So my version of the Omelas story would have a city, not especially utopian but comfy enough for the top sixth or so. The other five sixths are working their knuckles to the bone to support the comfy ones. Even among the comfy ones the wealth gaps are intense with one guy having many times as the others combined and then similar ratios all the way down to the edge of comfort.
And then in the story it’s revealed that even this level of comfort is fueled by a big old machine under the city that eats time, that warps into the future versions of the city, and eats their comfort and sends it back here. And disproportionately so, like, to have one day of comfort in the here and now, it’ll eat three days of comfort off the end of the calendar. And it’s been eating and it’s been eating and it’s been eating. It started at the edge of the calendar and it’s been getting closer and closer to the present day. And accelerating a pace that’s faster than even the doomsaying eggheads originally warned us about. Jor-El stumbling out of bed with one slipper on and a piece of toast in his mouth.
The “walking away from” part of this story would be bittersweet as heck because even those who did walk away and tried to build a new village together without the comfort machine, they’d lay awake in their beds at night knowing that the gnawing thresher over in the Comfort City was still running at faster and faster speeds.
So that’s why my politics are never going to be popular. Everyone’s quality-of-life would decrease since we’d turn off that comfort machine. Gradually but it could’ve been a heck of a lot more gradual if we had started the shutdown process a lot earlier. And maybe the quality-of-life decrease would be set up so that Mr. super comfy eloi Lex Luthor at the top would see the biggest hit. The temporarily embarrassed millionaires would sober up.
This is also why fixing the climate shouldn’t be thing we vote on. People aren’t gonna vote for it because it’s gonna suck for them. It just is. But we’ve got to do it.