Hope (A Tool of Coercion in Totalitarian Governments - Part 4/4)

In many dystopian novels—indeed, in many novels with any sort of totalitarian or dictatorial government, and even some novels that don't have that in there—there are those oppressed individuals known as the masses. The repressed populace. They suffer the indignities of cruel governments and/or rulers, undergo horrific things in the name of "the greater good." But what about their good? What about the welfare of the individual? What stops people from rising up against these terrible things?

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.

Hope

The fourth factor is hope. According to the dictionary, hope is aspiration, anticipation, optimism, faith, possibility—something good that people wish and strive for. But what does this, of all things, have to do with corrupt governments?

In The Hunger Games film, President Snow (one of the bad guys) sums it up fairly nicely. He explains that one way to redirect fear and resentment is with hope. Give the people something to hope for. And that is a useful tactic in any corrupt government.

The most obvious example of this I've ever seen is in the BBC Robin Hood series. Almost everyone knows the story of Robin Hood, how he robbed from the rich to give to the poor and how the Sheriff was so horrible and taxed the peasants into starvation and blah-blah-blah. Well, there's an episode in this particular series where the Sheriff does something completely off the wall, something no one would expect. When Robin's right-hand guy, Much, gets captured, instead of executing or torturing him, the Sheriff makes Much a lord.

Yeah, I didn’t see that one coming either. Gave him a nice house, some land, pretty servant girls, wealth, good clothes, etc. Now why would a bad guy do that? The Sheriff explains it to his right-hand man, Guy of Gisbourne—because of what it does to the peasants. "Look at that," they say. "That could be us," they say. "That could've been me. It still could be me if I play my cards right. We could go from cruddy poverty to that." Now because this is a TV show, Much of course is still allied to Robin and helps him out and so because of this loses all of his nice stuff, but that's not the point.

It was only after I'd seen that episode that I realized how this applied to what President Snow is talking about in The Hunger Games. That hope, that sense of "that could be me" is one of the things that helps promote the Games. The victor of the Games gets a super nice house, never has to worry about food again, gets nice clothes, a very generous stipend from the Capitol for the rest of their lives…and this applies to their family, as well. So Katniss winning the Games? All that good stuff goes to her mom and sister, too, whom she's been struggling to support for the last four or five years. The kids from Districts 1-4 actually volunteer (which is why they are almost always either seventeen or eighteen) in order to have the chance to get all of that.


Basically, when despair is rampant, people want to cling to hope, to the long odds in their favor—so long as the reward/outcome of those odds is kept fresh in their minds. Each district has a Victor's Square with lovely houses smack in the middle of it. Each district has a victor living in one of those houses. This only reinforces the idea, "Hey…that could be me someday, if I play my cards right." The slogan for the Games reinforces this too: may the odds be ever in your favor. 

We see a similar—though far less deadly—version of this "that could be me" ideology in The Selection, by Kiera Cass. In The Selection, there's a competition similar to The Bachelor television show, except the guy up for grabs is one of the princes of the royal family, and the girl selected will marry him, thus improving her lot in life as well as her family's lot. In a culture where social class is a rigorously upheld way of doing things, that's a pretty big deal. Of course, it might not seem like that if—like the main character, America Singer (I know, it's like the only major flaw in the book so far, but really?)—you have a boyfriend already and then get selected for the competition, since the hopes and dreams of your family will be riding on your shoulders. But again, this is a good example of the system-that-isn't-really-fair offering the-thing-you-really-really-want in order to keep the populace from exploding.

Sometimes, it's not even the prize in a competition. Sometimes it's just the hope or dream that you've wanted all your life, and the system can help you get it. In Caitlin Kittredge's The Iron Thorn, Aoife wants to be an engineer more than anything else in the world. It is her fondest, most desperate dream. And in order to get that dream, she has got to be careful, she has got to walk the line, and she has got to stay out of trouble, or that dream will go poof.

The same thing is in Matched, by Ally Condie. A lot of the adults, Cassia discovers as she goes through the plot of the book, have made the conscious decision to sacrifice certain things in order to hold onto what matters most to them. Cassia is exposed to the hope that if you play by the rules, you get rewarded with the thing you want the most—even during those times when the rules may or may not be fair. Cassia wants to be a sorter, a particular job she loves; that aspiration is threatened when she tries to flout the rules. She backs down (at first) in order to hold onto that dream.

