Collective numbing is a tool of domination
Content warning: discussion of child abuse
A few years ago, a friend grew somewhat exasperated with my ramblings about the apocalypse. So as a loving gesture, they sent me a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (cw: child abuse, ableist language).
Reading it felt like a blurry picture coming into focus.
Le Guin starts out by setting the scene of a summer festival in the fairy tale city of Omelas, which is blessed with a kind of sophisticated, respectable, guilt-free abundance and a community surrounded by art, beauty, harmony, joy and happiness. (I finally watched the second Wicked movie recently, and this strongly echoes descriptions of Emerald City in the land of Oz.)
If it feels too good to be true, it’s because it is.
Just like Glinda sings in her new solo piece in Wicked for Good, Girl in The Bubble, hers is “a beautiful life built on lies”. What we learn from the narrator in Le Guin’s story is that there is in fact a secret at the heart of Omelas: a child locked away in a cellar, imprisoned, neglected and repeatedly abused.
“They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas“, we are told. “They all know that it has to be there.”
Not many truly understand why, but they everyone gets told the terms when they are between 8-12 years old: “there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child” or else all the goodness of Omelas would crumble.
Most of the teenagers, who get taken to the cellar to see the child as a kind of perverted, traumatising right of passage, have a human reaction to it: pain, grief, anger, disbelief. Being unable to speak about the experience with anyone (as per the “strict and absolute” terms), most start to rationalise what they have witnessed so as to be able to live with their helplessness.
“Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it”, the narrator tells us.
Some, I would imagine, also turn away completely and try to forget the unforgettable, as Glinda admits in Wicked: “All that’s required to live in a dream is endlessly closing your eyes.”
Photo of reed in a grey, frozen lake with snow lining the shore
This, it seems, is exactly what we have been doing collectively for decades when it comes to the child abuse perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein and his international crime partners in politics, diplomacy, tech, finance, art, academia and royalty.
Courageous survivors and brave journalists had been telling us about the tens of thousands of children and young women being abused in cellars (or islands and penthouses) long before any of the filed were released or Epstein was imprisoned.
In response, eyes were shut, crimes covered up and further enabled, and those who spoke out were sent death threats instead of thanks and support.
The latest batch of some 3 million files, released earlier in February, published the names of the survivors and redacted the ones of the perpetrators and their assistants. This, alongside the volume and unstructured format, was intentional.
The deluge of material is designed to overwhelm and desensitise us to the unspeakable crimes that are integral to the functioning of our current world order.
It’s supposed to be too much and too shocking to take in, to “acclimatize people to horror [and] overwhelm [them] with fear”, as Sarah Kendzior puts it.
We are much easier to control when we are numb, apathetic or cynical.
What they have done is a kind of engineered helplessness, similar to what the teenagers in Omelas experience when they realise what their city is built on, that their happiness is dependent on the child’s suffering, and there is seemingly nothing they can do about it.
The realisation that our wealth and comfort is predicated on the domination and dispossession of others is hugely significant, and it has the potential to change everything.
In Omelas, the truth is that “theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. [The people] know that they, like the child, are not free.”
The people of Omelas realise that “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.”
This is true of our world, too. As Prentis Hemphill puts it:
“We talk about [how] capitalism has to have poverty embedded in it. [Similarly,] patriarchy has to have this kind of abuse. It doesn’t work without it, it doesn’t make sense without this kind of shame or pain [and the belief in] the inherent badness of femme people, women, queer people and children.”
The Epstein files reveal so clearly that this kind of abuse is “not a bug, but a feature” of the system, in Prentis’ words.
We have to let that sink in. And to allow that knowledge to change us in a really profound way.
Because if we don’t, if we allow ourselves to be overrun, overwhelmed and desensitised, we comply with a system that is predicated on the dehumanisation of ourselves and others.
Let me be clear - I completely understand why people numb out. Staying connected to our feelings when we are confronted with such gross violations of humanity, that many of us have experienced ourselves, is incredibly difficult. In such a context, dissociation may have become a vital survival strategy.
At the same time, it is precisely the ability to stay in our bodies and not evacuate when we are witnessing things that shake us to our core, that gives us the power to change the course of our collective future.
Because if we can’t feel and direct our rage, our grief, our disgust and our heartbreak, we are likely to turn it against ourselves or each other. The people who are trying to divide us will rub their hands at this, because fighting over each other distracts us from their crimes.
This is one of the places where we do have agency. We can refuse to normalise the depraved acts of our so-called elite.
It starts inside of us, by taking very seriously the human response we have to what we are learning about our world.
In Omelas as well as Oz, the people whose consciousness does not allow them to participate in a society based on enslavement and abuse walk away. I have mixed feelings about this choice of ending and what it says about the possibility of a different future.
In Le Guin’s story, we see people “walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. […] The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness”, the narrator tells us.
“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.”
I hope the people leaving Omelas are meeting up at some secret spot in the woods and hatching a plan to collectively change the premise of their world, rather than being alone in exile, never to return.
I also believe there are many of us who do know where we are going, or at least have a broad sense of direction, away from where we are now.
If we listen deeply to our hearts and bodies and follow the moral codes in our spirit, we can find the coordinates for a world that respects all of us and get out of this hellscape we have built.
One first move is to feel what we are feeling, in whatever way we can, and to do so with others for mutual support.
Do not let them take away your capacity for profound heartbreak, which is the same as your capacity for incredible joy and radical imagination.
This is so important.
“This is about all of us. It’s about power, it’s about the structure of things, it’s about the logic that underpins how we’ve built society. So we’ve got to keep talking about it.”
May we refuse to adjust to the unadjustable and feel the truth of this moment, together.