06]: And it all...

[00:26:56] [SPEAKER_04]: What's not to like about Paul?

[00:26:57] [SPEAKER_06]: It was totally the idea of the listeners, both to do an episode on parenting

[00:27:03] [SPEAKER_06]: and the impact of parenting.

[00:27:05] [SPEAKER_06]: And also to have Paul Bloom on our Patreon listeners voted on that, suggested it.

[00:27:10] [SPEAKER_06]: It was all them.

[00:27:11] [SPEAKER_06]: And that was awesome.

[00:27:13] [SPEAKER_06]: You can also give us a one time donation on PayPal.

[00:27:17] [SPEAKER_06]: Is there anything else that I've forgotten?

[00:27:20] [SPEAKER_04]: No, but really thank you.

[00:27:22] [SPEAKER_04]: I think this was...

[00:27:24] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, you see numbers and you get emails.

[00:27:27] [SPEAKER_04]: But until you see people in person who really have gone out of their way

[00:27:32] [SPEAKER_04]: to drive to see you, it's a weird but cool feeling that humanizes.

[00:27:39] [SPEAKER_04]: Not that we thought that our listeners weren't human, but it was great.

[00:27:42] [SPEAKER_04]: It was...

[00:27:43] [SPEAKER_04]: It was...

[00:27:44] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know why unexpected, but great.

[00:27:47] [SPEAKER_06]: Special thanks to that one guy I was sitting next to at my lowest point of the evening.

[00:27:52] [SPEAKER_06]: Who's the only forgot?

[00:27:53] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:27:54] [SPEAKER_06]: The only thing I can say is he was Asian.

[00:27:57] [SPEAKER_06]: He was very cool as I was kind of like struggling.

[00:28:00] [SPEAKER_06]: He was just like, just chill.

[00:28:03] [SPEAKER_06]: Listen to the lay back.

[00:28:06] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, he was just what I needed to hear.

[00:28:09] [SPEAKER_04]: All right, let's talk about the story.

[00:28:12] [SPEAKER_04]: The story luckily doesn't require a long summary.

[00:28:15] [SPEAKER_04]: It's the gist of the idea can be expressed in one sentence.

[00:28:19] [SPEAKER_04]: But this is Ursula K.

[00:28:21] [SPEAKER_04]: Le Guin, who we lost recently in 1973, wrote this short story,

[00:28:27] [SPEAKER_04]: a word winning short story about, I would say, utopia.

[00:28:30] [SPEAKER_04]: It starts off by describing a city of people, Omalas,

[00:28:35] [SPEAKER_04]: who are celebrating the Festival of Summer.

[00:28:39] [SPEAKER_04]: And this is described as, you know, using all of the flowery language

[00:28:42] [SPEAKER_04]: you would use to describe an idyllic fairy tale scene.

[00:28:46] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, everybody's boats are sparkling in the harbor

[00:28:50] [SPEAKER_04]: and this houses are freshly painted and there's trees.

[00:28:54] [SPEAKER_04]: And there's just a lot of that language

[00:28:56] [SPEAKER_04]: that's just giving you that feeling of a paradise almost.

[00:29:02] [SPEAKER_04]: Everybody's happy.

[00:29:04] [SPEAKER_04]: The only real problem with this utopia is that it requires

[00:29:07] [SPEAKER_04]: through no explanation of a mechanism,

[00:29:10] [SPEAKER_04]: it requires that one child be

[00:29:14] [SPEAKER_04]: living in a dark, damp basement with very little light,

[00:29:22] [SPEAKER_04]: nothing around them suffering, not eating,

[00:29:27] [SPEAKER_04]: just essentially being neglected to the point of torture.

[00:29:33] [SPEAKER_04]: And people around people in the city of Omalas know that this is

[00:29:36] [SPEAKER_04]: the one thing that's keeping everybody happy.

[00:29:39] [SPEAKER_04]: And some people choose to actually go look at this kid

[00:29:43] [SPEAKER_04]: and what they do when they look at that kid is,

[00:29:47] [SPEAKER_04]: I think, crucial to the story

[00:29:49] [SPEAKER_04]: and it's what gives it its title.

[00:29:51] [SPEAKER_04]: Some people walk away from that paradise.

[00:29:54] [SPEAKER_06]: They don't rescue the child, but they walk away from the paradise.

[00:29:59] [SPEAKER_06]: One thing to say about the child is it once was up in the city,

[00:30:07] [SPEAKER_06]: knows the sound of its mother's voice.

[00:30:10] [SPEAKER_06]: We don't know if it's a boy or a girl, but so

[00:30:13] [SPEAKER_06]: and has absolutely no idea why it's being

[00:30:18] [SPEAKER_06]: he or she, she refers to it as it is being held down there.

[00:30:22] [SPEAKER_06]: And they're they're not permitted to say anything,

[00:30:27] [SPEAKER_06]: give any explanation or say one kind word to the child.

[00:30:33] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's it's a it's a terrible just like just like

[00:30:36] [SPEAKER_04]: Ligwyn goes out of her way to convince us how happy they are.

[00:30:40] [SPEAKER_04]: There is she pulls no punches about saying how miserable

[00:30:43] [SPEAKER_04]: that this Kafkaesque suffering where you don't know

[00:30:47] [SPEAKER_04]: no idea, you're just yanked one day to live in this dirty cellar

[00:30:51] [SPEAKER_04]: with with nobody giving you any love and barely barely any food.

[00:30:57] [SPEAKER_06]: OK, so let's go deeper because there's so much to explore

[00:31:02] [SPEAKER_06]: in just the way she tells the story.

[00:31:05] [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, I knew the bare bones of the story

[00:31:08] [SPEAKER_06]: right before and it almost sounds so simplistic,

[00:31:13] [SPEAKER_06]: like maybe a reductio of utilitarianism in some sense.

[00:31:18] [SPEAKER_06]: But it's so much more than that.

[00:31:19] [SPEAKER_06]: It's so it's so much richer.

[00:31:21] [SPEAKER_04]: So actually, I have to admit that it took me a long time

[00:31:24] [SPEAKER_04]: in life to read it because the punch line is so easily

[00:31:27] [SPEAKER_04]: communicated that I thought, OK, well, I already know.

[00:31:29] [SPEAKER_06]: One thing let me just say right now that I recommend

[00:31:32] [SPEAKER_06]: that listeners do before we discuss this.

[00:31:36] [SPEAKER_06]: We'll post a link to this YouTube clip.

[00:31:40] [SPEAKER_06]: It's 17 minutes long and it is a narrator reading the story

[00:31:45] [SPEAKER_06]: while also showing the the story's text on the screen.

[00:31:51] [SPEAKER_06]: I did this for my class because I was correctly suspected

[00:31:54] [SPEAKER_06]: that they wouldn't have read the story before class.

[00:32:00] [SPEAKER_06]: And if they did, they wouldn't have read it carefully.

[00:32:03] [SPEAKER_06]: And it was actually really cool to just read this to experience

[00:32:08] [SPEAKER_06]: the story that way.

[00:32:10] [SPEAKER_06]: That was you get both text and audio is a really good way

[00:32:15] [SPEAKER_06]: of really processing all the language.

[00:32:18] [SPEAKER_06]: And so anyway, do that.

[00:32:21] [SPEAKER_06]: Don't just skim through it, but really go into it

[00:32:24] [SPEAKER_06]: because it fucks with you emotionally, psychologically.

[00:32:29] [SPEAKER_06]: Like I was totally fucked with my class

[00:32:32] [SPEAKER_06]: was also, I think, just kind of unnerved by it.

[00:32:39] [SPEAKER_04]: So it really is written at the beginning like a fairy tale.

[00:32:43] [SPEAKER_04]: I think that's one reason maybe the telling of it, you know, orally

[00:32:49] [SPEAKER_04]: works so well.

[00:32:51] [SPEAKER_04]: It sounds like it's going to be this just like, oh, you're going to bed.

[00:32:54] [SPEAKER_04]: Like let me tell you about this wonderful city of Omelos.

[00:32:57] [SPEAKER_04]: Might as well be a story about a Disney princess

[00:33:01] [SPEAKER_04]: and living happily ever after.

[00:33:03] [SPEAKER_06]: Sort of.

[00:33:03] [SPEAKER_06]: So the first paragraph is definitely like that.

[00:33:07] [SPEAKER_06]: It's all kind of written in the past tense about a very specific

[00:33:10] [SPEAKER_06]: festival that's just getting started and it's joyous.

[00:33:14] [SPEAKER_06]: And it's wonderful, as you say.

[00:33:17] [SPEAKER_06]: And then it switches into I have to explain to you

[00:33:23] [SPEAKER_06]: how deep this joy was.

[00:33:25] [SPEAKER_06]: And then it turns from just like a story, like a fairy tale language

[00:33:29] [SPEAKER_06]: to like the narrator is talking to you

[00:33:33] [SPEAKER_06]: and kind of reckoning with her struggle.

[00:33:38] [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, her, him, we don't know.

[00:33:40] [SPEAKER_06]: You don't know anything about the narrator

[00:33:43] [SPEAKER_06]: to convey what it was that this city had.

[00:33:50] [SPEAKER_06]: It's really interesting the way that she does.

[00:33:52] [SPEAKER_06]: So this is that point where I saw

[00:33:56] [SPEAKER_06]: Liguain distinguishing Omelos from like Brave New World,

[00:34:01] [SPEAKER_06]: essentially from the city and Brave New World where people are happy,

[00:34:05] [SPEAKER_06]: but it's that superficial, stupid kind of happiness

[00:34:08] [SPEAKER_06]: where they only feel just base pleasures

[00:34:13] [SPEAKER_06]: and are denied basic freedoms.

[00:34:16] [SPEAKER_06]: And she just explicitly says, so here's a line,

[00:34:21] [SPEAKER_06]: you'd I repeat that these were not simple folks,

[00:34:24] [SPEAKER_06]: not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians.

[00:34:28] [SPEAKER_06]: They were not less complex than us.

[00:34:31] [SPEAKER_06]: The trouble is we have that we have a bad habit

[00:34:33] [SPEAKER_06]: encouraged by pedants and sophisticates.

[00:34:36] [SPEAKER_06]: This seems like a direct shot at Huxley

[00:34:38] [SPEAKER_06]: of considering happiness as something rather stupid.

[00:34:42] [SPEAKER_06]: Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.

[00:34:46] [SPEAKER_06]: This is the treason of the artist,

[00:34:48] [SPEAKER_06]: a refusal to admit the banality of evil

[00:34:50] [SPEAKER_06]: and the terrible boredom of pain.

[00:34:52] [SPEAKER_06]: And then she says, how can I tell you about the people of Omelos?

[00:34:56] [SPEAKER_06]: They were not naive and happy children.

[00:34:58] [SPEAKER_06]: They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults

[00:35:01] [SPEAKER_06]: whose lives were not wretched.

[00:35:04] [SPEAKER_06]: Oh, miracle, but I wish I could describe it better.

[00:35:07] [SPEAKER_06]: And she says at this point that it sounds like a city in a fairy tale.

[00:35:13] [SPEAKER_06]: And then she doesn't but she doesn't want us to think that.

[00:35:17] [SPEAKER_06]: Right.

[00:35:17] [SPEAKER_06]: So then I think this is what was the first thing that I found fascinating.

[00:35:22] [SPEAKER_06]: She starts to get us to help her create the city.

[00:35:28] [SPEAKER_04]: It's brilliant.

[00:35:30] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, but she says early on perhaps it would be best

[00:35:33] [SPEAKER_06]: if you imagined it as your own fancy bids.

[00:35:37] [SPEAKER_06]: And then she's like, how about technology?

