i read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas recently on recommendation from a fantastic YouTuber named Shaun who has made many video essays from a leftist perspective criticizing right-wing ideology, thoroughly analyzing historic events using dialectical materialism, and recently put out an informative and heartfelt video about Palestine.
TOWWAFO is a short read (only five pages) but i have not been able to stop thinking about the questions it raises and the way it relates to being American in the modern age, with all the knowledge we have of the horrors of imperialism and American intervention in the name of capitalism. i highly recommend reading it and meditating on its implications.
βThe 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 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.β - Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas