Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

We're back with a foundational text from the legendary Ursula K. Le Guin.  This is one of the most important short stories in the history of scifi, and we talk utopia, anarchism, and waking up to the suffering our world is built on. We were firing on all cylinders for this one.Follow the show @SwordsNSocPodEmail us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre fiction. As always, I'm Darius, and I'm joined today by my co-host, Ketho. How's it going, Ketho? Pretty good. Pretty good. Today, we are doing, I think, the first half of what I'm calling a two-part series that is sort of the foundations of what this podcast is all about. This is part one. This is the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Variations on a theme by William James. Yes. Full title. We go full titles here. Part two of this little sort of foundational series is going to be next week where we're going to talk about on fairy stories by J.R.R. Tolkien. We're finally going to talk about the guy I referenced in every episode and the specific essay that I referenced on Twitter,

like twice a week. But today we're talking more Ursula Le Guin because we are talking the ones who walk away from Amalas. For us as like, as a podcasters, a pretty foundational essay, and also for a lot of anarchists, pretty foundational work of political philosophy as well, on top of being a good work of short fiction. So I think with this, I think we can, we can change it up a little bit here. And Q, tell me, do you remember when you first read this? And did it change anything for you when you read it?

For me, I think I was already kind of well down the road when I picked it up. I actually read The Dispossessed super early before I really read anything else by Le Guin. So eventually finding my way to The Ones Who Walk Away, it makes – to me it just seemed like a natural progression. It almost seems like one feeds into the other in a way. I think they are the two like most on their face political of all of like all of her popular work well yeah the most the most bluntly radical in what they're in in terms of like what political philosophy they fall into yeah i think obviously we talked about it in earth sea like and it's like our whole podcast like her philosophy is in all of her work but the ones who walk away in the dispossessed are just like a.

Bam, here it is. This is this is what I'm about. The ones who walk away has been packaged in anarchist and just honestly, in general, leftist design zines. Sorry, zines before I see the Z. I mean, yes, I think vine and then i think whatever um but it's been published and released in zines like all the time and of course lewin wouldn't care about the copyright no i'm pretty sure she would be happy to see this work being published in radical zines well this is i'm pretty sure it's kind of her whole this isn't the only one of her stories that's been published in radical zine she wrote one specifically

for radical zines at one point which was about the day which was about odo from the dispossessed it was like like i forget the name of it it was like the day before the revolution or something because the glen was based as hell and she's like this is one for the homies and then you know she wrote the intro for for uh bookchin's the next revolution the best way i've kind of heard this get described is a political rorschach painting um in that you can really apply this to to almost any leftist discipline for the most part any radical rejection of the status quo on the basis of human suffering really which is at its core like what even if again we can argue about the efficacy of the term but what at the bare minimum most leftists you know assume to be their their position again it just felt like that natural like the two just fit in really well

together and then um you know it it's it's one of those stories where you read it and you just kind of sit there in silence for a while thinking about it i actually don't remember when specifically i read it because i think i said in our first episodes about Wizard of Earthsea that the Earthsea cycle was what I read from Le Guin first. Like I got into her work through the fantasy side and I didn't read the sci-fi until way later because I was much more of a fantasy nerd than I was a sci-fi nerd. So like I probably actually didn't read the ones who walk away until, I don't know, I was in college at some point, which is interesting because college is also when I was like the least radical, believe it or not. I think I've talked about this on Twitter before, but college is when I was actually at my least radical because when I had a bunch of professors

who were like, you know, convincing me that you could make the world better through government. This is what I make, you know, out myself is the most embarrassing I could have been in the fact that like I spent most of college building towards getting an internship at the United Nations and being just an absolute lanyard dork. It was like my highest goal in college was to go be like a un lanyard dork i embarrassingly considered being an econ major for about two semesters let's not get into what we majored in yeah so i don't get excised from all of this twitter you're good again i said that i considered yeah i did that um i talk about my majors anarchist twitter will disown me uh i don't use them so there's that um but so i think i just read this at some point in college and it was just like yeah this makes sense to me this this is this is this is what's logical and then it was a little

bit later like out of college when i started getting more radicalized again that i was like oh duh no wonder i like this and also why i didn't think about it that much because it didn't really fit with like what i thought i was trying to do at the time like this isn't i'm going to be honest this isn't really like sock dem stuff like you're not looking at this and being like you know what we need radical government action to fix this problem you know we need more taxes no we need the united nations um so like i read it at some point in college and like i liked it but it didn't really hit and then like a few years later you know afterwards i was getting i was a bit more radical again um yeah this story does not advocate for tax reform. It took a teenage anarchist and made him sort of a sock dem. And then he graduated and was like, oh, never mind. I was right the first time.

So The One to Walk Away from Omelas is a short for anyone who doesn't know. And honestly, if you're listening to us and this episode, you stopped and you haven't read it. Stop the episode. Go read it. It's like seven pages long. Not even. In the book I've got, it's four pages. Okay.

But you can literally just Google it and you can find a PDF for free and you can read it. It takes no time and it's worth every second you put into reading it. So unlike some of the other books, if you haven't read this, pause now. It's also on the Anarchist Library if you don't want to download anything. That too. Go read it. Come back. Okay, you're back. Okay. The One to Walk Away is a story,

a short story in which Le Guin begins by describing Omelas. Omelas. Which is just, she says Omelas. It's just Salem, Oregon, Salem O backwards. Salem O backwards. Cool. So it's Omelas. It's, she begins by describing

utopia more or less a city in which everything is fucking great for all sorts of reasons and the first i don't know two-thirds of this essay are essentially her describing what is great about Omelas, why it's great. And like sort of how it works because the conceit here is that it's so good that we in our world can't, can't really properly conceive of how good it is. And from a thematic perspective, we can take this as essentially at face value, I think, that this is Le Guin by and large sort of describing, you know, a utopic future the way she might construct it or the way she assumes that a lot of us would want to construct it.

And by a lot of us, she means her readers who she assumes kind of enjoy the same thing she does yeah there's a yeah she keeps it pretty intentionally vague where she doesn't like lay out a lot of specific concrete details about anything um she well she's intentionally leaving space for you to picture it the way you want to picture it um which even like comes up with like a fake i don't remember if it's a drug yeah fake drug a fake drug called drews yeah called drews um drug where just you know and it doesn't even have any negative side effects you know what i mean this is like um everything about this is perfection. And she kind of both assumes that you think, wow, that's really good. And also think this is really unbelievable.