[00:35:39] [SPEAKER_06]: She's like brainstorming almost with us.

[00:35:41] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, no, it's it moves from being a real city

[00:35:44] [SPEAKER_04]: that the narrator appears to have visited and described in all of this detail

[00:35:50] [SPEAKER_04]: to a city that that is that now has to exist in our mind

[00:35:55] [SPEAKER_04]: because there's no way she feels she can communicate the joy.

[00:35:59] [SPEAKER_04]: So the best way that she can communicate the joy is for you reader.

[00:36:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Fine, tell me what all the good parts that you would want are.

[00:36:07] [SPEAKER_06]: Right. Yeah, she says at one point if this is sounding maybe

[00:36:11] [SPEAKER_06]: a little too goody two shoes for you, if it is add an orgy.

[00:36:17] [SPEAKER_06]: If an orgy would help, don't hesitate.

[00:36:20] [SPEAKER_04]: I love that.

[00:36:22] [SPEAKER_04]: If so, please add an orgy.

[00:36:26] [SPEAKER_04]: Go for it with some caveats.

[00:36:28] [SPEAKER_04]: Let us not have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests

[00:36:31] [SPEAKER_04]: and priestesses already half an ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or

[00:36:34] [SPEAKER_04]: woman lover or stranger who desires union.

[00:36:37] [SPEAKER_04]: But really, it would be better not to have any temples.

[00:36:39] [SPEAKER_04]: No religion.

[00:36:40] [SPEAKER_04]: Religion may be clergy, no orgies, but like where everybody's enjoying them.

[00:36:46] [SPEAKER_04]: Same with drugs.

[00:36:47] [SPEAKER_04]: She's like, I love this.

[00:36:49] [SPEAKER_06]: I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical.

[00:36:53] [SPEAKER_06]: For those who like it, the faint insistence sweetness of droos

[00:36:57] [SPEAKER_06]: may perfume the way of the city.

[00:36:59] [SPEAKER_06]: And again, she takes this drug droos and I think she goes out

[00:37:02] [SPEAKER_06]: of her way to distinguish it from Soma, which is that kind

[00:37:07] [SPEAKER_06]: of dull ecstasy or just really happy, but not thinking in any deep way.

[00:37:14] [SPEAKER_06]: And what she talks about are the wonderful visions at last of the very

[00:37:18] [SPEAKER_06]: arcana and in most secrets of the universe, as well as exciting

[00:37:22] [SPEAKER_06]: the pleasure of sex beyond all belief.

[00:37:25] [SPEAKER_06]: And it's not habit for me.

[00:37:26] [SPEAKER_04]: And it's this droos sounds amazing.

[00:37:29] [SPEAKER_04]: It does.

[00:37:30] [SPEAKER_04]: There's something she says right before that, which I think is important.

[00:37:33] [SPEAKER_04]: She says one thing I know.

[00:37:34] [SPEAKER_04]: One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt,

[00:37:39] [SPEAKER_04]: which I think is important for the for the story and for her to remove that

[00:37:45] [SPEAKER_04]: as any possibility.

[00:37:46] [SPEAKER_06]: But it's actually like I highlighted this

[00:37:50] [SPEAKER_06]: also because it just kind of comes out of nowhere and out of nowhere.

[00:37:55] [SPEAKER_06]: It's hard to, you know, once you find out what you find out,

[00:37:58] [SPEAKER_06]: it's it's open to question.

[00:38:00] [SPEAKER_06]: It would seem like or.

[00:38:02] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's it could be read just as a, you know, she's just talked about

[00:38:07] [SPEAKER_04]: orgies and she wants to point out that people don't feel guilty about those.

[00:38:13] [SPEAKER_04]: Right?

[00:38:13] [SPEAKER_04]: Like because we so we might associate the licentious sex with something

[00:38:17] [SPEAKER_04]: that's that's bad for us and feel bad after we do it.

[00:38:20] [SPEAKER_06]: She yeah, I don't think that that's that's not the way I read it.

[00:38:25] [SPEAKER_06]: I suppose it could be because she comes back to it towards the end as well

[00:38:29] [SPEAKER_06]: and has nothing to do with sex.

[00:38:31] [SPEAKER_06]: But it just kind of dropped out of nowhere.

[00:38:34] [SPEAKER_06]: It goes from the sex to the to the religion

[00:38:37] [SPEAKER_06]: and then just one sentence on guilt and then quickly to the drugs.

[00:38:41] [SPEAKER_06]: I don't know, but I want to come back to that.

[00:38:44] [SPEAKER_06]: So so actually, I just want to ask you, why do you think she switches

[00:38:48] [SPEAKER_06]: to from first just describing it very specifically

[00:38:52] [SPEAKER_06]: to something that we now are part of building with her

[00:38:57] [SPEAKER_06]: and that she is very unsure about and sort of building it with us?

[00:39:01] [SPEAKER_06]: We're all doing it at the same time.

[00:39:03] [SPEAKER_06]: Why do you think she's doing this?

[00:39:06] [SPEAKER_04]: First of all, I think it's a brilliant move because I think that she

[00:39:09] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, she says she's anticipating that that

[00:39:13] [SPEAKER_04]: that the only way we're going to get to understand this is if we

[00:39:18] [SPEAKER_04]: take part in building it because if she were to describe a utopia

[00:39:23] [SPEAKER_04]: and for instance, she said and there were

[00:39:28] [SPEAKER_04]: nothing but good religions and somebody could say,

[00:39:30] [SPEAKER_04]: fuck religion, that's not a utopia.

[00:39:32] [SPEAKER_04]: Or if she said and everybody could have sex with everybody.

[00:39:35] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, fuck that. That's not a utopia election.

[00:39:37] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, so it's super important

[00:39:41] [SPEAKER_04]: for for the story that everybody

[00:39:46] [SPEAKER_04]: is on board with the the thought that there is

[00:39:51] [SPEAKER_04]: nothing but happiness and not dumb happiness, but smart happiness.

[00:39:55] [SPEAKER_04]: But she can't, you know, she can't possibly cover all of the objections

[00:39:59] [SPEAKER_04]: that the reader would have.

[00:40:00] [SPEAKER_06]: Right. And she knows that all the readers are different.

[00:40:03] [SPEAKER_06]: Like and so some people want religion and and orgies.

[00:40:06] [SPEAKER_06]: Some people don't want religion.

[00:40:08] [SPEAKER_06]: Some people want religion. No orgies, no religion and orgies.

[00:40:12] [SPEAKER_04]: I think I. Yeah, you fill out all the cells there.

[00:40:16] [SPEAKER_06]: And and so yeah.

[00:40:17] [SPEAKER_06]: And so I think that's one of the things it's like

[00:40:20] [SPEAKER_06]: prefiguring the decision that's going to be put to us.

[00:40:24] [SPEAKER_06]: She doesn't want us to have an easy decision, right?

[00:40:29] [SPEAKER_06]: She doesn't want it to be.

[00:40:31] [SPEAKER_06]: Well, I wouldn't really want that version of utopia anyway.

[00:40:36] [SPEAKER_04]: Because that would easily undermine the point

[00:40:38] [SPEAKER_04]: for a reader to just disagree with something.

[00:40:41] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, exactly. And then now, oh, yeah, I definitely walk away

[00:40:44] [SPEAKER_06]: because I don't, you know, I don't like that utopia anyway.

[00:40:48] [SPEAKER_06]: I also think it is very

[00:40:51] [SPEAKER_06]: like she is implicating us now in the city.

[00:40:54] [SPEAKER_06]: She is making us a part of it.

[00:40:56] [SPEAKER_04]: We're building that's that's a really good point with her.

[00:40:59] [SPEAKER_06]: Whether we like it or not, now we're becoming

[00:41:02] [SPEAKER_06]: responsible for the existence of this city that, you know.

[00:41:08] [SPEAKER_06]: And I think that's really that's just so cool.

[00:41:12] [SPEAKER_06]: Like the way she does that.

[00:41:14] [SPEAKER_06]: And it's it's almost like it's seductive, kind of, you know.

[00:41:18] [SPEAKER_04]: That's great. I like I.

[00:41:21] [SPEAKER_04]: I hadn't thought of it that way.

[00:41:24] [SPEAKER_04]: And, you know, we talk a lot about about bill

[00:41:27] [SPEAKER_04]: when we talk about good villains and, you know,

[00:41:31] [SPEAKER_04]: whenever the millions of times I mentioned Tony Soprano

[00:41:34] [SPEAKER_04]: and I think, you know, there is this thing where

[00:41:37] [SPEAKER_04]: we've lived through his eyes for so long

[00:41:40] [SPEAKER_04]: that we we are now implicated in his bad actions.

[00:41:43] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. But this is an even more effective way

[00:41:46] [SPEAKER_04]: or at least a more efficient way to do it. Yeah, exactly.

[00:41:50] [SPEAKER_04]: She's made us build the city, you know, in our heads

[00:41:54] [SPEAKER_04]: that she's she's convinced us

[00:41:58] [SPEAKER_04]: to any objection that comes to mind.

[00:42:00] [SPEAKER_04]: All right, fix it.

[00:42:01] [SPEAKER_06]: Just fix it. But as you're fixing it, it's like Satanish,

[00:42:04] [SPEAKER_06]: you know, it's like we're just digging ourselves.

[00:42:08] [SPEAKER_06]: It's just you don't know what's going to happen.

[00:42:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, like I wish that I had read the story without knowing.

[00:42:13] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I do too.

[00:42:15] [SPEAKER_06]: It was still a shock.

[00:42:17] [SPEAKER_06]: I knew what was going to happen, but just the

[00:42:20] [SPEAKER_06]: the detail in which it was described was still shocking to me.

[00:42:26] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. Yep.

[00:42:27] [SPEAKER_06]: And then when we played it again for the class,

[00:42:30] [SPEAKER_06]: I was like dreading that part coming.

[00:42:33] [SPEAKER_06]: And then and then when it came,

[00:42:36] [SPEAKER_06]: it was still just deeply, I don't know, emotional.

[00:42:40] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. And so she's going on to describe now,

[00:42:43] [SPEAKER_04]: you know, now in the more abstract sense,

[00:42:45] [SPEAKER_04]: she was describing in a very concrete sense.

[00:42:47] [SPEAKER_04]: Now now we're playing this game with her

[00:42:49] [SPEAKER_04]: and she's guiding our imagination.

[00:42:51] [SPEAKER_04]: And so she says, oh, they have this drug that has no side effects.

[00:42:55] [SPEAKER_04]: It's wonderful.

[00:42:55] [SPEAKER_04]: And there's lots of celebrations, but it's not celebrations

[00:42:58] [SPEAKER_04]: because of violence, because that's that kind of celebration sucks.

[00:43:01] [SPEAKER_04]: It's trivial. That kind of courage sucks.

[00:43:04] [SPEAKER_06]: She says there's courage, but it's a virtuous courage,

[00:43:07] [SPEAKER_06]: not like bad kind of courage.

[00:43:10] [SPEAKER_04]: Right.

[00:43:11] [SPEAKER_04]: That's they don't they don't need to defeat anybody

[00:43:15] [SPEAKER_04]: to have a sense of victory in their heart.

[00:43:18] [SPEAKER_04]: And then she says, you know, that you remember

[00:43:20] [SPEAKER_04]: that perfect drug I described?

[00:43:22] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't even think most people need to take it

[00:43:24] [SPEAKER_04]: because everything is so good that why would you need to take it?

[00:43:28] [SPEAKER_06]: Yes.

[00:43:29] [SPEAKER_06]: Although, you know, again, if you want to take it, go for it.

[00:43:34] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm already signed up to take it.

[00:43:37] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm looking through.

