Mariella Gattini

The more I think of Ursula K. Le Guin and the topic of her short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, a tale about how the happiness of the few finds its roots in the mistreatment of others, the more I think of the infinite cough of the homeless girl, so that the Lamborghini driver can display his illusion of power in a speed and noise that not even the car’s engine can stand.

I think of how Paul Getty’s refusal to pay a ransom for his grandson’s kidnapping back in the 70’s—thinking it was a trick to steal his money concocted by his own family—fueled his own sense of power. Even though he was at the end of his own rope, and died alone, drowning in his own soil. His grandson survived, but remained traumatized the rest of his life.

Or, I think about how people in government nurture their own sense of supremacy by not doing anything about education, since they don’t have their children in public schools, where the majority of students are people of color, and most people in power are not.

I think about how a garbage human being gets his fifteen minutes of fame by killing as many people as he can, to later be glorified by the same media that condemns him and allows politicians to display their indignation for their own political gain on one side, and on the other, their senseless deflection.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s story depicts a perfect world where everyone and everything functions like a clockwork and there are no dark moments. This balance is due to the relentless mistreatment of one little boy, who lives in a dark, uninhabitable place, where he suffers all kinds of humiliations in complete misery. It’s what William James called “lonely torture”.

I wonder, how many of us would save the little boy? How many of us would continue to live our lives, like nothing is happening, knowing this, and as if the balance of this perfect society depended on it?

Brené Brown, and her theory of shame, would say that this is about the shame-based fear of being ordinary, the fear of not being considered good enough. She says that today people think that they only are as good as the number of “likes” they have on Facebook or Instagram.

But, if we stop for a moment to think why Facebook was created, we have to focus on Zuckerberg and his need for revenge when a girl rejected him. He created an engine that allowed him, and his kind, to disparage girls. And look at what happened in 2016, Hillary was disparaged to oblivion, with the help of Facebook. It worked. It managed to get to the highest levels of political power. Hillary was victimized not only to allow creeps to come to the surface; she was humiliated to, among other things, fulfill Zuckerberg’s own sense of omnipotence.

On the other hand, if we think about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak we would see that Jobs used Wozniak, who was working for Hewlett-Packard at the time, to harness Wozniak’s concept of Open Source software. This would be an environment for software creation that all software engineers would have access to, freely, in order for them to create new concepts that would belong back to that Open Source. In that way, everyone could benefit from it. Jobs, instead, saw it as a way for him alone to benefit, for his own convenience, to later create his own multimillion-dollar empire. Jobs was an ambitious salesman, who told the story of the future, and Wozniak, and engineers like him, made it happen.

If we look at the difference between Edison and Tesla, we would find the same dichotomy. Tesla wanted to develop ways to harness electricity from nature and then distribute that electricity and energy to everyone for free. While Edison did the opposite. He was not the first one to be working with the newly discovered concept of electricity, but he had J.P. Morgan as his investor breathing down his neck, and Edison wouldn’t let him down. So he took as much money as he could from his work. Tesla, on the other hand, gained a big deal of recognition and was considered a genius, but died penniless, because at the end he couldn’t find investors for what they considered his utopia.

Ursula K. Le Guin was a genius too, and still is in her stories. She was one of the few women writers of science fiction, a field dominated by men. She added to the genre an empathy that only women can really appreciate. Although, she, herself, recognized that the majority of her main characters are male, she adds an analysis and reflection that only a woman can display. Because women find identity in their relationships with others, and envision a humane and empathic society.

In her story, the ones who walk away are the ones who don’t want to live in a society based on the suffering of the little boy. They are the decent ones.

Look at the people who are supposed to be extremely successful, and what a disgrace they really are as human beings. Instead of wasting precious time with them in your mind, pay close attention to the Wozniaks and the Teslas of this world, and to all those software engineers that have been the real creators of the wonderful technology we can count on today, meant to foster creativity and human development. They did it, receiving only crumbs from the tech companies they worked for.

In the face of tragedies and suffering, don’t walk away from your own humanity. Achieving human decency in life is the real success story. Nobody really cares about the amount of money you can accumulate in your lifetime. We think: You got money? Good for you, I couldn’t care less. Whereas when faced with a decent human being, we know we are in the presence of greatness; we are before someone to emulate. And if you do, sooner or later you will be recognized for the goodness in you, that’s a promise I can keep. In the meantime, you can enjoy your life to the fullest, because you truly deserve it.