And that's, you know. Yeah. It simultaneously has to be both things. It has to be like almost incomprehensibly good. So like it has to be perfect, but also you have to be like, she's expecting you throughout the essay to say, what's the catch. And there's even some funny stuff in here. Yeah. So I think we can,

we can start a little bit before an actual quote here. Like she, she leaves that space around the description for you to picture it yourself. But then, you know, using her humor, she sort of like gives suggestions like, ah, there's probably horses because horses are cool. Maybe there's a field where people play music because music is cool. This is my personal favorite here.

But even granted trains, I fear that Omelos so far strikes some of you as goody goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, blah. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help don't hesitate uh but i do think so that's fun right after that though we get a bit of i think one of the bits where we actually go into sort of her like political theory here is the next couple lines after that because she says if you want to have an orgy cool let's have an orgy but no priests and priestesses offering themselves at a temple okay we can have a temple but an empty one yeah no priests or priestesses which she does that throughout this first half

here she like describes something great and then like clarify the way that she thinks it should be great. Or so she's like, oh, you want an orgy? Have an orgy. It can be a religion where everybody has orgies, but no priest or priestesses though, because those are bad. You can have a temple, but there can't be anybody running the temple. Unless you'll say, oh, and then later on she says, oh, we have to have like courage and victory.

We need courage and victory, but courage and victory without soldiers because soldiers are bad because well not soldiers are bad but the idea of needing a military to conquer other people is bad and no good utopia like omelas would have conquering soldiers it's a sense of victory for the achievement of the wonderful society they've created. Yeah. This, when you look into it, it's definitely utopia from her perspective. And it's difficult to conceive of this when you actually look at it.

This is certainly not a more conservative view of what utopia would be. No, this is very clearly an anarchic utopia. Yeah, left of center at the very least. Well, I mean, she specifically says there are few laws. Yes. Because they don't need them. There's no military.

There's no police. They don't have any of that because they don't need it. It's just unnecessary. This sticks out, I think, in the modern day because there are even when we're being generous, anti-capitalist, left of center political ideologies. She, specifically in like the things she's describing, do come across, obviously left of center, but like more particularly her flavor of like anarchist. Yes. Because there is no government in Omelas. There's no police, there's no military, there's no laws. These are all more anarchist things than they are state communist or, you know, Marxist Leninist or what have you. And I think in the modern day, in the milieu in which we live,

the word utopian is often thrown around as a negative. Someone calling you a utopian is meant to be derogatory. It's something that, you know, realistic versions of socialism or communism use as a derogatory phrase for certain kinds of people. And I think Le Guin's personal philosophy seen here in her describing Omelas stands in contrast to that like you should i would think that the leguin would say that you should be utopian because what otherwise what else are you working for like if you're not working for a utopia that you can imagine so like i think part of this exercise in writing this is imagining utopia because i think i think leguin would argue that's the thing we need to do well yeah and she certainly would agree with that just because this was written

two years before the dispossessed so she went from writing this which doesn't have a very concrete utopia to having a obviously it's ambiguous the the one in the dispossessed it's certainly not truly utopic but exploring what utop utopia is what it means it's something that she would go on to do again and again and even with always coming home again she would explore this idea of utopianism well i think also not not prescribing the details i think is sort of foundational to a more anarchist view of what utopia is because as an anarchist you're not you're not telling people what to do you're not supposed to be prescriptive you can't say you know utopia must be this because it must be whatever the people in it decided it's oh how post-modern of you i I know. Like, Utopia is, like, the setup of this society is whatever the people in it decide the setup of it should be.

And so here in Omelas, she's describing a city that is vague because she wants you to picture it yourself. Yeah. Picture in your mind whatever a perfect Utopia is to you. Envision that as best you can. Because that's how an anarchist sort of should envision utopia, is the one in which each person can have a world that they desire. You know, they can live in the way that they feel most fulfilled.

So it inherently cannot be a prescriptive uh like vision of utopia but she is very clearly telling you that this is utopia and that you should you should also be a little bit cautious of the fact that utopia does currently exist like you should picture it also you're probably thinking this is weird. Yeah. You're like, there's got to be a catch here, right? That you're correct. You're correct. But also, she does try to...

This essay sort of has two parts, where the one part is her describing Utopia and getting you to imagine it, because we should have an imagination of what it is. getting you to imagine it because we should have an imagination of what it is. The second part, obviously, is the twist where you learn that the utopia she's describing isn't. And we'll get to that. But even in the first part, she talks about the fact that I'm describing utopia, and a lot of you probably think this is weird or lame that I'm describing utopia and this is where we get to one of my favorite quotes because i use it a lot in discussions around a very like a pet peeve subject of mine on twitter which is irony poisoning for lack of a better word um this idea that like you can't genuinely enjoy things that you can only like things ironically, or that you have to like, like things sarcastically that, you know, you should

spend your time shitting on people for liking certain things. I, that is like one of my biggest nemesis in, in like a leftist movement context is I agree with this quote from Le Guin where I think irony is destructive to any sort of positive movement. We're never going to build a better society out of attitudes based on ironic detachment or sarcastic approval, right. Or like breaking down what, you know, just shitting on what other people like. It's a big problem I have with sort of the culture that's developed on Twitter is that everything is like irony and I really don't like it. I think people should be more genuine.

I think Le Guin kind of addresses this here when she's describing utopia, you know, she's, Oh, they don't use swords. They don't have slaves. I don't know the rules or laws, but they're few. There's no monarchy or slavery. They get on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, secret police, or the bomb. I love how she leaves out advertisement there, by the way. Yes.

That's the most anti-capitalist thing in this section. Leave out no advertisement. No fucking advertising. you're an advocate if you work in advertising go home and kill yourself who was that oh that was uh i don't remember which comedian that was yeah we're quoting someone it's everybody knows uh just a running bit if you you're in marketing. If you're in marketing, go home. Kill yourself.

Kill yourself. No, no, no. I'm joking. I'm joking. I'm joking. But seriously, kill yourself. Not about that. You should do that.