[00:43:38] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm looking through all the cupboards and all the bath

[00:43:42] [SPEAKER_04]: room medicine cabinets, or is the Druze?

[00:43:46] [SPEAKER_04]: Where's the Druze?

[00:43:47] [SPEAKER_06]: Look at that.

[00:43:47] [SPEAKER_06]: It's just Druze is going to expire in two months anyway.

[00:43:51] [SPEAKER_04]: They have had Druze sitting here for nine months.

[00:43:54] [SPEAKER_04]: It would be dangerous for them to take it, but my body can take it.

[00:43:57] [SPEAKER_06]: Exactly. And then it goes back to like the processions.

[00:44:01] [SPEAKER_06]: So now it's back to this.

[00:44:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's like, remember, there's a festival.

[00:44:05] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. I had forgotten for a second.

[00:44:06] [SPEAKER_06]: The smell of cooking goes forth.

[00:44:09] [SPEAKER_06]: She's now writing in the I don't know this

[00:44:11] [SPEAKER_06]: what the significance of this is, but it's noticeable.

[00:44:15] [SPEAKER_06]: She she she started in the past tense

[00:44:18] [SPEAKER_06]: describing the festival and now it's in the present tense.

[00:44:22] [SPEAKER_04]: And now she because she's asking you now that you've built the city.

[00:44:26] [SPEAKER_04]: Now imagine now now see, look, they're they're walking past.

[00:44:31] [SPEAKER_04]: They've reached the green fields now.

[00:44:32] [SPEAKER_04]: There is a smell like now we're part of the city.

[00:44:34] [SPEAKER_06]: That's right. We're there.

[00:44:35] [SPEAKER_06]: That that's yeah, exactly.

[00:44:37] [SPEAKER_06]: I like that. Yeah.

[00:44:38] [SPEAKER_06]: And so it started out, we're not part of the city.

[00:44:40] [SPEAKER_06]: It's like a journalist describing into us.

[00:44:43] [SPEAKER_06]: But now we're just in it now that we've helped build it.

[00:44:46] [SPEAKER_06]: We're still in it.

[00:44:48] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. And then this it's a little

[00:44:51] [SPEAKER_06]: a boy playing a flute.

[00:44:54] [SPEAKER_04]: All the little idyllic parts of old women passing out flowers

[00:44:59] [SPEAKER_04]: to all young men wearing it with their shining hair.

[00:45:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Trumpet sounding the horses.

[00:45:06] [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, those horses sober faced young riders.

[00:45:10] [SPEAKER_06]: And then she says, here's the transition line.

[00:45:14] [SPEAKER_06]: Do you believe do you accept the festival, the city, the joy?

[00:45:18] [SPEAKER_06]: No. Then let me describe one more thing.

[00:45:22] [SPEAKER_04]: One more thing.

[00:45:24] [SPEAKER_04]: Should we just read some of this?

[00:45:26] [SPEAKER_04]: Sure. Why don't you do that in a basement under one of the

[00:45:29] [SPEAKER_04]: beautiful public buildings of Omelas or perhaps in the cellar

[00:45:33] [SPEAKER_04]: of one of its spacious private homes?

[00:45:35] [SPEAKER_04]: There's a room.

[00:45:36] [SPEAKER_04]: It has one locked door and no window.

[00:45:38] [SPEAKER_04]: A little light seeps in dustedly between cracks in the boards.

[00:45:41] [SPEAKER_04]: Second hand from a cob webbed window somewhere across the cellar

[00:45:45] [SPEAKER_04]: in one corner of the little room, a couple of mops with stiff

[00:45:49] [SPEAKER_04]: clotted foul smelling head stand near a rusty bucket.

[00:45:52] [SPEAKER_04]: The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch as cellar dirt usually is.

[00:45:57] [SPEAKER_04]: The room is about three paces long and too wide.

[00:46:00] [SPEAKER_04]: A mere broom closet or disused, disused tool room in the room.

[00:46:04] [SPEAKER_04]: A child is sitting.

[00:46:06] [SPEAKER_04]: It could be a boy or a girl.

[00:46:08] [SPEAKER_04]: It looks about six, but actually is nearly 10.

[00:46:10] [SPEAKER_04]: It is feeble minded.

[00:46:12] [SPEAKER_04]: Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile

[00:46:15] [SPEAKER_04]: through fear, malnutrition and neglect.

[00:46:18] [SPEAKER_04]: It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes

[00:46:22] [SPEAKER_04]: or genitals as it sits hunched in the corner, farthest from the

[00:46:25] [SPEAKER_04]: bucket and the two mops.

[00:46:27] [SPEAKER_04]: Now she's, you know, now she's saying like maybe it's in this room,

[00:46:30] [SPEAKER_04]: maybe it's in that room and then she's getting to the visceral.

[00:46:32] [SPEAKER_04]: Like, yeah, but but but let me tell you wherever it is, it's in the dirt.

[00:46:36] [SPEAKER_04]: It's a small room.

[00:46:38] [SPEAKER_06]: So this is the part that breaks my door is always locked.

[00:46:41] [SPEAKER_06]: Nobody ever comes except that sometimes the child has no understanding

[00:46:45] [SPEAKER_06]: of time or interval interval.

[00:46:47] [SPEAKER_06]: Sometimes their door rattles terribly and opens and a person

[00:46:50] [SPEAKER_06]: or several people are there.

[00:46:52] [SPEAKER_06]: One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up.

[00:46:55] [SPEAKER_06]: The others never come close, but peer at it with frightened, disgusted eyes.

[00:46:59] [SPEAKER_06]: The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled.

[00:47:02] [SPEAKER_06]: The door is locked.

[00:47:03] [SPEAKER_06]: The eyes disappear.

[00:47:05] [SPEAKER_06]: The people at the door never say anything, but the child who has not

[00:47:08] [SPEAKER_06]: always lived in the tool room and can remember sunlight

[00:47:11] [SPEAKER_06]: and its mother's voice sometimes speaks, I will be good.

[00:47:16] [SPEAKER_06]: It says, please let me out.

[00:47:18] [SPEAKER_06]: I will be good.

[00:47:19] [SPEAKER_06]: They never answer.

[00:47:20] [SPEAKER_04]: They never answer.

[00:47:24] [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, it's so fucking visceral.

[00:47:28] [SPEAKER_04]: The child used to scream for help at night and cry a good deal,

[00:47:31] [SPEAKER_04]: but now it only makes a kind of whining.

[00:47:33] [SPEAKER_04]: Eh, huh?

[00:47:33] [SPEAKER_04]: Uh-huh.

[00:47:34] [SPEAKER_04]: And it speaks less and less often.

[00:47:37] [SPEAKER_04]: It is so thin there are no calves to its legs.

[00:47:39] [SPEAKER_04]: Its belly protrudes.

[00:47:40] [SPEAKER_04]: It lives on a half bowl of cornmeal and grease a day.

[00:47:42] [SPEAKER_04]: It is naked.

[00:47:44] [SPEAKER_04]: Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores as it sits

[00:47:47] [SPEAKER_04]: in its own excrement continually.

[00:47:49] [SPEAKER_04]: They all know it is there.

[00:47:52] [SPEAKER_04]: All the people of Omelus.

[00:47:54] [SPEAKER_05]: So let's stop there for a sec.

[00:47:55] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:47:56] [SPEAKER_06]: Couple things.

[00:47:57] [SPEAKER_06]: Again, there's this weird switch, alter between like very specific details.

[00:48:03] [SPEAKER_06]: Like it's almost 10, but it looks about six.

[00:48:07] [SPEAKER_06]: It's diet.

[00:48:08] [SPEAKER_06]: But then it could be a boy or a girl.

[00:48:12] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:48:12] [SPEAKER_06]: You know, like there's certain basic things that are not told to us

[00:48:16] [SPEAKER_06]: and certain details that are told to us.

[00:48:20] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:48:21] [SPEAKER_06]: And it's just, it's horrible.

[00:48:23] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:48:23] [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, she does and this is crucial to the story.

[00:48:26] [SPEAKER_06]: You have, it has to be something that really cuts at you at an emotional level.

[00:48:32] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:48:33] [SPEAKER_04]: I think that throughout the story, the things that she leaves up in the air

[00:48:36] [SPEAKER_04]: are things that she think would, would potentially soften the blow.

[00:48:43] [SPEAKER_04]: So like maybe you, you might actually care more if it's a boy or if it's a girl.

[00:48:49] [SPEAKER_04]: Right.

[00:48:50] [SPEAKER_04]: So we don't need to know.

[00:48:52] [SPEAKER_04]: So it could be either one.

[00:48:53] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:48:54] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:48:54] [SPEAKER_06]: Whichever one you would care about most.

[00:48:57] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:48:58] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:48:58] [SPEAKER_04]: It's terrible.

[00:48:59] [SPEAKER_04]: And the fact that the kid used, you know, at some point had a mother.

[00:49:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Right.

[00:49:04] [SPEAKER_04]: Some point a mother gave up this child.

[00:49:06] [SPEAKER_06]: That's important, I think for the torture, right?

[00:49:08] [SPEAKER_06]: So yeah.

[00:49:10] [SPEAKER_06]: If, if the child just never knew anything and was born like a factory

[00:49:15] [SPEAKER_06]: farmed animal or something like that, it's definitely suffering.

[00:49:18] [SPEAKER_06]: But there's something worse about suffering because you also know

[00:49:24] [SPEAKER_06]: that there is something better and you feel like you've been denied it

[00:49:29] [SPEAKER_06]: and you don't know why.

[00:49:31] [SPEAKER_04]: And not only that at that age thinking.

[00:49:33] [SPEAKER_04]: It's your fault.

[00:49:34] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:49:36] [SPEAKER_04]: When's my mom coming back?

[00:49:39] [SPEAKER_04]: Like at any time the door opens.

[00:49:42] [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe having the hope that it's your mom coming to pick you up.

[00:49:45] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:49:46] [SPEAKER_06]: Like a dog.

[00:49:46] [SPEAKER_04]: And to not know why.

[00:49:48] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:49:49] [SPEAKER_04]: To, you know, this is, yeah.

[00:49:52] [SPEAKER_04]: So and importantly everybody in the city knows that this child is there.

[00:49:58] [SPEAKER_04]: Only some of them have come to see it though.

[00:50:00] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:50:00] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:50:00] [SPEAKER_06]: So they all know it's there.

[00:50:02] [SPEAKER_06]: Some of them have come to see it.

[00:50:03] [SPEAKER_06]: Others are content merely to know it's there.

[00:50:06] [SPEAKER_06]: They all know that it has to be there.

[00:50:08] [SPEAKER_06]: Some of them understand why and some do not.

[00:50:11] [SPEAKER_06]: But they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city,

[00:50:15] [SPEAKER_06]: the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children,

[00:50:18] [SPEAKER_06]: the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers,

[00:50:21] [SPEAKER_06]: even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies

[00:50:24] [SPEAKER_06]: depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

[00:50:31] [SPEAKER_04]: Crucially she underspecifies why she leaves that open because

[00:50:37] [SPEAKER_04]: you know, at some point I remember talking about Groundhog Day and how much

[00:50:40] [SPEAKER_04]: of a shittier movie it would have been if there was an explanation for why

[00:50:43] [SPEAKER_04]: everything was happening.

[00:50:45] [SPEAKER_04]: I think this is kind of like that.

[00:50:47] [SPEAKER_04]: If if Le Guin had said, oh, because through some, you know, like,

[00:50:52] [SPEAKER_04]: you know, magic, causal force, the deal they had made with a demon

[00:50:56] [SPEAKER_04]: thousands of years ago, it would just be stupid.

