I'm going to use six different dystopian series, as well as references from history, as my examples when answering these questions, but it really all boils down to four very simple things: apathy, fear, blame, and hope. This blog will actually be broken up into four separate posts to prevent having to scroll through a lengthy research-paper-length post if anyone wants to look for something specific.
Blame
The third factor is blame. According to the dictionary, blame is condemnation, accountability, culpability—basically, who's at fault for something. The blame game has been played by dictatorships for like, ever. The most well-known instance of this is found during the Nazi Regime.
After WWI, when the German economy tanked and fell into a depression, one of the things Hitler did was blame a lot of Germany's problems on other people. The Enemy, as it were. Hitler blamed Jews, homosexuals, black people, Gypsies, Catholics, anyone who didn't fit into his concept of a pure race. Most people think about this from an objective standpoint and think that it's ridiculous that anyone would buy into that. How could the German-Jewish community have possibly destroyed the German economy? And why would they? What would be the point?
But if you look at it subjectively, that kind of mindset sort of makes sense. It's completely, morally wrong…but it makes sense. People ask questions that hint at this mindset all the time. Why me? Why did this happen to me (or my wife or my kids or my parents or whatever)? Why does God let bad things happen to good people? The inherent blame in those questions is obvious. The phrasing of the question pushes aside the possibility of a blameless answer. Most people refuse to believe that the answer to "why me?" is simply "because." People naturally look for someone to blame.
In a way, it's a bit like a defense mechanism. When something bad happens, people want a way to solve it. How can something be solved if no one and nothing is behind the problem? If it's one of those things that just happens? People need someone to blame. Someone to direct all of those negative emotions—fear, anger, even hatred—toward so they can feel as if it's possible to do something about it. Negative emotions need an outlet, a target. Blame gives that.
What does this have to do with forms of coercion in totalitarian governments?
One of the best ways to keep a group of people from noticing the enemies within is by giving them an enemy from without to deal with. During the Nazi Regime, it was everyone who was non-Aryan. During the time of the Hauns Mill Massacre, it was the Latter-Day Saints. During the Cold War, it was the Communists. And it's ridiculously easy to train someone to hate or fear another person, to believe they are the enemy. All you need is someone incredibly charismatic who knows how to manipulate people, and the proper setting for the manipulation to take place. Once you've managed to convince someone to draw the line between "us" and "them," it can take years, decades, or even centuries to undo that division. The blame game can be used most effectively to take the fear and resentment aimed at the dictatorship and direct it outward at someone else—the Enemy.
Although we see this a lot in dystopian novels (and in a lot of fantasy novels as well, such as the small-town mindset found in Eragon's home village in The Inheritance Cycle or even the anti-outsider point of view we get from the Hobbits in Tolkien's works), we don't see it everywhere. For example, it's not in Beth Ravis' Across the Universe* series. And in certain other series, such as The Iron Codex and Ann Aguire's Horde Trilogy (Enclave, Outpost, etc.), the Enemy really does exist. In Enclave, there really are zombies out there that people need to be defended from; same as in Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth, which has a small settlement with a rather dictatorial government in place. In The Iron Codex by Caitlin Kittredge, there really are monsters that want to kill people, as well as people with magical powers who work for the enemy government who are spying on the US. Those threats are actually legit. But legit or not, the government can still use them in these novels.
In Matched by Ally Condie, Cassia is afraid of two types of people at the beginning of the book. One: the Enemy that the Society is currently supposedly at war with. Two: a class of people known as Anomalies.
Of course it would make sense for her to be afraid of someone her country was at war with. Of course if anything crazy-terrible happened on the border with those enemies, and the government said the enemy did it, that would make sense to believe it.
But what are Anomalies? Why does blaming them for bad things reinforce Cassia's belief in the system of the Society?
Anomalies are people with an intense predisposition for violence and cruelty. At the time of the Matched Trilogy, which is at least a couple hundred years in the future, the Society has figured out how to screen for that sort of thing. It seems a little drastic to push anyone with this predisposition out of society, though, doesn't it? Why would anyone be okay with that? That's prejudice; it's infringing on civil rights.
Because of the blame game. The decision to exclude Anomalies from the Society was made before Cassia was even born, but she fully supports it. Why? She's afraid of them. She's been taught her whole life to be afraid of them, and her one exposure to an Anomaly only reinforced that. Because of the rules of the Society, people are safe—for the most part. Cassia's never experienced a crime, never had anything stolen from her by another person, her house has never been broken into, she's never been beat up, nothing. The most anyone has ever done to her is call her names or exclude/ignore her (which in and of itself is bad, but explains her reaction to the following).
Her one brush with an Anomaly was when her neighbors' son was brutally murdered by an Anomaly when she was a kid. In a country where murder and assault and rape are almost unheard of, this of course has a serious impact on her. It reinforced in her mind, "Of course I should be happy that the Society does what it can to protect me from that sort of thing."