Oh, he's going for the anti-marketing dollar. That's a good dollar. No. a good dollar. No. So Le Guin here, getting to my point, is that she addresses the fact that you're not going to believe that this society can exist. And she says, the trouble is that we have a bad habit encouraged by pedants and sophisticates of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist, a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick them, join them. If it hurts, repeat it. So that to me gets to the heart of how

I feel about the way discourse around our politics happens today is that we are absolutely focused on pain and evil and like the degrading of things. And I wouldn't even leave it at that. Like she keeps going and keeps like, now I'm just looking at it myself even more like directly where she's like to praise despair is to contend the light to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else um we can no longer describe a happy man nor make any celebration of joy where yeah i mean it's it is this like irony poisoned is one way to see. Another way to see it is almost like this intellectual love of media that, that like shows real gritty, like awful suffering as like the,

the main driver of the story. I think that's kind of also what she's getting at with that. Yeah. It's a rejection of, it's a rejection of the idea that all things interesting are painful things or destructive things or evil things. Yeah, that's kind of what she's pointing out with the treason of the artist line, a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain, where it's like artists for a very long time have put pain and suffering on a pedestal of enjoyment when in reality most evil is boring and and pain is just something that people experience on a daily basis with no no narrative fulfillment there's there's no like fulfilling martyrdom in it. It just sucks.

It just sucks. I do think also that there's also, I think, a little bit of a rejection of nihilism. I would suppose like to praise, disparage, to condemn, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything

else. I think she would I think she also there is a little bit disparage to condemn like to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else i i i think she would i i think she also there is a little bit not like directly countering it but i think that sort of stands in opposition to your sort of more nihilistic i would i would say violent forms of of of of revolution and and that and that like people can you can take that i don't think the gwyn would be a big fan of like i don't know desert yeah well maybe it's like it is the blessed is the flame i don't know yeah it's about to say um i think that you could you could probably take it that way um there's a certain rejection

of a sort of naive nihilism i would say a sort of inactive nihilism the sort of like well we can't do anything so let's just embrace the suffering yeah that's one thing there's there's obviously that word has an awful lot of contention around it because it means so many different things, so many different people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously, I'm going to phrase it in a way that made somebody mad, but there's literally no way to talk about these sorts of political things without making somebody mad. So get off it. I don't care. Because, I mean, there's obviously there can be value in, you know, admitting that it's, you know, of not necessarily believing that it's possible but fighting anyways um which i mean actually describes me most of the time honestly most the time i don't think we can win but i think you should do it anyway but i think you should do it anyway which is something

more the point of like blessed is the flame where it's more like true resisting in this instance because it's the right thing to do as opposed to something that is actually successful or possible um which um oh boy when we eventually get to it there's a i have a whole spiel prepared because that is actually one of the major themes of lord of the rings heavily borrowed from germanic mythology well yeah when you think about it just even from a distance it's like well frodo should not have been capable of doing this well one of the heavily the themes that tolkien takes heavily from germanic mythology is this idea it's a uh discred displayed most accurately in um for us anyway in Beowulf in the idea that

your job is to go out and fight the monsters and inevitably you will lose at some point. You're going to. But you have to do it anyway because you should. Now he's coming at it from a slightly different perspective, but it has

something that has colored my political views going. And what draws me towards some of these specific anarchist tendencies is the fact like, do I, I, do I think we can go like overthrow the American government? No, obviously not. I don't think we can't do that, but we should be like resisting anyway. And so I think that's a more nuanced, a deep interpretation of that sort of thing. I think Le Guin here is speaking out against just the like, everything sucks and we should enjoy it, that it sucks. Because that's not a helpful way to build.

Yeah, very much the sort of impression. This is actually some of the more contentious things i've i've encountered with friends of mine from before i was an anarchist and i'm still friends with um this seems to be honestly the most common thing i run into when it comes to like arguing radical leftist ideas to people who don't agree it's like you can admit make a lot of times they can admit the fact that the system is horrifically flawed and that there's that something needs to be goddamn done but they usually in my experience essentially just kind of say well that's the like you can't like what are you going

to do you can't change it like any of the things you try and do to change are just going to end up the xyz happening so we might as well just sit down and learn to how to fit in with it and i'm like no like what that that just makes you complicit with the problem it's like if you and everyone else that thought like you just didn't think like you which i know is the literal definition of idealism but um is so obviously that's not like i'm not sitting there going, please change your mind. That's how we win this or something. This is when we – this is when you quote Graeber and I think I'm pretty sure it was Graeber that was like – or I mean Le Guin also has said similar things about the fact that things seem immovable. Le Guin's quote I think is that capitalism seems –

Yeah, its power seems inescapable. Inescapable, but so did the divine right of kings. And was it Graeber? Was it Graeber quoting someone that was like, one of the greatest secrets is that society is something we make and we can just as easily unmake? Yeah, or reaching once again to another,

the whole, I think it was Bookchin, the belief that anything that is necessarily must be is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking. It's almost like there's a through line here between all these people. Well, to be perfectly honest, that's that's a major issue that a lot of more radical leftists have with more center left individuals being like, you can't just find a way to fit into the system these problems will always persist within the system we have to find a way to get rid of it and if you're not willing to get rid of it like you're just complicit in the suffering that is caused by the system so it's like of course there's also the retrograde argument in the in the opposing where it's like sometimes these revolutions or these mass actions lead to more suffering.

Yeah. But then there's a whole argument about whether that means it's not worth attempting. That actually sort of takes us back. That takes us back to last episode where you're standing at the edge of the world. And the question is, do you jump or not?

Because jumping could kill you, but it could also land you home again so like that takes us back to last episode and that's like a whole other discussion yeah it does it does circle us back perfectly here too though to the text to um the ones who walk away because being complicit in the system is the back third of this essay yes we spent the whole first part talking about what utopia is what it could be how you can describe it what works for you what kind of drugs there are if there's orgies or not there's definitely there's no ads though and so like you have this whole bit where you're talking about it and she gets partway through and she says well after i've

described all of this do you believe it's possible like do you accept that this can be and the idea being that the the reader then answers no of course i don't believe she even says it she even just says no with a question mark yeah no like so for she's answering for you you don't believe in this utopia obviously because it seems unreal well let's make it real. What about now? And then she gets to, you know, for lack of a better word, the twist of the story is the one abused and beaten and like neglected child

sitting in a broom closet in the basement somewhere who never gets sunlight or ever a kind word or word spoken to it at all really or any food outside of gruel that suffers this the suffering child she even goes out of her way to explain that the child has memories of not being like this so that it could be even worse. Yes. The child specifically remembers a mother and the son and the son. And it's key that it, this child does remember what it used to be like before it was in the basement.