[00:50:59] [SPEAKER_04]: We don't that's not important.

[00:51:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Right.

[00:51:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:51:02] [SPEAKER_04]: The important thing is that they know everybody's convinced everybody

[00:51:05] [SPEAKER_04]: knows that this needs to happen.

[00:51:09] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:51:10] [SPEAKER_06]: Or that if it if it doesn't happen, they will lose their their happiness.

[00:51:16] [SPEAKER_04]: This is usually explained to children when they're between eight and 12

[00:51:20] [SPEAKER_04]: whenever they seem capable of understanding.

[00:51:23] [SPEAKER_04]: And most of those who come to see the child are young people,

[00:51:27] [SPEAKER_04]: though often enough an adult comes or comes back to see the child,

[00:51:30] [SPEAKER_04]: which is interesting, right?

[00:51:32] [SPEAKER_04]: Like the curiosity.

[00:51:33] [SPEAKER_06]: So then she says that, you know, when they first see it,

[00:51:37] [SPEAKER_06]: especially the young people, they'll be they'll go home in tears

[00:51:41] [SPEAKER_06]: or a tearless rage.

[00:51:43] [SPEAKER_06]: She says shocked and sickened at the sight.

[00:51:47] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:51:47] [SPEAKER_04]: They feel disgust.

[00:51:48] [SPEAKER_04]: They feel anger, rage, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations.

[00:51:53] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:51:53] [SPEAKER_06]: And then they could may brood over it for weeks or years.

[00:51:58] [SPEAKER_06]: But as time goes by, they begin to realize that even if the child

[00:52:01] [SPEAKER_06]: could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom.

[00:52:04] [SPEAKER_06]: A little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more.

[00:52:10] [SPEAKER_06]: So it's like they start, I don't know, like I think there's a bunch

[00:52:13] [SPEAKER_06]: of different ways to read this.

[00:52:16] [SPEAKER_06]: But I start to read it as they start rationalizing.

[00:52:21] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, yeah, I mean, they it's important that they have that reaction

[00:52:25] [SPEAKER_04]: to show that whatever this deal is that causes the whole city to be happy.

[00:52:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Hasn't so fundamentally changed them that they wouldn't feel the shock

[00:52:35] [SPEAKER_04]: and the misery and the empathy and the desire to save this kid when they see it.

[00:52:41] [SPEAKER_04]: Right.

[00:52:41] [SPEAKER_04]: It's important that they react in the way that anybody would react

[00:52:44] [SPEAKER_04]: and they want to do something.

[00:52:46] [SPEAKER_04]: They're idealists.

[00:52:47] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[00:52:48] [SPEAKER_04]: The children are the idealists, you know, and the youth is just true

[00:52:52] [SPEAKER_04]: are the idealists in society.

[00:52:55] [SPEAKER_04]: And soon they realize they can't do shit.

[00:52:58] [SPEAKER_04]: There's nothing, nothing they can do.

[00:53:01] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.

[00:53:02] [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, so I think there's a cynical way to read this, I think, crucial passage here

[00:53:07] [SPEAKER_06]: and there is not as cynical way to read it.

[00:53:10] [SPEAKER_06]: But when when when they say but as time goes by, they begin to realize

[00:53:15] [SPEAKER_06]: that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom.

[00:53:19] [SPEAKER_06]: A little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more.

[00:53:24] [SPEAKER_06]: It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy.

[00:53:27] [SPEAKER_06]: Indeed, after so long, it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it

[00:53:32] [SPEAKER_06]: and darkness for its eyes and its own excrement to sit in.

[00:53:37] [SPEAKER_06]: Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible

[00:53:42] [SPEAKER_06]: justice of reality and to accept it.

[00:53:46] [SPEAKER_06]: Now, yeah, you could read that as they are, they are discovering

[00:53:53] [SPEAKER_06]: the truth that there's nothing much they can do for this child.

[00:53:57] [SPEAKER_06]: I inclined to read it as they are telling themselves a story to make

[00:54:02] [SPEAKER_06]: themselves feel better about benefiting from the suffering of this child.

[00:54:09] [SPEAKER_06]: They don't know.

[00:54:10] [SPEAKER_06]: They're speculating about what would happen if you freed it.

[00:54:13] [SPEAKER_06]: And especially when they say it would probably be wretched without

[00:54:17] [SPEAKER_06]: like having its own excrement to sit in.

[00:54:20] [SPEAKER_06]: That sounds like bullshit to me.

[00:54:26] [SPEAKER_06]: But I want to know, like, because the rest of the paragraph, I think

[00:54:30] [SPEAKER_06]: also strikes me as bullshit in a slightly more subtle way.

[00:54:33] [SPEAKER_06]: But this strikes me as I'm telling myself a story to make me feel better

[00:54:37] [SPEAKER_06]: about this horrible injustice and to start calling it a terrible justice.

[00:54:44] [SPEAKER_04]: Right.

[00:54:44] [SPEAKER_04]: So so they're motivated because they know the deal.

[00:54:47] [SPEAKER_04]: It's been explained.

[00:54:49] [SPEAKER_04]: The terms are strict and absolute.

[00:54:50] [SPEAKER_04]: There may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

[00:54:53] [SPEAKER_04]: So anything they do will breaking that rule will ruin the city of Omalas.

[00:54:58] [SPEAKER_04]: And so because of that, in a motivated fashion, they start thinking, well,

[00:55:04] [SPEAKER_04]: you know, what are we going to do?

[00:55:05] [SPEAKER_04]: This kid has no shot anyway.

[00:55:07] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. I.

[00:55:10] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I agree with you.

[00:55:11] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, look, yeah, I mean, I think you're right because the passage continues.

[00:55:17] [SPEAKER_04]: And they say it says they know that they like the child are not free.

[00:55:22] [SPEAKER_04]: They know compassion.

[00:55:24] [SPEAKER_04]: It is the existence of the child and their knowledge of its existence

[00:55:26] [SPEAKER_04]: that makes possible the nobility of their architecture,

[00:55:29] [SPEAKER_04]: the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science.

[00:55:33] [SPEAKER_04]: It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children.

[00:55:37] [SPEAKER_04]: That's that's really interesting.

[00:55:39] [SPEAKER_04]: But strikes me as like an even worse kind of rationalization.

[00:55:42] [SPEAKER_06]: No, I know. So right before just a sentence right before that.

[00:55:46] [SPEAKER_06]: Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity

[00:55:50] [SPEAKER_06]: and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true

[00:55:54] [SPEAKER_06]: source of the splendor of their lives.

[00:55:57] [SPEAKER_06]: There's is no vapid irresponsible happiness.

[00:56:00] [SPEAKER_06]: It's like they're almost glorifying their acceptance

[00:56:04] [SPEAKER_06]: of this child suffering at that point, saying, oh, we're suffering too in a way

[00:56:10] [SPEAKER_06]: because I'm not free either.

[00:56:13] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, you know, yeah, we have to do this.

[00:56:15] [SPEAKER_06]: We're part of this puzzle.

[00:56:17] [SPEAKER_06]: There's nothing we can do.

[00:56:19] [SPEAKER_06]: It's like fatalistic.

[00:56:21] [SPEAKER_06]: And yet there's something about that almost glorifying of their

[00:56:25] [SPEAKER_06]: acceptance of this child's torture that struck me as.

[00:56:30] [SPEAKER_06]: And now I had a lot of students that didn't agree with this.

[00:56:33] [SPEAKER_06]: Like they thought maybe this is part of the explanation

[00:56:35] [SPEAKER_06]: of why the child has to be down there.

[00:56:37] [SPEAKER_06]: Maybe this is, you know, I think you can read it that way.

[00:56:40] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, and there's especially that second part there's,

[00:56:43] [SPEAKER_04]: you know, in order to appreciate beauty, you need to know what ugly is.

[00:56:46] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. Right.

[00:56:47] [SPEAKER_04]: And and having only one instance of ugly is the best, the best world

[00:56:56] [SPEAKER_04]: because in another city, you have plenty of instances of people suffering.

[00:57:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Here we just got it down to one, you know, we make it a little

[00:57:04] [SPEAKER_04]: little tour for the eight to twelve year olds to come see it.

[00:57:08] [SPEAKER_04]: From then on they go and produce great works of art

[00:57:10] [SPEAKER_04]: because they now know what happiness truly is in a way that they didn't before.

[00:57:16] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. And, you know, this is one answer to the problem of evil where you say, well,

[00:57:22] [SPEAKER_06]: there needs to be suffering in order for us to appreciate happiness.

[00:57:27] [SPEAKER_06]: But then in this case, as you say, that suffering is reduced to just

[00:57:31] [SPEAKER_06]: one single person, one child.

[00:57:37] [SPEAKER_04]: And if and I don't know whether it's important here to go back to her

[00:57:40] [SPEAKER_04]: claim that there is no guilt.

[00:57:42] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. Because

[00:57:46] [SPEAKER_04]: if they were living with this, one could say when they're saying,

[00:57:50] [SPEAKER_04]: oh, you know, we have to live with the knowledge of this one kid being

[00:57:54] [SPEAKER_04]: kept in this under these horrible conditions.

[00:57:57] [SPEAKER_04]: But they don't feel guilt about it. Right.

[00:58:00] [SPEAKER_04]: They or they feel rage at first, like they have that initial reaction.

[00:58:03] [SPEAKER_04]: They get over it.

[00:58:04] [SPEAKER_06]: Well, there's this line a little earlier where they say

[00:58:08] [SPEAKER_06]: right after they find the terms, there is nothing they can do

[00:58:13] [SPEAKER_06]: if the child were brought up to the sunlight out of that vile place.

[00:58:16] [SPEAKER_06]: If it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed.

[00:58:20] [SPEAKER_06]: Which seems to contradict what comes next, which is that the child wouldn't

[00:58:25] [SPEAKER_06]: be able to appreciate it and would want to be back down in the cell.

[00:58:29] [SPEAKER_06]: But then she says, but if it were done in that day and hour,

[00:58:32] [SPEAKER_06]: all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither

[00:58:36] [SPEAKER_06]: and be destroyed, those are the terms to exchange all the goodness

[00:58:40] [SPEAKER_06]: and grace of every life in Omelas for that single small

[00:58:44] [SPEAKER_06]: improvement to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance

[00:58:48] [SPEAKER_06]: of the happiness of one, that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

[00:58:54] [SPEAKER_06]: It's very strange.

[00:58:55] [SPEAKER_06]: Like like at first guilt was sort of

[00:58:59] [SPEAKER_06]: the idea of guilt as an emotion that individuals feel now

[00:59:05] [SPEAKER_04]: in the context of the orgies.

[00:59:07] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, people feeling guilt about religion, sex, drugs, whatever.

[00:59:11] [SPEAKER_06]: But now it's like it's something else.

[00:59:14] [SPEAKER_06]: It's like it's a thing.

[00:59:16] [SPEAKER_06]: It's a it's it almost has a kind of religious quality, like sin or something.

[00:59:23] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. And they would for the first time have the evaluation

[00:59:26] [SPEAKER_04]: that they have done something truly wrong, right?

[00:59:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Because if they freed the kid,

[00:59:33] [SPEAKER_04]: they would immediately see all of the suffering that they've caused.

[00:59:37] [SPEAKER_04]: Then everybody would be capable of suffering.

[00:59:40] [SPEAKER_04]: And that would truly be guilt inducing for them, right?

[00:59:44] [SPEAKER_04]: And like they they're under this view that, you know, like, yeah,

[00:59:49] [SPEAKER_04]: it sucks that it's the one, but like what would suck more is if a bunch

[00:59:52] [SPEAKER_04]: of kids had to live that way.