Which is how manipulative governments work; they give you something to be afraid of, something that makes you grateful for their protection, as a means of reinforcing their control. People do it to other people all the time. Why can't groups of people do the same thing?
I'm going to branch out real quick and talk about a novel that actually isn't a dystopian novel per se, but does have a bit of a problem regarding the government up to a point. It's more the military, actually. This novel—Lia Habel's Dearly, Departed, which takes place about 300-400 years in the future in another country—is set in a country where the military has almost as much power over the lives of private citizens as the government does. For the most part, the military doesn’t abuse this power, but when they do, it's chalked up to being for "the greater good." Why? Because everything the military does that seems so horrible in the novel is claimed to be a means of defending against the enemy group that this country has been at war with for the last hundred or so years.
In Delirium, pretty much every horrible/inconvenient/annoying/awful thing that is done by the government is said to protect people from the Enemy—the Invalids. Every terrible thing is blamed on the Invalids. You actually see a great example of this in book two, Pandemonium. In Pandemonium, a terrorist attack takes place in a major city. A terrorist group takes credit for it; this group is made up of "Invalids." However, the government blames the attack on all Invalids, not just the militant group responsible, furthering the fear of anyone who refuses "the cure" for the deliria.
Going back to book one for a moment, Lena (the MC) often says, "Well, this rule here is annoying, but it's to make sure we don't have an epidemic. If the Invalids weren’t so crazy, we wouldn’t have this problem." That right there is a perfect recreation of the same anti-Semitic thinking people entertained in Nazi Germany.
Not only that, but whenever someone has a thought or makes a statement along the lines of, "Well, but this still seems a bit much," the people who have already been "cured" respond by blaming something and someone else—the person making the statement. You actually see something similar in the real world right now. When someone young is upset or unhappy about something, I can't count the number of times an adult responds with, "You'll forget about when you're older," or "I know it seems like a big deal now, but when you're older, it won't bother you so much," or words to that effect.
In a way, that's what the "cure" for the deliria has done and that's what people in the world of the Delirium Trilogy do now: they blame these feelings of dissatisfaction on the intense feelings that are so common (and normal, contrary to their opinion) feelings to be found in people that young. "When you're cured, you'll realize you were overreacting." Those words simultaneously cast blame on the deliria and the nature of a person before the "cure," as well as acting as a subtle and probably unconscious warning that too much of this might make people think you already have the deliria. Once the "cure" is administered, these feelings go away and the person only has a sense of contentment.
Regarding Caitlin Kittredge's trilogy, in The Iron Codex the blame is actually adequately placed for the most part. For example, the city of Lovecraft enforces a curfew set at sundown. Seems a little ridiculous, right? Except that that’s when all the monsters really do come out. The only people who should be out there are the City Guard, who keeps the monsters from going to close to people's homes. If anyone else is out after dark, the government assumes they're "heretics" who associate with these highly dangerous creatures. And for the most part, they'd be right.
Same thing regarding those people executed as heretics—they associate with the Crimson Guard (that's world Russian forces; remember, TIC takes place during the height of the Cold War, except on steroids), they dabble in things that might attract the monsters, or they associate with people who do the dabbling. This is 100% true in every case we've seen so far.
Does that mean all these people are evil? No. And that's the problem. But we'll talk more about that in my review of book one of TIC, The Iron Thorn.
In The Hunger Games, the Capitol deflects the blame for a lot of things onto other people. The biggest example of this is the event of the Games themselves. For the most part, only the people in the Capitol buy this. No one in the districts believes it. And the government blames the Hunger Games on two groups: one, District 13, who started the rebellion/war that the Games are still punishing; and two, the other districts, which according to the government still need to be kept under the Capitol thumb so they never think about rebelling again. Unlike with a lot of dystopian novels, the blame aspect of coercion isn't actually used that much. This is its main example, but it's a big one, so I felt it should be included.
Lastly, there is one of my favorite futuristic novels, Veronica Roth's Divergent. In Divergent, the main government isn't actually corrupt. It actually works quite well. But a small faction of the government doesn’t like the current heads of state, and so she is playing the blame game in order to roust them from power. It's because of Abnegation (that ruling faction) that the other factions don't have cars. Abnegation is hording supplies from the other factions. Abnegation is doing this, Abnegation is doing that. And all of this anger and resentment and blame gets stirred up so that when this woman eventually takes power, people (for the most part) ignore the other horrible things she did to get into power in the first place because they're too busy being ticked off at the group she did all those horrible things to.
Now, blame isn't as widely used as an effective manipulation tool in novels like these as other methods are, such as fear and apathy. But there is one other tool that, when used in small doses, can help quell the rebellion beast stirred up by the others: hope.
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