Because that's, yeah, like you said, that's a key to it. Suffering is the fact that it knows it was not always this way, but it is now just says it, yeah, the quote is here. The people at the door never say anything, but the child who has not always lived in the tool room

can remember sunlight and its mother's voice. Sometimes speaks, I will be good. It says, please let me out. I will be good. But they never answer. The child used to scream at night and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a whining and speaks less often and then she of course describes a child that's basically anything you picture you've seen a picture of like a kid who's been through like a famine you know like

a swollen belly and the muscles eaten away and it's very terrible the key here being that every single citizen of omelas knows about this kid all of them they're all required at some point they're required to know some they said usually between like 8 and 12 when they think the kids are ready they're brought down to this tool closet and shown the child and because it's required you need to know about it but then you just have to like get on with your life. The idea being that you can only truly appreciate the joy that your life has because you're aware of the suffering of the child. Like your joy would not be as joyous without knowing that the child suffered. Your love would not be as deep without knowing the lack of love the child has.

not be as deep without knowing the lack of love the child has and very like the additional caveat here of course being that nothing kind can ever be done to or for the child under any circumstances not even a kind word said in its direction or else and it explains here that she doesn't know how and you as someone who would be led down there, wouldn't know how. But you know that if anything kind happens to this child, if the child stops suffering for even a second, you lose the utopia you had before. You lose all of utopia. Everything is gone. This is interesting before we get to the societal impact of it. It's interesting before we get to the societal impact of it. Interesting.

It just sort of occurred to me, this idea that you also hear this about your own personal life. I think this sort of references what she was talking about at the beginning part. You can't really be happy as a person unless you've also suffered. You can't really know love unless you've experienced loss. You can't really have love unless you've experienced loss you can't really have joy unless you've experienced pain like people say that just generally about like you know you as an individual in your life right like you can't really know the highs like the highs unless you've experienced the lows well this is just that except society-wide society as a whole only experiences such high highs because this one child experiences the lowest of lows at all times and this is not an idea that le Guin is on like that is unusual for le Guin to touch the dispossessed touches on it as well

um this i even even le Guin almost kind of says that that statement is true, where there is a certain amount of suffering, not necessarily in a like, ooh, society is the thing making you suffer sense. But just a certain amount of suffering that makes life meaningful is something that she's explored in her novels before and since. explored in her novels before and since so she's not even necessarily saying that it's not true in this story um because it's something that she stated in the past is at least to an extent yeah she's not she's yeah she doesn't she's not disputing the idea this idea that they only have these highs because the child experiences these lows. And so everyone has to go and see the child at some point, everybody. And just point out though, what I think true humanity is that often when the children go and see the child for the first time, it's massively upsetting to them. They go home in tears or in a tearless rage.

When they have seen the child and face this terrible paradox, they may brood over it for weeks or years. So that's true and I think is a good observation about humans, people. You would see this child and you would be upset. That's fair. But then the next sentence comes. But as time goes on, they begin to realize that even if the child would be released, it wouldn't do much good of its freedom. A little vague pleasure of warmth or food, no doubt, but a little more.

It's too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It's been afraid too long. It's too uncouth. That's where you get to people individually and society as a whole rationalizing the suffering of others. Because the way, she explains right here, the way people get on with their lives is the idea that even though they want to give this child help they tell themselves the child has suffered for so long that it wouldn't appreciate good things if it had them and because because it's incapable and that is pretty brilliant on her part because that is

pretty much pure slave owner logic you know like that's the justification that slave owners had for maintaining slavery was like, oh, they wouldn't understand. They don't know, you know, they could never lead a life out there. We're giving them food and yada yada. It is still the justification for a lot of racism today. It's really honestly the justification for most, if not all suffering put on humans by other humans throughout all of human history. British colonialism was all of this. Oh, yeah. White man's burden shit.

It's white man's burden shit. Well, these people that we're taking over aren't possibly smart enough to govern themselves. Or to reach these heights of technology. enough to govern themselves or to reach these heights of technology if they're not advanced enough to appreciate or take part in our advanced british society that's very advanced yeah um so like this justification has been has been pervasive in racism, colonialism, since the dawn of capitalism, more or less. Obviously, it's always existed, I think, to some degree in humans, but it's been exacerbated by capitalism in the modern era

and colonialism and all that. I've been reading a lot of the no against adult supremacy adult supremacy zines recently oh watch out you're gonna get oh we're gonna get in we're gonna get in our menchies now this is some some hot water um but hot water talking about it's the same thing it's the same thing with with adults and children and that's where it all starts too so it's like you start by the infantilization of children which is where infantilization comes from and then you then use that to infantilize other people with the same logic that is used on children where it's like oh the children aren't capable of defending themselves they aren't capable of thinking this out properly they they have to be well guided obviously the word guided is probably correct but but um they

have to be forced or they have to be you know know, have to have to be coerced, coerced into doing the things correctly, into doing the things that we know is better for them. Yeah. And then that ideology is then taken or that viewpoint is then taken and kind of pushed on other people like patriarchal domination of women is the same way. other people like patriarchal domination of women it's the same way uh yeah racist domination of you know non-white people they don't aren't advanced enough and you know and then you get to the point in advanced capitalism now where we still say like well we can't give people these better things they wouldn't appreciate them even if we did. It is absolutely also like – I mean obviously I think probably the most prominent example, at least in America, that's in the forefront of most people's minds that most people just kind of admit to when you ask them about it being the infantilization of the poor by the rich. It's the same it reminds me it reminds me of that famous well really famous to like someone like me because i remember going around a whole lot and people making fun of it was when like years and years ago fox news ran like a segment about essentially being like why

the poor really aren't that poor and one of the things was like 98 percent of poor people own a refrigerator and you're like what the fuck man that's this that's this logic that we the like the poors haven't had the stuff and they don't deserve it because they wouldn't appreciate it if we gave it to them because i mean I mean, they're just not as hard of a worker as the rest of us. Or it's even like poor people can't. This also gets into the way libs view things. Like, oh, well, poor people can't really appreciate art. You know, this is when you get like, this is when you get the stuff where you get like blue check libs, like making fun of backwards rednecks that you see a lot.