[00:59:53] [SPEAKER_04]: So if we let him out, like that would truly let guilt in.

[00:59:57] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's like they have a ritual.

[00:59:59] [SPEAKER_04]: They have a way of understanding that this one kid

[01:00:03] [SPEAKER_04]: is necessary for suffering to be minimized.

[01:00:06] [SPEAKER_04]: And I think Le Guin is saying in this world that what they think

[01:00:10] [SPEAKER_04]: would be a horrible thing would be to let the kid free and know

[01:00:13] [SPEAKER_04]: know what guilt really is.

[01:00:16] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I mean, that's one way of reading it.

[01:00:19] [SPEAKER_06]: I think I don't know why I'm resisting that that interpretation,

[01:00:24] [SPEAKER_06]: which I like just to be clear as that I understand it,

[01:00:27] [SPEAKER_06]: it's that it really is the wrong thing to do.

[01:00:31] [SPEAKER_06]: Like you have one or at least they believe

[01:00:32] [SPEAKER_06]: or at least they believe that it's really the wrong thing to do.

[01:00:36] [SPEAKER_06]: And but just the way she phrases it, that would be to let guilt

[01:00:40] [SPEAKER_06]: within the walls indeed.

[01:00:42] [SPEAKER_06]: That doesn't sound like they believe that that would be something

[01:00:46] [SPEAKER_06]: that would really make them feel guilty or something like that.

[01:00:50] [SPEAKER_06]: It sounds that they would be weird.

[01:00:52] [SPEAKER_06]: I guess so I'm just very suspicious of the two uses of guilt.

[01:00:56] [SPEAKER_06]: Those are the only two times those words that word is mentioned

[01:00:59] [SPEAKER_06]: in the sentence we referred to earlier.

[01:01:02] [SPEAKER_06]: And they're both just kind of strangely located, strangely phrased.

[01:01:08] [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, a lot of things are strangely phrased, but and also

[01:01:11] [SPEAKER_06]: just the fact that it's very contradictory.

[01:01:14] [SPEAKER_06]: I don't think I noticed this the first time, but at first

[01:01:17] [SPEAKER_06]: they say that it would genuinely be good for the child,

[01:01:20] [SPEAKER_06]: clean it up, it could be comfort, and that would be a good thing.

[01:01:25] [SPEAKER_06]: And then later in the part where I think they're rationalizing,

[01:01:30] [SPEAKER_06]: it says like, oh yeah, I wouldn't even do any good to release the child.

[01:01:35] [SPEAKER_06]: You know, so there's a lot of self deception here,

[01:01:38] [SPEAKER_06]: it seems like to me that she's conveying without making it explicit.

[01:01:45] [SPEAKER_04]: I think you're right because when she's describing

[01:01:49] [SPEAKER_04]: like the pilgrimage of these young people,

[01:01:53] [SPEAKER_04]: they would like to do something for the child.

[01:01:55] [SPEAKER_04]: There's nothing they can do if the child were brought up

[01:01:57] [SPEAKER_04]: into the sunlight of that vile place.

[01:01:59] [SPEAKER_04]: If it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed.

[01:02:03] [SPEAKER_04]: That's what they're thinking, right?

[01:02:05] [SPEAKER_04]: They're struggling with this situation.

[01:02:09] [SPEAKER_04]: They're outraged and they're thinking, come on, man,

[01:02:12] [SPEAKER_04]: just bring it out into the sunlight.

[01:02:13] [SPEAKER_04]: That would be such a good thing.

[01:02:15] [SPEAKER_04]: And then by the time they go home, month for months, they mourn it.

[01:02:19] [SPEAKER_04]: And after a while, the tears at the bitter injustice run dry

[01:02:23] [SPEAKER_04]: and they begin to accept it.

[01:02:25] [SPEAKER_04]: And here is where they start saying, you know what?

[01:02:27] [SPEAKER_04]: Not even bringing it out would do anything.

[01:02:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. She's describing to us the stages of self deception.

[01:02:34] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. Or at least the stages at which they are understanding this.

[01:02:39] [SPEAKER_04]: And I think it's very important to communicate that

[01:02:42] [SPEAKER_04]: the natural response of everyone is outraged.

[01:02:46] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. That these aren't people who are incapable of this.

[01:02:49] [SPEAKER_04]: They're not monsters. They're not psychopaths.

[01:02:51] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. Yeah. Right.

[01:02:53] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. They're us.

[01:02:54] [SPEAKER_04]: Like we're one of them, right?

[01:02:56] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. This whole thing is just we are them.

[01:03:00] [SPEAKER_06]: And you know, all the different techniques that she uses to implicate us.

[01:03:05] [SPEAKER_06]: This is one of them, I think.

[01:03:07] [SPEAKER_06]: And she wants us to really feel the dilemma

[01:03:10] [SPEAKER_06]: in a way that we sometimes feel it in our own lives.

[01:03:14] [SPEAKER_04]: So at the end of this, she says, now do you believe in them?

[01:03:17] [SPEAKER_04]: Are they not more credible?

[01:03:19] [SPEAKER_04]: But there is one more thing to tell.

[01:03:20] [SPEAKER_04]: And this is quite incredible.

[01:03:22] [SPEAKER_04]: At times, one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child

[01:03:26] [SPEAKER_04]: does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all.

[01:03:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two

[01:03:34] [SPEAKER_04]: and then leaves home.

[01:03:36] [SPEAKER_04]: These people go out into the street and walk down the street alone.

[01:03:39] [SPEAKER_04]: They keep walking and walk straight out of the city of Omelas

[01:03:43] [SPEAKER_04]: through the beautiful gates.

[01:03:44] [SPEAKER_04]: They keep walking across the farm lands of Omelas.

[01:03:48] [SPEAKER_04]: Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman.

[01:03:52] [SPEAKER_04]: Night falls, the traveler must pass down village streets

[01:03:54] [SPEAKER_04]: between the houses with yellow windows and on out into the darkness of the fields.

[01:04:00] [SPEAKER_04]: The darkness of the fields is great imagery.

[01:04:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, each alone they go west or north toward the mountains.

[01:04:05] [SPEAKER_04]: They go on, they leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness

[01:04:09] [SPEAKER_04]: and they do not come back.

[01:04:11] [SPEAKER_04]: The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable

[01:04:14] [SPEAKER_04]: to most of us than the city of happiness.

[01:04:15] [SPEAKER_04]: I cannot describe it at all.

[01:04:17] [SPEAKER_04]: It is possible that it does not exist,

[01:04:19] [SPEAKER_04]: but they seem to know where they're going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

[01:04:25] [SPEAKER_04]: Wow. It's incredible, right?

[01:04:27] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, that's I think a very like crucial to the story.

[01:04:31] [SPEAKER_06]: Like you could think of it as a thought experiment at times.

[01:04:36] [SPEAKER_06]: I think that would be even before the of course, before this paragraph,

[01:04:39] [SPEAKER_06]: that would be a wrong way to to understand it.

[01:04:43] [SPEAKER_06]: But then when this comes, it is deeply meaningful and also cryptic.

[01:04:50] [SPEAKER_02]: Mm hmm.

[01:04:52] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, because there's there's no hero that goes and breaks the child free.

[01:04:58] [SPEAKER_04]: No. Right.

[01:04:59] [SPEAKER_04]: They they go visit one more time and they just walk away.

[01:05:04] [SPEAKER_04]: Presumably, these are the people for whom the self deception.

[01:05:08] [SPEAKER_04]: Just wasn't working.

[01:05:10] [SPEAKER_04]: It doesn't work. Yeah.

[01:05:11] [SPEAKER_04]: They're they're.

[01:05:14] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know, enlightened, whatever, whatever it is they are, they are.

[01:05:17] [SPEAKER_04]: They didn't they didn't let the normal process of justification,

[01:05:21] [SPEAKER_04]: rationalization, take hold in them.

[01:05:23] [SPEAKER_04]: They went back.

[01:05:24] [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe there's something about them that's different

[01:05:26] [SPEAKER_04]: that took them back one more time as an adult

[01:05:29] [SPEAKER_04]: where you where you can't you're not as malleable as you were

[01:05:32] [SPEAKER_04]: when you were a kid and you you just you just leave.

[01:05:37] [SPEAKER_04]: And I love the description of just

[01:05:39] [SPEAKER_04]: they don't even say anything. Right.

[01:05:41] [SPEAKER_06]: And they are not with each other.

[01:05:43] [SPEAKER_06]: They go alone. Yeah, alone.

[01:05:45] [SPEAKER_06]: And they don't and they go somewhere we don't know where

[01:05:47] [SPEAKER_06]: and that might not even exist.

[01:05:50] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that's crazy.

[01:05:51] [SPEAKER_04]: That's crazy because I thought, well,

[01:05:54] [SPEAKER_04]: what the decision they're making is to go out into the world

[01:05:56] [SPEAKER_04]: with all its gruelties.

[01:05:58] [SPEAKER_04]: But I think what she's saying is they don't know.

[01:06:02] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. And I think one of the possibilities that has to be in their mind

[01:06:06] [SPEAKER_04]: is that there might be a great society that doesn't have to torture a kid.

[01:06:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe let's go look.

[01:06:11] [SPEAKER_06]: But yeah, maybe it's important.

[01:06:13] [SPEAKER_06]: So this is something I was wondering, like, why does she

[01:06:17] [SPEAKER_06]: say that they're going somewhere and even the narrator has no idea

[01:06:22] [SPEAKER_06]: where or what they're going towards?

[01:06:24] [SPEAKER_06]: One thing it does is convey that they don't know either.

[01:06:28] [SPEAKER_06]: Right. Like you said, all they know is it's not Omalos

[01:06:32] [SPEAKER_06]: and they cannot be part of Omalos anymore.

[01:06:37] [SPEAKER_06]: They cannot benefit from this child's torture.

[01:06:41] [SPEAKER_06]: And they maybe there's a better future where they're going.

[01:06:44] [SPEAKER_06]: Maybe there isn't, but this is done.

[01:06:47] [SPEAKER_06]: They are completely done with it.

[01:06:50] [SPEAKER_04]: The sentence right at the last paragraph that says the place

[01:06:54] [SPEAKER_04]: they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us

[01:06:58] [SPEAKER_04]: than the city of happiness.

[01:07:00] [SPEAKER_04]: That right there kind of fucked with me because

[01:07:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Le Guin spends a lot of time trying to get us to imagine.

[01:07:06] [SPEAKER_04]: She knows we're going to have this imaginative resistance to a utopia

[01:07:10] [SPEAKER_04]: where everybody's happy, but also deep and smart.

[01:07:13] [SPEAKER_04]: And you know, all of the things she knows that that's going

[01:07:17] [SPEAKER_04]: going to be a difficult thing for us.

[01:07:19] [SPEAKER_04]: And now she's saying the place that they're going toward

[01:07:22] [SPEAKER_04]: will be even harder for you to imagine.

[01:07:26] [SPEAKER_04]: So it's a perfect ambiguity.

[01:07:27] [SPEAKER_06]: She says I cannot describe it at all.

[01:07:30] [SPEAKER_06]: She's been so good at describing Omalos.

[01:07:33] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. Maybe it is a much better place.

[01:07:37] [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe it's so terrible that she can't describe it.

[01:07:42] [SPEAKER_04]: Who knows? Do they know where they're going?

[01:07:45] [SPEAKER_06]: What I was just suggesting is that this conveys their ignorance

[01:07:51] [SPEAKER_06]: as well, but it's never explicitly said that they don't know.

[01:07:55] [SPEAKER_06]: It says, in fact, they seem to know where they are going.

[01:07:59] [SPEAKER_06]: But I took that as they seem to know where they're going,

[01:08:03] [SPEAKER_06]: which is away from Omalos.

