"In her novel The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. le Guin describes a city where the good fortune of the citizens requires that an innocent child is tortured in a secret place (le Guin 1973). The child stands symbolically for the innocence of extreme sufferers. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas are the people who deny the world. We will associate them with Buddhist monks in this paper, i.e., with childlessness and retreat. The metaphor suggests that individual happiness is ambivalent. The joy of the majority is at the cost of a suffering minority; one is not possible without the other. There is no doubt that the human suffering in this world is caused by procreation, but the relation is indirect. Parents participate in an immensely complex system of interactions and probabilities. Often a contingent event decides who becomes a victim. As a consequence, participants deny the responsibility for the results of the system – a phenomenon which is also known in the context of structural violence (Galtung 1969). If the human race were a sympathetic race, it could walk away from Omelas."