Spoilers below for Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” If you haven’t read it, it’s short—go and do so now!
TW: child abuse, suicide.
In her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” Ursula Le Guin describes an idyllic town (Omelas) built entirely on the misery of a single, innocent child. The inhabitants of Omelas lead a utopian life, but are burdened with the knowledge that this child suffers so that they can prosper. Although the story is brief—only five pages long—Le Guin pulls no punches in the emotional weight of her writing:
The child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good, " it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day.
The metaphor, and underlying social commentary, is perhaps obvious. Le Guin goes on to (implicitly) attack utilitarians:
[The spectators] would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
And those who are good at rationalizing away injustice:
…as time goes on [the people] begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no real doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.
And those who think that suffering “gives life meaning”:
[The people] know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.
The story concludes by describing the last, and rarest, response to Omelas:
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home.... They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
As I read the story, the conclusion is that few people have the moral courage to reject injustice entirely. Rejecting a broken system is scary, and risky; most people would rather lull themselves into complacency than try and build a better world. But implicit in this analysis is that the ones who walk away are making the right decision, and the ones who stay in Omelas are making the wrong one. In our own flawed world, when is this true?
The past decades have seen a great purge within American culture. The “Me Too” movement exposed the prevalence of sexual assualt within Hollywood, Boston Globe investigations revealed massive corruption within the Catholic Church, vast protests over the summer of 2020 decried systematic racism within American institutions, and in general institutions of all forms have come under attack for their failings. Every university has a racist legacy to reckon with; every business has an investor with unsavory political beliefs.
To some, this is the oft-derided “cancel culture”—finding fault with everyone, and viciously attacking people and organizations for even the slightest offenses. If “all have sinned and fall short,” then evil can never truly be eradicated, and all that this movement can do is destroy venerable institutions without constructing anything better. To others, however, making peace with evil is deplorable. Evil is the original pandemic; its capacity to spread is unparalleled, and its damage immeasurable. No compromise can be made with the enemy; no peace can be made with injustice.
Neither heuristic is sufficient; as usual, wisdom resides in the dialectic. For everyone who seeks to improve the world, then, the question presents itself anew: can one work within the system, flaws and all, or must change come from outside?
Albert Hirschman analyzed these issues in his 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which analyzes how consumers respond to declining quality. Hirschman draws a basic distinction between “exit,” the movement of individuals away from their current allegiance and towards a competitor, and “voice,” when individuals remain loyal and protest the change from within the system. An insightful point that Hirschman makes is that different fields of study view these options in different ways. Economists, who often think in terms of “perfect competition,” tend to assume exit is the most meaningful option, whereas political scientists prefer voice (i.e. engagement with the political process), thinking of exit as craven or traitorous.
These two options can be described in other terms. Exit is the mindset of the young reformer, the naïve, the idealistic, who believes the old system is beyond saving and a new world must be birthed. In contrast, voice is the perspective of small-c conservatism and Chesterton’s Fence, the wisdom of the agéd seer who has seen countless evils and knows how fragile civilization can be. This dichotomy does not separate Red from Blue; a love of exit unites Robespierre, Thunberg, and Trump, while voice embraces Henry Clay and Deng Xiaopeng alike.
When is exit better, and when is voice better? In certain circumstances exit can preclude voice by allowing only the most motivated and skilled members to escape a failing system. This removes the very elements of the populace necessary for change through voice, resulting in what Hirschman calls “an oppression of the weak by the incompetent and an exploitation of the poor by the lazy.” In this scenario, then, voice is superior. Exit also only functions when there are legitimate alternatives to the current system: in a monopoly, there can be no exit.
(Different Christian sects present an interesting case study here. In Catholicism, the Church is one united organization, and so exit is not an option: only voice is permitted. In contrast, Protestants are divided and subdivided into innumerable organizations, and so any individual Protestant can easily “vote with their feet” and join a church they agree with. The myriad failures of both sects suggests that neither solution is perfect.)
In contrast, voice presumes that change is possible—that the system is able to be reformed, and that doing so is more effective than simply starting over. For governments or Catholics, this may be true; for smaller organizations, it seems less true. An idealized capitalist market proceeds through relentless “creative destruction”: old firms become stagnant and stop innovating and are replaced by young startups, who last a few decades before themselves becoming stagnant. Creating the next Google, in most cases, is easier than fixing Google.
In other cases, the failures of the current system are so all-encompassing, so total, that it’s almost impossible to conceptualize the right reforms from within. Scott Alexander (of Astral Codex Ten, née Slate Star Codex) describes this phenomenon in his piece “Against Tulip Subsidies,” which critiques the discourse around rising tuition costs. Reforming how we pay college tuition, Alexander argues, “would subsidize the continuation of a useless tradition that has turned into a speculation bubble” and thus entrench the very thing we ought to uproot. Voice is better suited for marginal or incremental change; if you want to think big, start from scratch.