[01:08:05] [SPEAKER_04]: Exactly. What they know is that they are going in the opposite direction.

[01:08:10] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. They're that they're leaving wherever we go.

[01:08:13] [SPEAKER_04]: They're walking away.

[01:08:14] [SPEAKER_04]: You mentioned earlier, like they're not they're not doing anything.

[01:08:18] [SPEAKER_04]: They're not freeing the child.

[01:08:19] [SPEAKER_11]: Yeah. What? Why do you think?

[01:08:25] [SPEAKER_11]: I think they

[01:08:28] [SPEAKER_04]: they know that they would be implicated in bringing misery to thousands.

[01:08:31] [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.

[01:08:33] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, and they don't want to do that because, you know,

[01:08:38] [SPEAKER_04]: like the whole point is I don't like a place that induces misery.

[01:08:42] [SPEAKER_04]: So I don't want to be the one to do it.

[01:08:44] [SPEAKER_04]: But I can't.

[01:08:45] [SPEAKER_04]: The terms of this contract are fucked.

[01:08:48] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. Like this contract,

[01:08:49] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't want to live in a world where there's a contract like this.

[01:08:52] [SPEAKER_06]: But they could break the contract.

[01:08:54] [SPEAKER_06]: They could live in a place that didn't have that contract anymore

[01:08:58] [SPEAKER_06]: by just bringing the child up and they don't do that.

[01:09:03] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, they'd be causing misery.

[01:09:05] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, I get it.

[01:09:06] [SPEAKER_04]: Like they were all raised in the same thing.

[01:09:08] [SPEAKER_04]: In some sense, it's like it's like leaving a religion.

[01:09:12] [SPEAKER_04]: Right? Yeah.

[01:09:13] [SPEAKER_04]: You leave a religion.

[01:09:14] [SPEAKER_04]: Only a few people are going to stick around church and tell everybody they're wrong.

[01:09:18] [SPEAKER_04]: You're not going to convince them you could free the child

[01:09:20] [SPEAKER_04]: and make them all miserable and they'd be all pissed at you.

[01:09:22] [SPEAKER_04]: What you would really ideally want is for everybody to walk away from this city.

[01:09:27] [SPEAKER_04]: But you probably know that that's impossible.

[01:09:31] [SPEAKER_04]: They've they've she's taken us through every step of the way

[01:09:35] [SPEAKER_04]: where they justify and rationalize and to try to convince somebody else

[01:09:41] [SPEAKER_04]: that this is wrong, you know, get get get agreement

[01:09:44] [SPEAKER_04]: that we shouldn't do this anymore is it seems futile.

[01:09:48] [SPEAKER_06]: They don't have to convince anybody of anything, though.

[01:09:50] [SPEAKER_06]: They just have to take the child and free the child.

[01:09:53] [SPEAKER_04]: But they they could do that,

[01:09:56] [SPEAKER_04]: but they know that the consequence or everybody is going to be miserable.

[01:09:58] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. Well, I think that's very they don't think that would be the right thing to do.

[01:10:03] [SPEAKER_06]: They actually believe that they would be doing the wrong thing

[01:10:07] [SPEAKER_06]: if they freed the child or at least they're not sure

[01:10:11] [SPEAKER_06]: that it wouldn't be a deeply wrong act.

[01:10:14] [SPEAKER_06]: And and yet they're walking away

[01:10:17] [SPEAKER_06]: because they can no longer implicate themselves by the terms of this unfair contract.

[01:10:23] [SPEAKER_06]: Even if it's a contract that's good, all things considered for the world,

[01:10:29] [SPEAKER_06]: they can't be a part of it anymore.

[01:10:32] [SPEAKER_04]: And I don't know.

[01:10:32] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, I think that like they might think that it's not their decision to make

[01:10:36] [SPEAKER_04]: to free the child, you know.

[01:10:38] [SPEAKER_04]: And but and all like what I was trying to say is they could maybe try

[01:10:43] [SPEAKER_04]: to like mount a campaign to say this is fucked up,

[01:10:46] [SPEAKER_04]: but they know they're dejected about this.

[01:10:49] [SPEAKER_04]: You might imagine that they might mount a movement so that everybody agrees.

[01:10:53] [SPEAKER_04]: But they know that they can't do that.

[01:10:55] [SPEAKER_04]: They know that nobody's going to be convinced

[01:10:57] [SPEAKER_04]: because they've all been essentially brainwashed by this contract.

[01:11:01] [SPEAKER_04]: And so they're dejected in a way that they're like,

[01:11:04] [SPEAKER_04]: well, like this is the city, this is the contract.

[01:11:07] [SPEAKER_04]: This is what everybody's agreed to. I don't like it like peace.

[01:11:11] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, there's something about the way you're describing it that I'm resisting.

[01:11:17] [SPEAKER_06]: And I think it's that like I don't think that they even are inclined

[01:11:21] [SPEAKER_06]: to try to convince everybody.

[01:11:25] [SPEAKER_06]: I think they they they think that they're that that the people

[01:11:28] [SPEAKER_06]: are probably right to not free the child.

[01:11:32] [SPEAKER_04]: And so no, what I don't know, maybe I'm not describing it right.

[01:11:35] [SPEAKER_04]: What I think is that it crosses their mind that it would two options.

[01:11:39] [SPEAKER_04]: I could free the kid, you know, and like make the decision for everybody.

[01:11:44] [SPEAKER_04]: And I don't think that's the right thing to do.

[01:11:46] [SPEAKER_04]: I could try to convince everybody, but that's not going to work.

[01:11:50] [SPEAKER_04]: So I'm walking away.

[01:11:51] [SPEAKER_06]: But I but I'm saying that implicit is that if they thought

[01:11:55] [SPEAKER_06]: that they could convince people, then that would be their.

[01:11:59] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't think they can.

[01:12:00] [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, I don't think they think that if they thought they could.

[01:12:03] [SPEAKER_06]: Let's just say then then they would do that.

[01:12:06] [SPEAKER_06]: That's what you're saying.

[01:12:07] [SPEAKER_06]: And I'm saying I don't think so.

[01:12:09] [SPEAKER_06]: I'm saying even if they thought they could convince the people

[01:12:13] [SPEAKER_06]: that they wouldn't want to.

[01:12:16] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I don't know.

[01:12:19] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, what are what are they saying when they're walking away?

[01:12:22] [SPEAKER_04]: Then they just want to wash their hands.

[01:12:24] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, they want not.

[01:12:25] [SPEAKER_04]: Are you saying they are they the villains of this story?

[01:12:28] [SPEAKER_04]: No. Why would they be villains?

[01:12:32] [SPEAKER_04]: Because they're not trying to save the kid

[01:12:34] [SPEAKER_04]: and they're not trying to convince the people and they are just.

[01:12:36] [SPEAKER_04]: It's like the people when you give them sacrificial dilemmas

[01:12:40] [SPEAKER_04]: that are like, no, I wouldn't do any anything.

[01:12:43] [SPEAKER_06]: No, I mean, I think it's that.

[01:12:46] [SPEAKER_06]: I don't think they're trying to convince anybody of anything

[01:12:50] [SPEAKER_06]: whether they think they can or not,

[01:12:52] [SPEAKER_06]: whether they think that's possible or not.

[01:12:53] [SPEAKER_06]: I think they at some level, some part of them thinks

[01:12:58] [SPEAKER_06]: that anybody who can live with this probably should.

[01:13:04] [SPEAKER_06]: And if I did this campaign to try to convince everybody

[01:13:07] [SPEAKER_06]: to break the contract, then I would be bringing a lot of misery

[01:13:10] [SPEAKER_06]: into the world and I don't want to be and I don't want to do that

[01:13:13] [SPEAKER_06]: whether it's by freeing the child unilaterally

[01:13:15] [SPEAKER_06]: or by convincing people by convincing.

[01:13:18] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, but what I won't do is benefit

[01:13:22] [SPEAKER_06]: anymore from this child's torture.

[01:13:25] [SPEAKER_06]: I won't.

[01:13:26] [SPEAKER_06]: That's the thing that they they can't themselves

[01:13:30] [SPEAKER_06]: benefit from this contract anymore.

[01:13:33] [SPEAKER_06]: And that's why they walk away is that every day

[01:13:36] [SPEAKER_06]: that they enjoy the droos and the orgies and the music

[01:13:41] [SPEAKER_06]: and the little kid playing the flute is a day that they are

[01:13:46] [SPEAKER_06]: profiting off the suffering of this kid

[01:13:49] [SPEAKER_06]: and that they just can't they can't live with themselves doing that anymore.

[01:13:52] [SPEAKER_06]: And maybe that's why there's no guilt, right?

[01:13:55] [SPEAKER_06]: Is because anyone who did feel guilt left.

[01:14:02] [SPEAKER_11]: Yeah.

[01:14:03] [SPEAKER_11]: Yeah, maybe maybe that's right.

[01:14:05] [SPEAKER_11]: They they self select.

[01:14:07] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm not sure what Le Guin

[01:14:12] [SPEAKER_04]: is thinking about what ought to be done.

[01:14:15] [SPEAKER_04]: And I'm more convinced that she doesn't even

[01:14:18] [SPEAKER_04]: have an opinion about what ought to be done.

[01:14:22] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I do think that she's

[01:14:24] [SPEAKER_04]: you think that she's condemning

[01:14:27] [SPEAKER_04]: the people of Omelas or the people who walk away

[01:14:31] [SPEAKER_06]: not any more than she would condemn us.

[01:14:37] [SPEAKER_06]: And maybe that we can talk about, like you said,

[01:14:39] [SPEAKER_06]: the allegorical nature of it.

[01:14:41] [SPEAKER_06]: But the first question before we get to that,

[01:14:46] [SPEAKER_06]: does she have an opinion?

[01:14:48] [SPEAKER_06]: Maybe it's certainly not explicit

[01:14:52] [SPEAKER_06]: or didactic in any way in the story.

[01:14:55] [SPEAKER_06]: And I think she's probably conflicted

[01:14:58] [SPEAKER_06]: like the people of Omelas are conflicted

[01:15:02] [SPEAKER_06]: or the ones who walk away are conflicted.

[01:15:05] [SPEAKER_06]: And in any case, wants to certainly

[01:15:08] [SPEAKER_06]: leave it up to us and not tilt us

[01:15:11] [SPEAKER_06]: in any one direction.

[01:15:14] [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, that's what's so kind of brilliant.

[01:15:16] [SPEAKER_06]: The technique of it is that she has drawn us in.

[01:15:19] [SPEAKER_06]: She has made us citizens of this city.

[01:15:22] [SPEAKER_06]: And now we're the now we have to make the decision.

[01:15:25] [SPEAKER_06]: Can we live with it or are we going to walk away?

[01:15:30] [SPEAKER_11]: Yeah.

[01:15:30] [SPEAKER_11]: Yeah.

[01:15:31] [SPEAKER_11]: I'd want to walk away, but I don't know that I.

[01:15:37] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know knowing me.

[01:15:39] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know that I would.

[01:15:40] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I think anybody looking at themselves

[01:15:44] [SPEAKER_06]: might say that there is that dynamic

[01:15:47] [SPEAKER_06]: where people know that there's something going on

[01:15:52] [SPEAKER_06]: that is wrong and the and that

[01:15:56] [SPEAKER_06]: and that they are benefiting from when they think about it.

[01:16:01] [SPEAKER_06]: It's sad, but then they somehow find a way to to live with it.