"Eyes on the prize" is a technique used by a lot of totalitarian governments, but in small doses, to help maintain the status quo. Basically the corrupt ruling institution, whatever it is, continually reinforces the idea that "this thing you want could happen to you! As long as you don't screw up." By itself, it's a weak and ineffective tool. But combined with the other three…hey, it works.

Apathy (A Tool of Coercion in Dystopian Governments - Part 1/4)

In many dystopian novels—indeed, in many novels with any sort of totalitarian or dictatorial government—there are those oppressed individuals known as the masses. The repressed populace. They suffer the indignities of cruel governments and/or rulers, undergo horrific things in the name of "the greater good." But what about their good? What about the welfare of the individual? What stops people from rising up against these terrible things?

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.

Apathy

The first factor is apathy. According to the dictionary, apathy is defined as indifference, a lack of concern, or a lack of interest. Basically, a state of apathy is a state of just plain not caring. It's a sad truth that most people (in this country, at least) can't be roused to a true state of caring unless something directly affects them or someone they know. The most you'll get is, "Oh, that's horrible." And then they'll move on to something they feel is more relevant to them. I saw this constantly in high school, in students as well as adults. I was even guilty of it myself due to my PTSD, but that's another story for another time. Sadly, a lot of people just don't care about anyone beyond themselves or their sphere of friends and loved ones. How many people ignore a kid being abused by their parents in a parking lot? Or walk by someone being ripped to shreds by their peers? I'm not saying everyone does this. I know they don't. But a lot of people do. And that is often the first thing a lot of people do in different dystopian novels, though for many different reasons.

In Ann Aguire's Enclave, which is actually a horribly written book but with viable and very-well developed characterization of the MC (for the first 2/3 of the novel, anyway), there's a girl named Deuce. Deuce is a fighter for her enclave who lives in a world of kill-or-be-killed, predator-and-prey. She believes she can't afford to care about anyone who can't take care of themselves because that is how she was raised in a world where failure to protect yourself means death for you and countless other people. So though she feels some guilt, when the council of her enclave votes for the death of a blind nine-year-old boy because he's basically a drain on their resources and can't take care of himself or contribute to the welfare of the community, she doesn't protest (even silently).

A similar thing happens later in the novel (in the final third that really just makes me want to know what this author was smoking when she wrote it*, yet sadly this part sort of fits with Deuce's personality) when Deuce meets a guy called Wolf. Wolf is not only a thug and a killer, he's an admitted rapist. But because he can fight and Deuce and her partner are in a dangerous area, she puts aside what he's done in the past—including kidnap and try to rape Deuce and their third member—in order to use his fighting prowess against their enemies. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, but her total acceptance, her attitude of "that was then, this is now" is exactly the sort of "don't care" attitude I'm talking about in this post.

* The thing that just totally throws me isn't that Deuce allows Wolf to live and uses him fight with them; it's that he's the second guy in her little love triangle and she's okay with that. She actually finds him attractive. I'm just like, "What kind of crack-acid do you smoke?" This is near the middle of the final third of the book, so I finished it anyway, but I just could not believe this. And people complain about Stephenie Meyer and The Twilight Saga, and how Edward's abusive. Um, Ann Aguire got optioned for a trilogy, I heard there might be a movie, and she's a best-seller. Not as big as S. Meyer, but still! With an idiot like that for a heroine? Really? Okay, rant over.


In Matched, the main character, Cassia, is one of those rare individuals who has rarely questioned the Society—the totalitarian system in which she lives. Though there are some things about the Society's rules that she doesn't like, she doesn’t really care about them enough to worry. Why? For a very different reason than Deuce: Cassia knows what the Society has provided for her in exchange for these "small unpleasantries."