You know, where they're like, well, your state voted Republican. I'm fuck you. You don't get any aid money. Yeah. That's the same shit. Why don't we just take away your aid money? You voted for X,

Y, Z. And it's like, well, it's like, you know, they're essentially saying that like, oh,

well, poor people in Kentucky don't deserve or can't appreciate. Well, this is most noticeable in like the covid situation you know the most like the covid situation where it's like oh you didn't get the vaccine and you you know voted red i guess you deserve to die yeah it's it is it's the systematic like justification to yourself that suffering does exist in society but that it's fine actually i also want to be very clear on my previous statement i am exorbitantly pro-vaccine

yeah we're very pro-vaccine but there's obviously like deserves to die for not being pro-vaccine doesn't mean that people who haven't been vaccinated deserve to die because we live in a society that's full of misinformation yeah we live in the greatest system of you know control in human history you can expand this even greater just capitalism as a system that we as people that live within capitalism and most of the people within it especially in the modern era with the internet everyone any any person you talk to on the street knows what a sweatshop is. Everybody knows there's a sweatshop in Honduras that makes our clothes. Everyone knows there's

an iPhone factory in China that has like suicide nets so the workers don't kill themselves when they're making iPhones. Or that there's like Nike makes shoes in Vietnam or Bangladesh is where they make all the clothes for H&M for fast fashion, right? Anyone on the street is aware of these things. They're all aware generally of the suffering that occurs due to the system we live in. But most people are the people that Le Guin is talking about in Omelas. They have over time just become immune to the suffering. Yeah. And they'll find some method of rationalizing it. In order for me to live the life that I live with its relative privileges, that suffering over there

must occur to somebody else. It's that sort of statement that makes this story almost more of a parallel even though what the utopia she's describing is exorbitant and ridiculous and definitely falls more into the far left category in terms of what it looks like on paper the the actual like relationship she's describing here is more akin to America and the global north to the global south. boundaries but are better than someone in equal relative economic standing within our nation as someone in anywhere that's not you know europe or japan south korea yeah well i think omelas works on two and has like two separate things going on. It has the hopeful part, what I call like sort of the hopeful part at the beginning, where she does actually want you to envision utopia. Because that's important that you can actually do that.

And whether or not, and at the end, she's essentially testing you as to whether or not it's worth it. Yes, that is, that's the crux that we're getting to right here is the idea is she wants you to envision utopia. You should envision utopia. But is utopia worth it if this suffering must occur to somebody that isn't you? That's the test. Those are the ones that walk away. Are the people that look, see the suffering that must occur for their utopia to exist and choose no and the the interesting thing here and i think the reason that this can this particular story can impact

really any anti-status quo you know at the, center left, really anyone who agrees with some kind of radical politics based around the idea of human liberation, regardless of what your methods might be, or what their idea of what should be done is, why this resonates so well with that many with those many people is because she does keep that ending very vague people do choose to walk away um when they see this but they she explicitly says they do not know where they are going and they are jumping they're jumping off the rim of the earth they're jumping off the rim of the world they do not know where they are going but they know that they reject that. Yes. And that is, again, fits in line with her political viewpoint. She can't tell you what they're going towards

because it's not her job to prescribe that to you either. The same way she couldn't tell you what utopia was, if you realize utopia isn't, she also can't tell you what you're doing instead. That's up to you. That's up to the people that are walking away. And rightly, just like any of us, they don't know exactly where they're going either. It was dang right.

You can't know where you're going. We do not know how to achieve socialism anymore. So I guess we're just winging it anymore so i guess we're just doing capitalism um like i think this sometimes can be read as depressing right you've imagined utopia and then she's like broken it for you right she's just gotten you to the highs of, of this, of, of Omelas, but then shattered them for you by showing you that they only exist on this suffering. And then again, asking you if it's worth it to stay or to leave. Asking you if it's worth it to stay or leave this utopia, because you have to know about the suffering. I think knowing is key. The people like you have to know about the suffering, because if you don't know the suffering exists, you can't make a meaningful choice.

You can't make it. Yeah. But even though this can be read as depressing because you're essentially building and breaking utopia and asking people to jump off the rim of the world. It's also, I think, hopeful because people do choose to walk away. I think in a non-hopeful story, everyone would decide together that the suffering was worth it. And everyone would stay in Omelas. I think this is inherently an optimist, just like the idea of Utopia generally. I think this is an optimistic story. It is.

It's not that, obviously it's bad that the suffering exists, but the optimism is inherent in the fact that people can freely make the choice to say no. And I think that makes it an inherently positive story. I agree. I agree. So a couple other like points about this you wanted to make a note about like the title and the fact that she's not entirely like original and sort of this this like concept right oh yeah um from those who've read le guin at any point in the past it it's very

obvious that she reads a lot um you know, the classic good writers read, read, read, read. And the extended title of this, as we pointed out at the beginning, is Variations on a Theme by William James. William James was like a philosopher back in like the late 1800s. What was the first educator to offer a psychology course in the US? He's sort of seen as like one of the founding fathers of psychology in the U.S., I think. And a philosophical school called pragmatism. Now, I don't know anything about pragmatism. I'm on left Twitter, not philosophy Twitter. There is overlap, but I'm, you know, so so but it's very obvious that you know she's read

him because of a specific line from like a quote from william james is what she used as the central idea of the story the whole reason that she wrote this wrote this so the quote and i'll read here is keep in mind this is like late 1800s i'll do my best um or if the hypothesis were offered uh offered us of a world in which um mr's fourier and bellamy's and morris's utopias should all be outdone and millions kept permanently happy on the simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far off edge of things should leave a life of lonely torture what except a skeptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered how hideous

a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain which okay uh that that's yeah that's my first time reading it out loud that's that's that's solid that's just this story but in like way less words in way less words and without the same emotional roller coaster yes but it gets to the point and this is her in quotation marks variations on a theme and this is the theme she's writing a variation on she does she does make a little bit of a joke i'm just looking at the wikipedia page here where technically the first time she came across this was in the brothers karamazov which holy moly can we just point out again that this is further further points of the