[01:16:05] [SPEAKER_06]: And you can say this about anything, homelessness, bad schools,

[01:16:10] [SPEAKER_04]: all of the electronics that I'm surrounded by

[01:16:14] [SPEAKER_04]: were made in China and in many cases

[01:16:17] [SPEAKER_04]: in conditions that are probably inhumane.

[01:16:21] [SPEAKER_04]: And what am I doing?

[01:16:23] [SPEAKER_04]: Excited about it by children who are

[01:16:26] [SPEAKER_04]: or almost 10, but look like they're six.

[01:16:29] Yeah.

[01:16:31] [SPEAKER_04]: And the poignancy is that she has put all of this on one child.

[01:16:35] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. Right.

[01:16:36] [SPEAKER_04]: All of the things that we have a like a diffusion,

[01:16:40] [SPEAKER_04]: we have like where some might say

[01:16:42] [SPEAKER_04]: capitalism itself is built on the back of

[01:16:45] [SPEAKER_04]: that on the backs of people who are oppressed.

[01:16:48] [SPEAKER_04]: But because it's a diffusion across all those people

[01:16:51] [SPEAKER_04]: and I don't have to think about it,

[01:16:52] [SPEAKER_04]: there's no one place I can go to see

[01:16:55] [SPEAKER_04]: the congealed suffering of millions.

[01:16:58] [SPEAKER_04]: Right. Yeah.

[01:16:58] [SPEAKER_04]: In Omelas, there is.

[01:17:01] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. There is that place.

[01:17:03] [SPEAKER_04]: You can go see exactly what is at stake.

[01:17:07] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, you can, but you don't have to.

[01:17:09] [SPEAKER_06]: And I think it's important that a lot of people don't.

[01:17:12] [SPEAKER_06]: So I think of this like factory farm videos or something

[01:17:14] [SPEAKER_06]: where you could look at one of those

[01:17:18] [SPEAKER_06]: and your heart will be wrenched from your chest.

[01:17:22] [SPEAKER_06]: But you just rather not know, you know?

[01:17:25] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:17:26] [SPEAKER_06]: And even if you're like me, that is

[01:17:30] [SPEAKER_06]: like you're just a vegetarian, but you know, me like,

[01:17:34] [SPEAKER_06]: yeah, I'll definitely almost always avoid factory farm meat.

[01:17:38] [SPEAKER_06]: But if I'm out like in Vancouver, I probably had some

[01:17:41] [SPEAKER_06]: and I could look at videos that would make me

[01:17:45] [SPEAKER_06]: recognize how horribly cruel

[01:17:49] [SPEAKER_06]: their treatment is.

[01:17:50] [SPEAKER_06]: But I generally choose not to do that.

[01:17:54] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, you know, there's this other part of this story, which is

[01:17:59] [SPEAKER_04]: many people would think this is absolutely

[01:18:04] [SPEAKER_04]: the best way.

[01:18:07] [SPEAKER_04]: Right? Like it would be great if nobody had to suffer.

[01:18:10] [SPEAKER_04]: But if one people has to suffer for the happy

[01:18:12] [SPEAKER_04]: for this so such clear happiness,

[01:18:18] [SPEAKER_04]: clear good, yeah, like happiness,

[01:18:21] [SPEAKER_04]: that one suffer, that's, you know, that sucks for that one person.

[01:18:25] [SPEAKER_04]: But it's only one like you'd be an idiot not to think of this as a utopia.

[01:18:29] [SPEAKER_04]: Like it's just your emotional response at the one.

[01:18:32] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. Because there are a lot of kids that are suffering this

[01:18:35] [SPEAKER_06]: in our own society, like to be all high and mighty about this city when

[01:18:41] [SPEAKER_06]: it's like our city, except there's just thousands,

[01:18:44] [SPEAKER_06]: hundreds of thousands of suffering children.

[01:18:47] [SPEAKER_04]: And that's the brilliance.

[01:18:48] [SPEAKER_04]: It's it can be this story, a moral quandary that you ponder about utilitarianism.

[01:18:54] [SPEAKER_04]: But it's also a.

[01:18:57] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know if she intended it this way,

[01:18:59] [SPEAKER_04]: but I would like to think that she might have intended it to say,

[01:19:02] [SPEAKER_04]: oh, all right, you know how bad you feel about that kid?

[01:19:05] [SPEAKER_04]: And you know, you know how like terrible you think the situation is

[01:19:09] [SPEAKER_04]: now like multiply that by millions and like tell me how you feel

[01:19:14] [SPEAKER_04]: because, you know, you're not doing that.

[01:19:16] [SPEAKER_06]: Well, so so if this is a parable about just

[01:19:21] [SPEAKER_06]: our blindness or kind of willful blindness

[01:19:25] [SPEAKER_06]: to injustice and oppression and exploitation,

[01:19:30] [SPEAKER_06]: what's the analogous act of walking away?

[01:19:34] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I was thinking about that.

[01:19:36] [SPEAKER_04]: And and I don't.

[01:19:40] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, I suppose you could find examples in a local sense, right?

[01:19:44] [SPEAKER_04]: Like you could stop eating meat, for instance,

[01:19:45] [SPEAKER_04]: I could stop buying cheap electronics from China.

[01:19:49] [SPEAKER_04]: But there is nothing as, you know,

[01:19:52] [SPEAKER_04]: the ability to walk away from it hinges on

[01:19:55] [SPEAKER_04]: the the specificity of the suffering, right?

[01:20:00] [SPEAKER_04]: The like specific person who's suffering that allows you to walk away.

[01:20:04] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, to be honest, I don't.

[01:20:07] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't want this to be really an allegory.

[01:20:11] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I agree.

[01:20:12] [SPEAKER_06]: It's reductive to make it an allegory.

[01:20:15] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's it's it's this is this is to me

[01:20:20] [SPEAKER_04]: just something to get us to really think about about suffering,

[01:20:25] [SPEAKER_04]: not like, you know, a Marxist commentary on capitalism or something like that.

[01:20:30] [SPEAKER_06]: Well, I mean, so I feel that completely.

[01:20:35] [SPEAKER_06]: However, I think it like the it can be a parable for so many different things.

[01:20:40] [SPEAKER_06]: Like, I think you could make it a parable or an allegory about Jesus

[01:20:44] [SPEAKER_06]: and his suffering and, you know, the problem of evil in general.

[01:20:49] [SPEAKER_06]: So you could take this certainly in a religious way.

[01:20:53] [SPEAKER_04]: And I mean, she talks about the I don't know if you have the little preamble

[01:20:57] [SPEAKER_04]: in your copy of the story, but in this collection,

[01:21:01] [SPEAKER_04]: she says the central idea of this psychomyth,

[01:21:06] [SPEAKER_04]: the scapegoat turns up in Dostoevsky's brothers Karamazov.

[01:21:09] [SPEAKER_04]: And several people have asked me rather

[01:21:11] [SPEAKER_04]: this, especially why I give the credit to William James.

[01:21:15] [SPEAKER_04]: And so but that notion of a scapegoat,

[01:21:18] [SPEAKER_04]: which was the real goat that carried all the sins.

[01:21:23] [SPEAKER_04]: And that became symbolic for Christians.

[01:21:26] [SPEAKER_04]: So that was this Jesus, you know, taking on all the sins and dying.

[01:21:31] [SPEAKER_04]: I think I think you're right.

[01:21:33] [SPEAKER_06]: And in the brothers Karamazov there, it's very explicitly.

[01:21:37] [SPEAKER_06]: So Ivan Karamazov is saying this contract that his brother,

[01:21:41] [SPEAKER_06]: Aliyoshas, trying to make him endorse this,

[01:21:47] [SPEAKER_06]: you know, where everybody is in the kingdom of heaven is happy.

[01:21:52] [SPEAKER_06]: And he says, but like it's not that I don't believe in your God necessarily.

[01:21:57] [SPEAKER_06]: I just reject him.

[01:21:58] [SPEAKER_06]: I reject the terms of this deal.

[01:22:01] [SPEAKER_06]: I reject and then he puts it to me.

[01:22:03] [SPEAKER_06]: He says, what if one small child had to suffer so that we could all be happy?

[01:22:08] [SPEAKER_06]: I like, you know, if that's the way it is, that's the way it is.

[01:22:12] [SPEAKER_06]: But I reject it.

[01:22:14] [SPEAKER_06]: I am not being a part, any part of it.

[01:22:17] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yep.

[01:22:18] [SPEAKER_04]: I love that passage.

[01:22:19] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[01:22:20] [SPEAKER_04]: In the at the end of this little forward,

[01:22:24] [SPEAKER_04]: the preamble to this story, Le Guin writes

[01:22:27] [SPEAKER_04]: that the word omelas came from a road sign, Salem, Oregon, backwards.

[01:22:33] [SPEAKER_04]: And then she ends this little preamble with a quote, like question from somebody.

[01:22:38] [SPEAKER_04]: Where do you get your ideas from is Le Guin

[01:22:41] [SPEAKER_04]: from forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards naturally.

[01:22:46] [SPEAKER_04]: Where else?

[01:22:47] [SPEAKER_04]: That's great.

[01:22:48] [SPEAKER_06]: So let's talk about it, which we barely have.

[01:22:51] [SPEAKER_06]: And that's good.

[01:22:53] [SPEAKER_06]: But in connection to utilitarianism.

[01:22:56] [SPEAKER_06]: So the William James, I don't know if you remember.

[01:22:59] [SPEAKER_06]: I don't remember this in William James.

[01:23:02] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, she mentions it here too.

[01:23:04] [SPEAKER_04]: And I can read the passage if you want.

[01:23:08] [SPEAKER_04]: James, here's how James puts it.

[01:23:10] [SPEAKER_04]: Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which

[01:23:13] [SPEAKER_04]: Mr.'s Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone

[01:23:17] [SPEAKER_04]: and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition

[01:23:21] [SPEAKER_04]: that a certain lost soul on the far off edge of things

[01:23:23] [SPEAKER_04]: should lead a life of lonely torment.

[01:23:26] [SPEAKER_04]: What except a specific,

[01:23:27] [SPEAKER_04]: specific and independent sort of emotion can it be?

[01:23:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Which would make us immediately feel

[01:23:33] [SPEAKER_04]: even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered.

[01:23:37] [SPEAKER_04]: How hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted

[01:23:41] [SPEAKER_04]: as the fruit of such a bargain.

[01:23:43] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah. So I think that there what's being pointed to is

[01:23:49] [SPEAKER_06]: the limits of reason to explain our reaction to a situation like this.

[01:23:59] [SPEAKER_06]: That if you just run the numbers as utilitarians would like us to do,

[01:24:07] [SPEAKER_06]: this is like we've said, this is the greatest city imaginable.

[01:24:15] [SPEAKER_06]: Maybe imaginable because maybe you do need at least that one child

[01:24:19] [SPEAKER_06]: for the contrast.

[01:24:20] [SPEAKER_06]: But there's something that we recoil at the bargain of an emotion that we have.

[01:24:29] [SPEAKER_06]: And it's an emotion that I think maybe James is endorsing here

[01:24:35] [SPEAKER_06]: as giving us real insight.

[01:24:39] [SPEAKER_06]: But it also points to this is in the critiques of utilitarianism.

[01:24:43] [SPEAKER_06]: We've talked about this, Williams.

[01:24:45] [SPEAKER_06]: This idea that it matters to us.

[01:24:51] [SPEAKER_06]: Whether we're a part of something like whether we're connected to it.

[01:24:55] [SPEAKER_06]: So even if it's going to go on, we can't just accept that

[01:25:03] [SPEAKER_06]: we're benefiting from somebody else's suffering or we're implicated in it

[01:25:08] [SPEAKER_06]: and just count that as well.

[01:25:09] [SPEAKER_06]: That's just another like extra uptick of happiness.

[01:25:14] [SPEAKER_06]: My happiness.

[01:25:15] [SPEAKER_06]: Like we will actually we're motivated to remove ourselves from that

[01:25:20] [SPEAKER_06]: situation at our and at our own expense just to not be involved in this

[01:25:28] [SPEAKER_06]: utilitarian bargain.

[01:25:29] [SPEAKER_06]: That's just something about some human beings, right?

[01:25:34] [SPEAKER_06]: That is deeply important at a deep moral level.

[01:25:38] [SPEAKER_04]: Well, I think that there is also just descriptively

[01:25:42] [SPEAKER_04]: a psychological feature that that prevents us from feeling

[01:25:48] [SPEAKER_04]: good about this situation.

[01:25:50] [SPEAKER_04]: And that is when I see the person suffering,

[01:25:53] [SPEAKER_04]: I see their suffering and I feel my happiness.

[01:25:57] [SPEAKER_04]: That feels fucked up.

[01:25:59] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, right.

[01:26:00] [SPEAKER_04]: Like I am represent like they are there.

[01:26:03] [SPEAKER_04]: They got the shitty end of the deal.

[01:26:05] [SPEAKER_04]: Like I got I got all the good stuff.

[01:26:07] [SPEAKER_04]: Like that doesn't feel right.

[01:26:08] [SPEAKER_04]: That violates a deep sense of fairness.

[01:26:10] [SPEAKER_04]: Now, it's very hard to represent psychologically the the accrued

[01:26:17] [SPEAKER_04]: pleasure of everybody else.

[01:26:19] [SPEAKER_04]: It's very easy to see one on one.

[01:26:22] [SPEAKER_04]: Fuck my happiness is contingent upon this guy's torture.

[01:26:25] [SPEAKER_04]: No, I don't want that.

[01:26:27] [SPEAKER_04]: But because it's hard to then multiply all of the happiness,

[01:26:32] [SPEAKER_04]: you know, it's very hard to represent what that even means

[01:26:34] [SPEAKER_04]: that a million people are happy.

[01:26:36] [SPEAKER_04]: We just our mind has trouble going there

[01:26:39] [SPEAKER_04]: in order to justify the situation.

[01:26:43] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, although I think that's why she takes so much time

[01:26:46] [SPEAKER_06]: to really do that, to really express the joy.

[01:26:51] [SPEAKER_06]: And again, like have us fill in the details of what is that

[01:26:57] [SPEAKER_06]: she wants us to as much as possible imagine this really

[01:27:03] [SPEAKER_06]: happy place.

[01:27:05] [SPEAKER_04]: And I now I'm convinced not convinced.

[01:27:08] [SPEAKER_04]: Now I'm I suspect that this is a decent defense of utilitarianism.

[01:27:17] [SPEAKER_06]: Well, yeah, I don't see that.

[01:27:20] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I think

[01:27:23] [SPEAKER_04]: it's certainly a horrible thing that's happening to the one person.

[01:27:27] [SPEAKER_04]: And but certainly everybody else is really happy

[01:27:31] [SPEAKER_04]: and the people who disagree just leave.

[01:27:36] [SPEAKER_04]: But like there is nothing that forceful in there,

[01:27:39] [SPEAKER_04]: aside from the initial shock and reaction of the kids when they see them.

[01:27:44] [SPEAKER_04]: There's just this quiet walking away,

[01:27:47] [SPEAKER_04]: which is like fine if you don't want to be involved in this system.

[01:27:50] [SPEAKER_04]: But the system itself, man, like if you broke it.

[01:27:56] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, you would be causing the suffering of many people.

[01:27:58] [SPEAKER_04]: And that much is clear because as you say,

[01:28:00] [SPEAKER_04]: she has gone out of her way so much to tell us how

[01:28:04] [SPEAKER_04]: how happy they are.

[01:28:05] [SPEAKER_06]: So I mean, I agree with that and I agree that there's certainly no

[01:28:08] [SPEAKER_06]: endorsement of breaking the contract and freeing the kid because nobody

[01:28:15] [SPEAKER_06]: does it, including all the people that that they walk away.

[01:28:21] [SPEAKER_06]: However, do you think they should, by the way, walk away or free the child?

[01:28:26] [SPEAKER_04]: No, free the child.

[01:28:30] [SPEAKER_06]: It's funny that, you know, that would be my first instinct.

[01:28:33] [SPEAKER_06]: Right?

[01:28:34] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I know.

[01:28:35] [SPEAKER_06]: Like fuck this, like burn it down.

[01:28:37] [SPEAKER_06]: Burn down this fucking place.

[01:28:39] [SPEAKER_06]: But there's something about the way it's described that makes that just

[01:28:46] [SPEAKER_06]: seem like not a genuine, I mean, it's and I don't exactly get how this works.

[01:28:52] [SPEAKER_06]: But it almost seems like it's not a genuine alternative.

[01:28:57] [SPEAKER_06]: Or maybe, you know, and one reason that could be is it's just too

[01:29:01] [SPEAKER_06]: much responsibility to destroy an entire city's happiness.

[01:29:05] [SPEAKER_06]: And you might feel like you were doing it because of like this self-indulgent

[01:29:10] [SPEAKER_06]: squeamishness, as Williams would say at the child's suffering.

[01:29:15] [SPEAKER_06]: And they just don't want to take that burden.

[01:29:20] [SPEAKER_06]: But at the same time, they also don't want to become one of the rationalizers.

[01:29:26] [SPEAKER_06]: You know?

[01:29:26] [SPEAKER_06]: And so that's their compromise is just.

[01:29:31] [SPEAKER_04]: Is it a cowardly act to walk away?

[01:29:34] [SPEAKER_06]: I don't think it's cowardly to walk away.

[01:29:36] [SPEAKER_06]: That seems like the brain.

[01:29:37] [SPEAKER_06]: I don't know, the way it's the way the story is portrayed and the way

[01:29:41] [SPEAKER_06]: I read it, that's the courageous thing to do.

[01:29:45] [SPEAKER_06]: Maybe even more courageous than freeing the child because

[01:29:49] [SPEAKER_06]: that's just that right, genuinely be the wrong thing to do in this case.

[01:29:54] [SPEAKER_06]: I don't know.

[01:29:55] [SPEAKER_06]: Wouldn't you want to free the child?

[01:29:56] [SPEAKER_06]: Fuck the kid in his flute.

[01:29:58] [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know.

[01:30:00] [SPEAKER_04]: I have more consequentialist leanings than you.

[01:30:03] [SPEAKER_04]: Part of it depends on how much misery, you know, how much could they get along?

[01:30:07] [SPEAKER_04]: Like how much misery would I really be bringing into the world?

[01:30:10] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.

[01:30:10] [SPEAKER_04]: Like would I be bringing just dividing up the misery of that child

[01:30:15] [SPEAKER_04]: in some equal measure across thousands of people so that like

[01:30:19] [SPEAKER_04]: then I'd feel like it's OK.

[01:30:21] [SPEAKER_04]: But I assume that what she means is that the risk is of like just

[01:30:26] [SPEAKER_04]: genuine human misery invading the whole the whole town.

[01:30:30] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I mean, I don't think we're supposed to know that either.

[01:30:33] [SPEAKER_06]: Like the people who walk away don't know where they're going.

[01:30:36] [SPEAKER_06]: We don't know what it would bring necessarily.

[01:30:38] [SPEAKER_04]: I would offer to be the child.

[01:30:40] [SPEAKER_04]: I would offer to take the place of the child.

[01:30:42] [SPEAKER_04]: That's that's how good I am.

[01:30:44] [SPEAKER_06]: I would I would take, you know, have one last orgy,

[01:30:49] [SPEAKER_06]: take one hit of bruise.

[01:30:51] [SPEAKER_06]: I kick the kid that's playing the flute

[01:30:54] [SPEAKER_06]: because that kid gets on my nerves anyway, and I would free the child.

[01:31:00] [SPEAKER_06]: And all right, bring it.

[01:31:01] [SPEAKER_06]: Bring it normal world.

[01:31:06] [SPEAKER_04]: Is this what you want?

[01:31:09] [SPEAKER_04]: Is this not what you came to see?

[01:31:14] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm terribly misquoting gladiator there.

[01:31:16] [SPEAKER_06]: Well, huh.

[01:31:18] [SPEAKER_06]: I don't know if we resolved anything there, but.

[01:31:21] [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, the brilliance of the story is.

[01:31:25] [SPEAKER_04]: That I don't think you can resolve it, right?

[01:31:28] [SPEAKER_04]: I think it's so easy.

[01:31:30] [SPEAKER_04]: You know, and this is why I recommend anybody who is in the position

[01:31:33] [SPEAKER_04]: that I was in who who just heard the idea like imagine a torture kid.

[01:31:39] [SPEAKER_04]: That's stupid. No, I would never torture kid.

[01:31:41] [SPEAKER_04]: This is truly giving us the dilemma.

[01:31:45] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. And it's there's no right like the people who walk away.

[01:31:49] [SPEAKER_04]: That's as good a resolution as you're going to get.

[01:31:52] [SPEAKER_04]: And it's not even clear to me that that's that's almost selfish in some way.

[01:31:56] [SPEAKER_06]: You know, yeah, I don't see that.

[01:31:59] [SPEAKER_06]: I think they're the heroes and maybe precisely because

[01:32:03] [SPEAKER_06]: they don't try to make a big they don't glorify it.

[01:32:07] [SPEAKER_06]: They don't think of themselves as heroes.

[01:32:10] [SPEAKER_06]: They don't say anything.

[01:32:11] [SPEAKER_06]: They don't virtue. They're not virtue signalling, you know,

[01:32:15] [SPEAKER_06]: they're not going on Twitter and like.

[01:32:17] [SPEAKER_04]: And say like walked away from a moment today.

[01:32:21] [SPEAKER_06]: Like I'm not saying you should, but so excited.

[01:32:24] [SPEAKER_04]: Just saying.

[01:32:26] [SPEAKER_04]: Hashtag do the right thing.

[01:32:30] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, no, I think that's what she wants us to think about them as well.

[01:32:34] [SPEAKER_04]: I think that given the dilemma that they're facing

[01:32:37] [SPEAKER_04]: to do it like that quietly walk away.

[01:32:40] [SPEAKER_04]: And maybe the hope is that everybody would.

[01:32:43] [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. And then the kid would just die

[01:32:45] [SPEAKER_04]: because they wouldn't even get a little bowl of.

[01:32:48] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I agree.

[01:32:50] [SPEAKER_06]: I agree.

[01:32:51] [SPEAKER_06]: Like I started feeling dirty when we started making the an allegory

[01:32:55] [SPEAKER_06]: too explicit, like mapping things on to the world.

[01:32:59] [SPEAKER_06]: But I think it's an interesting question.

[01:33:02] [SPEAKER_06]: What walking away

[01:33:05] [SPEAKER_06]: would be in whatever allegory you're describing, you know,

[01:33:11] [SPEAKER_06]: what that actually entails.

[01:33:13] [SPEAKER_06]: But I don't know the answer.

[01:33:13] [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe it's suicide.

[01:33:15] [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe it's just suicide.

[01:33:16] [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, back to that.

[01:33:18] [SPEAKER_06]: We're not having been born.

[01:33:20] [SPEAKER_06]: No, we're not.

[01:33:22] [SPEAKER_05]: All right, we should wrap this up.

[01:33:25] [SPEAKER_05]: But join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[01:33:28] [SPEAKER_04]: I'm gonna go do a line of trees.

[01:33:31] Duck waiting!

[01:33:51] [SPEAKER_10]: Good man.

[01:34:13] [SPEAKER_09]: Just a very bad wizard.