220509-happiness

"...recall Ursula Le Guin's famous short story 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', about the imaginary city of Omelas, a city which also made do without kings, wars, slaves or secret police. We have a tendency, Le Guin notes, to write off such a community as 'simple', but in fact these citizens of Omelas were 'not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is just that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.'"

• dawn of everything, graeber and wengrow

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