fact that everything ever written under the sun you you can point back at the Brothers Karamazov. Everything is in that book. And she said that she just forgot about it in the Brothers and re-encountered it in James's The Moral Philosopher and The Moral Life. So I just thought it was funny that once again, it all goes back to the Brothers Karamazov. But yeah, I just thought that was important to point out that this is pulling on another body of philosophical work. This is a question that's been posed by philosophers many times before and by fiction at different times before. way to apply more to you know in in essence american style neocolonialism in the modern age so and to more adequately represent because both james and dostoevsky were writing before any attempted leftist well not any attempted um but careful now yeah i know um like i'm not dismissing things like the paris commune and stuff like that but was written before and in the like slightly before and in the midst of the rise of leftist thought karamazov was written before uh capital yes so they were contemporaries at the time but didn't

you know have the reflection able yeah because nothing had really been done yet no one had read a book called what is to be done yes no no one had written written a silly little book in Russian, What Is To Be Done? And no one else had written, you know, what? What's a good anarchist example, like anarcho-syndicalism theory and practice or something? Rudolf Rocker? Please. I don't know. Again, I don't know.

I don't read. I was about to say. again i don't know i don't read i was about to say but yeah so so the the massive grand scale revolutions that we would consider you know the birth of modern marxist and leftist thought yeah like hadn't happened yet hadn't happened yet so this is for a post and um um, you know, this is a post-World War II reinterpretation of those two. Yeah. And I think it's incredibly unfortunate for humanity and the planet at large, uh, that the question posed here is no less relevant now than it was when it was first, uh, posed, you know, by, you know,

William Jennings in like 1880 or whatever. Like, it's no, the question, is the suffering worth it, is no, is just as relevant now, maybe even more so. Well, yeah. I mean, back in 188080 they weren't teetering on the edge of the extinction of a vast majority of complex life on earth so uh i would say it has a bit more weight now yeah yeah but again i want to i want to make sure i reemphasize that Le Guin thinks it's possible. So she took what was just a question posed by someone and then she sort of imposed her philosophy on it.

And clearly her interpretation is that something can and should be done because, because otherwise nobody would walk away. Yeah. And it's like, it's regardless of the potential, regardless of its possibility, yeah that something should be that at least some people would agree and that she's hopeful that some people do agree um that something should be done um and even though they don't know where they're going and i i think that does bring us i think to sort of our last sort of major point here is that over time there have obviously been well i say some criticisms i guess some critiques of this this story has a surprisingly large number of like direct responses so yeah

lots of people felt have felt the need over time to take the story and just rewrite it the way they like it better or the way they think is more appropriate i'm not deriding them doing that because clearly they're doing it i mean she literally called this variations on a theme and then other people are just doing variations on her theme with their own interpretation of it. Some of them, you know, it's people imposing their own thoughts on this. One of the ones that we wanted to talk about that we felt was pretty well elucidated, I think, was a critique that you found, Ketho, from the sort of current,

Oh, contemporary as a contemporary of us, not of Le Guin, a fantasy author and K Jamison. Yeah. This was written January of last year, by the way. Yeah.

Well, uh, two years ago, January, 2020 babies. This was, this was written pre COVID. Oh boy. Literally just in-COVID. Oh, boy.

Literally just before. In the before times. And just before all the BLM stuff. Yes. Also, yes. Just right before the BLM stuff. Which is important to point out for a lot of people. So it's important to point out because the title of this essay,'m like kethel actually to talk about it more but i'm intro it here by saying the author of this one

is the title of this by nk jameson is called the ones who stay and fight and i think that right off the bat gives you a little hint about where she disagrees with with with leguin here yeah so this like story poses like a alternative thought experiment using the same general format yes including like direct paragraph references at points yeah basically like she's kind of doing what I used to try to do in college or high school where you're trying to steal someone else's essay, but you're just like rewriting the words, but like, you just want to keep the format the same. Yeah. So it's, it's, she, she's got the format, um, the same, and she just kind of changes the, uh, the thought experiment here with a different city. Um, one called, uh, um, and she does the same general thing

where the first half is this utopic vision. And then the second half is the thing that maintains the utopia. And she essentially is making the argument throughout the story that this sort of thing, that sort of utopia is something kind of fiercely and violently maintained. That if influence from something like our world is to get into that

setting that it gets violently put out um through like uh like execution style means if necessary and you know makes the argument that you know you shouldn't just leave, you should be willing to fight for this utopia to be that utopia, Her, you know, her family was upper middle class at the very least, you know, daughter of a tenured professor and is white. And N.K. Jemisin comes from a working class black background from Iowa. So there's like a clear reasoning and and understanding why the perspectives are are varied here that being said i i don't disagree with jemisin uh at all on this in terms of that yes these sorts of things are violently won and maintained to an extent and that's something that le guin that and many critics of leguin would might would probably point out that leguin was explicitly a pacifist yeah um and you

know that's those are the few times when i ever have been like actual criticisms of leguin is her very hard line even in the dispossessed like anaris becomes anaris pacifistically which seems kind of absurd um but she does create a situation that it kind of makes sense for that to have happened um where where the the where the where the the gap between anaris and urus was big enough that it would have been too difficult to militarily reclaim Anaris. Yeah. Especially since Anaris still maintained the production of the materials that they were sending back to Urus.

So it was like a, but that sort of thing comes through a lot in Le Guin's work, which is why I understand someone coming out of, from somewhere, especially from a non upper middle class white perspective, uh, arguing the opposite. That being said, I think this story was kind of an interesting place to try and make that criticism, because I would personally argue that the walking away isn't necessarily pacifistic. The way it's presented obviously is in the ones who walk away. However, like said before it does leave those yeah so i think for interpretation yeah well i i agree with you and like a lot of what you're saying about uh nk jemisin's critique here i think those are critiques that you can effectively apply to

pacifism as a whole yes i do agree with you though that i think this specific essay to me feels like maybe not quite the most accurate place to apply that i think you could again more accurately apply some of those critiques of pacifism to like the dispossessed yes like absolutely you could apply to dispossessed because like you said the fact the only reason that they got their anarchist society was because it was kind of far away and they still supplied the supplies. So like that productive relationship still existed. Whereas I think most people nowadays would argue that in any anarchist society, you ideally wouldn't exist by still supplying capitalists with supplies someone could yeah someone could legitimately argue that anaris may remained a colonial holding it's because the fact that they were still sending raw materials to earth yeah they're still sending earth like a

bunch of raw materials but then you get into again you're getting into like the critiques of things like projects that are or are not socialist that exist now in the world. Like, can you be that while still cooperating with the capitalist powers? It's a very pre in the pre Marxist sense, utopian socialist. Yes. cis-sense utopian socialist view. And so my slight, you know, not that, you know, Le Guin needs defending or anything, but I'd say my slight defense of this essay in particular, I'm not going to defend pacifism personally. Like that's, anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that's not really my bag.