The choice between voice and exit thus hinges on several factors: how hard would it be to fix the current system, and how hard would it be to build a new and better system from the ground up?
As a high school student learning about synthetic organic chemistry, I came across a New York Times article entitled “Lethal Chemistry At Harvard.” The article told the story of Jason Altom, a brilliant Ph.D. candidate in organic chemistry who took his life after years of struggling on a challenging total synthesis problem. Altom’s story resonated with me so much that, as an undergraduate, I printed out his aspidophytine synthesis and pinned it above my desk as a sort of impromptu memento mori. (The synthesis, and Scheme 4 in particular, is transcendently beautiful.) He died just weeks after I was born; now I work in the same building in which he worked.
Altom’s story is by no means unique: according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, he was one of three graduate students in his lab to commit suicide within an 11-year period, with more suicides occuring in other labs, departments, and universities. Although some of the issues highlighted by his suicide have been addressed (I have an advising committee now in addition to my professor), the core reality remains the same: the success or failure of a given graduate student depends almost completely on their relationship with their advisor, making students willing to sacrifice almost anything to please their PI. Even those who “succeed” often emerge damaged by the process, aspirations lowered and ambition quenched.
Nor are graduate-student “deaths of despair” the only problem within academia. Much has been written about the failures of the scientific establishment: problems with fraud and p-hacking, parasitic university rent-seeking, problems with peer review, a general increase in bureaucracy and concomitant decline in research productivity, a failure to fund basic methods, and many more. It’s obvious that the ivory tower is not without blemish. The human cost, typified by Altom, is but the most visible apex of a whole mountain of problems.
Nevertheless, although Le Guin might not approve, academia can be defended through a utilitarian argument: the considerable benefits of academic research and education outweigh the human costs and other drawbacks. This argument, while compelling, presumes that the functions of graduate school are irreplaceable—that no better alternative can be created, that exit is impossible. I would also argue that, although academic research is good, it’s likely it could be improved and made better. Indeed, the very importance of research makes it uniquely susceptible to decline; the “ceiling” of scientific progress is so high that even considerable atrophy still leaves behind an important and productive institution. Hirschman again:
The wide latitude humans societies have for deterioration is the inevitable counterpart of man’s increasing productivity and control over his environment. Occasional decline as well as prolonged mediocrity—in relation to achievable performance levels—must be counted among the many penalties of progress.
If we accept that improvements to the “prolonged mediocrity” of the academic research system are necessary, the question becomes familiar: can the system be fixed from within (voice), or would it be easier to start from scratch (exit)?
Reforming any huge system is non-trivial, but academia presents special difficulties; as Hirschman describes, academia protects itself by selecting for those who can stomach its evils. The conscientious and compassionate flee, for the most part, to undergraduate institutions or industrial positions, enriching R1 faculty positions in those less encumbered by moral concerns. (This statement notwithstanding, I don’t mean to condemn faculty en masse; I have the utmost love and admiration for many faculty members I know who push back against the excesses of the system.) This selection effect deprives voice of its strongest assets, making reform that much harder.
Exit, too, is not without its challenges. The problems we face cannot be solved simply by moving to a different university or a different country; the interconnectedness of academia makes it monolithic. To contemplate exit from the academic system means a total revolution, erasing centuries of norms and paradigms—the relationship between professors and graduate students that Altom blamed for his death, which echoes the ancient master–apprentice relationship, dates back to Justus von Liebig in 19th-century Germany. Exit means new journals, new funding paradigms, new ways to recruit students and new ways to train them. Proper regime change leaves no stone unturned.
Perhaps it's the optimism of youth, or a misguided belief in the possibility of progress. But day by day I find myself believing less in voice and more in exit. The past few years have seen a flourishing of non-academic models for science. New ventures like Arcadia, the Arc Institute, New Science, the Astera Institute, and the more venerable Santa Fe Institute are demonstrating that science can be done outside a university—and the growing interest from industry and philanthropists for funding basic research indicates that the demand is there. But at the same time, these little endeavors all combined represent less than a percent of the current governmental–academic complex. Time will tell, too, if the flaws of our current system are fated to be recapitulated anew in any replacement.
Will it be possible to build a robust and practical scientific ecosystem in parallel to the current system, gradually moving more and more pieces into position until at last Uqbar becomes reality? I don’t know—but I’m excited to find out.
Thanks to Eugene Kwan, Ari Wagen, and Taylor Wagen for reading a draft of this piece.