In the Society, for example, Cassia opts to get married eventually (she can choose to remain single for the rest of her life if she chooses). The boy who will become her husband is dictated by the Officials based on the data they've collected about her personality and other traits compared to the boy's over the course of their lives. That would irritate the crud out of me, but not Cassia, and with valid reason—her parents were Matched by the Society and have a very happy and healthy relationship, a relationship just like the one Cassia wants for herself. She knows other people who've been happily Matched with their spouse by the Society as well. So this lack of choice doesn’t bother her because of the happiness of what is basically a guaranteed outcome. She's seen the process, seen how it works, and seen the results—which are results she wants.

The same applies to most of what's going on in her life: her job, her recreational activities, even her diet. In the beginning of the book, the restriction of her choices doesn't bother her because she's trading the ability to choose for what she believes she wants based on what she's seen from other people.

The one time Cassia almost violently breaks this mold of not caring, of trading her choices for happiness, is when her father dies. In the Society, people die at eighty years old on their birthday, by government mandate. This sounds outrageous. Crazy. Absolutely ridiculous. But even though Cassia is stricken by her grandfather's death, even though she at times thinks that it isn't fair, she still has that mindset of trading choice for happiness.

This also touches a little on fear, so we'll explore that in another segment of this blog series, but again—her desire for a specific outcome that she sees all around her helps Cassia set aside her concerns about the Society (when she has them, which only happens regularly once the plot picks up).

In The Hunger Games, we see apathy in its worst form: people who don't care because they worry too much about themselves to be bothered with other people. Now, let me again stress, not everyone is like that in the series. And those that are have good reason. For the most part, the people in District 12 are barely scraping by. Katniss and her family nearly starved to death after her father died when she was twelve because they are so poor. She basically lives in one of the ghettos of Panem (the country in which this takes place).

Though a few of her neighbors in District 12 help her out a little—this is the starting point for her relationship with Peeta Mellark, the other tribute from District 12, who risked a beating from his mother to give Katniss and her family a few burnt loaves of bread—they can't help very much because they, too, are in dire straits and can't afford to help. Those that aren't in such straits simply don't care. An example is Peeta's (relatively) wealthy mother, who would rather give the burnt bread to their pig than give it to a starving child. And the government of Panem actually actively encourages this attitude towards neighbors as well as between the districts, helping to discourage any teamwork between the different districts against the Capitol.

Specifically with Districts 5-12 in The Hunger Games, the Capitol also encourages another form of apathy: the lethargy/uncaring induced by lack of will/strength. As I mentioned previously, most of these people are not wealthy. They barely scrape by unless they resort to poaching (as Katniss does, which is illegal and is actually a capital offense). When every minute of the day is filled with the efforts to feed yourself and your family, most people don't have the energy to plot political unrest or rebellion (though some do). They are literally too tired to do anything, even care, most of the time.

And onto that, one district could not take out the forces of the entire Capitol, and it is very difficult to travel between the districts. The Capitol has, of course, done this on purpose to keep communication to a minimum between districts, to keep them from banding together. You see a similar concept in detention in schools—teachers keep the kids separate to keep them from talking to each other. In Panem, distrust of the other districts is also pumped up because of the event of the Hunger Games within the story. This helps contribute to the general attitude of, "It's too difficult, too risky, without enough payoff" in regards to rebellion.

In The Iron Codex by Caitlin Kittredge, the apathy comes more from an established class hierarchy than anything else. Example: a well-to-do family doesn’t give a flying rat's buttered carcass if a homeless person labeled as a psychopath and a heretic (similar in this world to being called a Communist) is carted off to prison without a trial, or killed in the street, so long as they don't have to step around the blood puddle.

The same applies to those individuals in this world who contract what is known as the necrovirus, a so-called sickness that turns people into monsters. So long as everyone who "matters" is kept safe from the virus and the inhuman things it breeds, they don't care how those who're infected are dealt with—especially because it has no cure.

You see the same thing in Lauren Oliver's Delirium. In Delirium, the MC Lena doesn’t care about many of the restrictions placed on her: a city-enforced curfew of 9:00pm; rules about fraternizing with males (yeah, you saw that); censored reading, movie, and musical material. She only cares about being kept safe from the "disease" that killed her mother by causing her to commit suicide and nearly killed her sister—amora deliria nervosa (aka intense emotion).