But to defend this essay in particular, much, much like Le Guin's description of utopia is non-prescriptive. What she's saying you need to do is also non-descriptive. She doesn't say they walk away from Omelas and thereby cause its downfall by peacefully walking away. Right? It's like, even in this essay, pacifism doesn't win. It doesn't beat Omelas. Omelas continues to exist. And she explicitly says at the end,

the place they go towards is even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist, but they seem to know where they're going, imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness i cannot describe it at all it is possible it does not exist but they seem to know where they're going the ones who walk away from omelas this to me is her is just saying it's up to you like yeah not telling you how to resist it is it's a it's it's this whole thing is a larger allegory, not for a prescribed way to make the world better,

but more towards the, the awakened realization that the suffering occurs and that there is another option. And then once it's, it's you realizing there is another way way what comes after that is up to you she explicitly says she can't describe it to you and i think that's where you get into the like that's where you get into your more technical breakdowns of well what are you going to do are you going to vote in elections are you going to did you propaganda of the d are you gonna like yeah i do

i do think that for the most part the jemisin understands that to an extent so yeah i i almost view this more as like a compounded companion piece more so than like a direct criticism of omelas that makes sense it's not that she's really critiquing Omelas as a short story. It's she's using the format of Omelas to critique pacifism. Pretty much. Which again, you're not going to hear. To explain an alternate method.

You're not going to hear arguments from me there. There, there was one other that I, I don't even know if I'll mention, cause I couldn't even find a way to read it. So I'm just going entirely off of. Fine, we'll just wing it. You think I think out my opinions in advance?

Come on. Well, no. All I can get is people who read. Oh, are we going on reactions of other people's reactions? Yes. This kind of thirdhand content is what I live for. Let's go. It's like having an opinion about a tweet you can't read by only reading the replies. Hell yeah. The that it's told from the point of view of the prisoner.

But just based on the way people are kind of responding to it, it seems almost more like a... I don't think this is necessarily the message I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt because I haven't read it. That it could be interpreted in one way, or at least it has been by some people who are in here, as saying that the people in society who suffer do so by their own choice, which is not a great message. But based on my understanding of who this person is, that's like the actual author, that is probably not exactly what's going on here.

So, you know, I don't want to go too far into it. But I just wanted to make sure people understood there's a lot of these sorts of like the ones who blank, the ones who blank that are like responses to the blank blank from the blank blank blank. There's there's a fairly sizable number of stories that are built off of this one and responses to it, which I think the different conclusions, I think speaks to the fact that despite being an incredibly short story, that isn't even really a story based. That's essentially a thought experiment based off a line that, you know, a philosopher wrote as like a, you know what I mean?

As like a, as just like a little think piece theme and and something that probably was explored in the brothers karamazov over the course of like 75 pages so like despite the fact that obelisk is short and is an incredibly abbreviated version of a thought experiment that's been proposed before and at other places this has had a lot of impact generally like almost every anarchist i know has read this a lot of just general. Almost every anarchist I know has read this. A lot of just general leftists of other stripes I know have read this. Clearly, a lot of people who don't even agree with it have read it and have felt the need to respond to it, right?

Or who don't think it goes far. Who don't think it goes far enough have responded to it. So I think for how short it is, there is, it has had an outsized ripple effect in society and in like, you know, philosophical like circles, which I think speaks to the power of the thought experiment going on here. And, and more generally to the lasting impact of Le Guin as an author, because this is one of the most concise,

one of the more concise explanations of her political philosophy laid out. I just generally make the argument that Le Guin's, I like her narrative work. I do like her narrative work. But my personal favorite works of hers are always the essay thought experiment kind, like this one.

A lot of her best short stories are that way you know you've got um there's one there's like uh concerning the hole in time or whatever or the the running out of time which is just an allegory for climate change and the regular denial it goes into it but it like a lot of these stories are thought experiments that's what she i think she does best personally, which is, I think she would actually admit to that. Well, but, well, that's, yeah, because she called herself a sci-fi author and she herself said that sci-fi

was just thought experiments. Yes. Like that's what, to her, that's what defines science fiction is the, is, is the, is the inclusion of a thought experiment. Yeah. She regularly, you know, she would start, I pretty, I'd say pretty much anything past the second hein a thought experiment. Yeah. She regularly, she, you know, she would start, I pretty, I'd say pretty much anything past the second heinous cycle book. So what is that? Roken, uh,

Rokanen's world. Uh, pretty sure, uh, planet of, yeah, planet of exile and Rokanen's world are the first two. Yeah.

Anything after that? Because, well, no, anything after, what's the third one? Third one would be. Cause I know that it that the last three in

that are her most prominent thought experiments in terms of uh city of illusion okay maybe so her biggest thought well she has four i would say of her biggest um thought experiment titles and they're usually the ones that people talk about the most where you have uh the left hand of darkness yeah so yeah it sorry it goes rocanon's world planet of exile city of illusion left hand of darkness the world uh the the word for world is forest the dispossessed and the dispossessed so those are three of her big ones and then you have the late of heaven yeah so it's like these are all her biggest thought experiments like ever in this collected set of stories that all went from what, like 1971 or 72 all the way up to like 75. Rokannon's World. Well, if we're talking about the actual like the ones that are popular, the thought experiment ones.

