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

Very Bad Wizards

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The Place That They Go Toward Is a Place Even Less Imaginable to Most of Us

Le Guin spends a lot of time trying to get us to imagine she knows we're going to have this imaginative resistance to a utopia where everybody's happy but also deep and smart. Now she's saying the place that they're going toward will be even harder for you to imagine so it's a perfect ambiguity She says I cannot describe it at all she's been so good at describing omalass right maybe it is a much better place maybe it's so terrible that she can't describe it who knows do they know where they're going what I was just suggesting is that this conveys their ignorance as well.

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