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OmelasOmelas is the fictional city described in the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin. In the story, Omelas is a city of happiness and delight, whose inhabitants are intelligent, cultured and refined. Everything about Omelas is pleasing, except for the secret of its happiness: the good fortune of Omelas requires that an unfortunate child be kept in filth, darkness and misery. The title describes the reaction of some of the citys inhabitants to this state of affairs. Ms. Le Guin hit upon the name of the town on seeing a road sign for Salem, Oregon, in a car mirror. Le Guin later wrote: "The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat, turns up in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. The fact is, I haven't been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I'd simply forgotten he used the idea. But when I met it in James's 'The Moral Philosoper and the Moral Life,' it was with a shock of recognition. .... ask me 'Where do you get your ideas from, Ms. Le Guin?' From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?" See also: scapegoat, the problem of evil
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