Well, Left Hand of Darkness came out in 69. Dispossessed came out. Oh, geez louise. That's even earlier than I remember. Left Hand of Darkness in 1969. The Dispossessed was out that's even earlier than left hand of darkness 1969 the dispossessed was in 74 yeah and then late of heaven was before the dispossessed

so yeah it's in there but it's in that time frame yeah we're saying here is that like her most famous works are the ones where she is the most thought experimenty yes and again this is her most famous the ones where she is the most thought experimenty yes and again this is her most famous uh the ones who walk away from omelas the left hand of darkness the dispossessed the lathe of

heaven like she was in her she was in her goddamn mojo from 1969 to 1975 yeah like and which absolutely slaying also speaks the two of us the fact that my favorite of her books are the Earthsea cycle. Well, the Earthsea books came out in about the same time. But they're also not thought experiments. Oh yeah. And also of the heinous cycle, my favorite is City of Illusions,

which is also not one of the most thought experiment of them. So like it's two of us, I think clearly more of our, like our dichotomy of, even though obviously we cross over our sort of dichotomy in sci-fi guy and fantasy guy. Well, I mean,

if you think about it, like there that's, that makes sense. It's like, like fantasy on the whole is usually a bit more narrative anyways. It's like fantasy on the whole is usually a bit more narrative anyways. And then sci-fi is usually more like explicitly. If we're going to peek ahead a little bit, like I said, I think this is part of what I see. This is part of a sort of two-part little series here that sort of covers foundationally what this podcast is about for us.

Like why we do this. what this podcast is about for us like why we do this so here in the ones who walk away from omelas this is like explicitly showing the power that a short this is i mean this is a sci-fi story it's a thought experiment that has had just an outsized impact on the world around it and it's the power of just a short story that she wrote. This story, I think without a doubt, has radicalized thousands of people. Yes. At just periods. Yes. And so that's why I wanted to

cover it, because it's foundational to the way we view stories. It's foundational to the way we view a text, and the thought experiment behind it, the power behind it, and the fact that even if you don't think you're doing one, you probably are. Especially if you're writing sci-fi,

even if you don't think you're necessarily doing a thought experiment, you probably are. This is going to, this contrasts, I think a lot with the foundational text for me specifically that we're going to talk about next week, which is the essay on fairy stories by J.R.R. Tolkien. It started off as a lecture he gave.

Anyway, we'll talk about it next week. But what it is, is him arguing about why fantasy, why fairy stories are important to people and to society and why they're not just stories for children, why they're important for adults as well. They're like sort of their place within society, aside from stories for kids. And I think these two texts are sort of the error as to where this podcast comes from, because you have the thought experiments and the political philosophy behind things you're writing, even if you don't know you're doing political philosophy behind things you're writing,

even if you don't know you're doing it, or when you do, you know. And also why these texts are not just for kids. All of them are for adults and that adults have things to draw from them, even if you think it's just a kid's story. I mean, we pulled the need for school abolition from A Wrinkle in Time so you know like yes it's

out there you just have to like look into it i do think it's well even even like even in just this like this is such a short story and we somehow managed to pull out stuff like youth liberation stuck out of the middle of this yeah stuck it right in the middle um it is ironic though that we're now next we're going to talk about tolkien who was just fanatically against the idea of you taking his text as allegory for anything just hated allegory with all his bones dude this doesn't realize how much like that doesn't matter like he can be like there's no allegory here bro you accidentally wrote allegory yeah i think that's what one where i might have some criticism of the man where he's like there is no allegory here i didn't intend any allegory what i just

said was it doesn't matter if you intended it or not it can be there and so tough shit old man just you know the ones who walk away is entirely allegorical and the next week we're going to talk about a man who would who'd like slap you for saying anything he wrote was allegory and you know i'm going to just have anything to do with your experience of warble what look okay and then c.s lewis is like what c.s lewis in the background screaming screaming about the fact that if you don't know the lion is jesus he's gonna rip out his own hair yeah it's like it's like like tolkien is pouring this big old glass of allegory and he decides not to add it to his like little soup he's making and then c.s lewis grabs the glass and dumps the whole goddamn thing

the whole thing and it's just it's old c.s lewis almost flips back around to ones who walk away where his story is only allegory like oops all allegory oops all allegory that's the that's the the the the thing of uh like god making whoever and it's like he's like oh you mean you mean the and he goes to tip over some some liquid and then he just tips too much the far side comic where he accidentally covers the world in the idiots on accident it's a it's a far side where he's just like in a dash of idiots ah just a little bit of allegory just no lewis was doing it intentionally so yes i think that's probably uh it for this week.

We, I think we've sort of adequately covered this short story again. If you guys want to, if any of you listeners want to talk about it more, have points that you think we missed things you want to talk about, just add us on Twitter. We'd be more than happy to talk about it more. Absolutely. I'm also going to try and remember who it was that said that actually I should be able to find them really, really easy. Oh, we're going to get a shout out. Ooh oh so we admit that we love each one of our listeners well no they're from

wisconsin too which i find very funny yeah but i mean i i didn't ask permission so i'm not gonna actually say their uh their username or anything but i did kind of steal the thing i said super early on about this being a political rorschach painting um from someone on twitter and i'm pretty sure they listened to some of the stuff and if i add him that or them uh i'm not sure i didn't look at the that's important this this twitter user yes has talked to me about how much all the little gremlins means to them. All the little gremlins in my phone that exist on Twitter.

You people aren't real. You're all just little computers in there. I'm going to go full, was it, Descartes? I'm the only one that exists. All of you are simply gremlins in my phone. This is me giving distant credit without actually saying your name yeah uh but yeah so if you guys want to talk about it more please add us on twitter

i would love nothing more than to waste that like spend my time particularly my time at work on the clock talking about this on twitter that's like my favorite thing to do is to be on twitter on the clock which will be might be harder soon. So let me get the time in while I can. Thank you all for listening. I really appreciate it. Like I said, next week, we're going to flip to the other side to what we kind of call foundational.

And then we haven't decided where we're going to go from there. But thank you all for listening. Thank you all so much for enjoying the show. We love each and every one of you romantically. I promise. Develop a parasocial relationship with us, please. Don't worry.

Our podcast is small enough. If you talk to me on Twitter, it's not actually probably not parasocial. It's just social. Yeah, there we go. Get in while it's still social before it becomes parasocial. It's just social. Cause yeah, there we go. There's the, you know,

get in while it's still social before it becomes parasocial. Let's say all 80 of you at most on a good day. Get in while we can still actually be real friends. All right. Thank you all for listening. And we'll see you next week. Bye. Bye. y'all for listening and we'll see you next week bye bye bro

are you fucking real man come on