Donald Trump, Accidental Moralist

Shopping in Omelas

Photo by Antoine GIRET on Unsplash

There is only one reason we import so much stuff: We are better behaved than most of the people we import from. By “better behaved,” I mean that the trading partners with whom we run the largest trade deficits treat their workers less well and pollute their environments more severely than we allow here. Their bad behavior accounts for our cheap stuff.

Ursula K. LeGuin distilled this sort of exploitation in her story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Omelas is a lovely and prosperous place, but the happiness of its inhabitants depends, for reasons not given, on the misery of one misbegotten soul:

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl.It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is…