And this really ties into the fear-aspect of the totalitarian government. Without fear—fear of what happens to me, be it from a natural influence such as starvation, or a manmade influence such as government reprisals, or something like a highly contagious illness—most people don't have the "don't care" issue in these novels. Their apathy is heightened by their fear. So long as they are kept safe, they don't care what has to happen to ensure that.

Which leads us to our next blog post: Fear as a Tool of Coercion in Dystopian Governments.

Splitting a Sci-Fi Subgenre - the Old Utopia/Dystopia vs the New Straight Dystopia

I hang out a lot on the internet, on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as places like Figment.com, and I've noticed there's a lot of confusion about different emerging genres. For example, what's the difference between urban fantasy and paranormal? Or the difference between space opera and science fiction? What defines steampunk? So I decided to write a few blogs about those different things. This one is focusing on a not-so-recent split in a sub-genre of science fiction that I actually studied for two semesters in high school: Utopia/Dystopia.

In olden days—aka, before The Hunger Games came out, which caused a change in how such literature was written—you couldn't have a dystopia novel without the concept of utopia. For those who don't know, a utopia is a perfect world where there is no crime, no unhappiness, no darkness, nothing. Everything's great. Fantastic. Perfect.

Of course, everybody knows that old phrase, "You can't please everyone." Same applies here. You can't have a real utopia in a world run by normal humans. Or even robots, actually, if you look at the film I-Robot with Will Smith. A utopia, by its very definition, can't exist without squishing somebody's happiness. And therefore you get the dystopia aspect—the part of the utopian society where all the crud and bad stuff pops up.

1)    In Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, it was the destruction of basically anything that made you think too hard and thus question the rights and regulations of the government—namely, books. Except there are people who still like reading. Thus the conflict of the novel.

2)    In the film Soilent Green, they solve world hunger. Cool, right? Except they do it by resorting to a form of cannibalism ("Soilent Green is PEOPLE!") and it's this big government conspiracy involving murder and such.

3)    There's an episode in season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation about a planet whose culture has almost zero crime and everyone is so happy all the time. Sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? But how do they manage this? Because any infraction, no matter how small, is a capital crime. You die for walking on the grass if there's a "Keep Off" sign. That's crazy, right?

4)    A short story called "The Lottery" tells of a town without crime of any sort because the town gets out all their aggression, all their evil feelings, by stoning a town-member to death once a year, chosen at random via lottery.

5)    In Ayn Rand's novella Anthem, the peaceful, productive culture of the main character is preserved by the destruction of the human ego—the destruction of the concept I AM in the human psyche. Does it work? Of course not. Thus the conflict in the story.

In all these books and movies, we have the concept of utopia ("everything's fine, don't challenge the status quo, it's for our own good") paired with the actuality of the dystopian world ("pretend everything's fine, don't challenge the status quo or something terrible happens to you, just keep smiling and pretend it's for our own good"). But the publication of The Hunger Games changed this genre forever.

How?

By stripping away the concept of utopia from the utopia/dystopia subgenre.

I won't say it was for the first time (I haven’t read everything, believe it or not, lol), but for the first time on a nationally bestselling scale, the idea of "Big Brother is watching you for your own good" was ripped out of the utopia/dystopia novel, leaving only the aggressive resentment of "screw off, Big Brother; stop being a creeper."

In THG, for the first time, the reader sees a totalitarian government viewed for the sucky, civil-rights-smashing fist of tyranny that it is. This revolutionized the utopia/dystopia subgenre, creating a completely different genre of novels: the straight-up dystopias, books about worlds with unfair rules that people either view as necessary evils to combat even greater evils or actually acknowledge as sucking and try (or have tried) to do something about them—even if it's only to get out and get away as soon as possible.

Some of the best versions of this that I've read so far are the following:

The Chemical Garden Trilogy—Lauren Destefano

The Divergent Trilogy—Veronica Roth
The Hunger Games Trilogy—Suzanne Collins
The Iron Codex Trilogy—Caitlin Kittredge
The Lunar Chronicles—Marissa Meyer
The Razorland Trilogy—Ann Aguire **
The Red Death Duology—Bethany Griffin
The Selection Trilogy—Kaitlin Cass
 
** The Razorland Trilogy is actually a terrible series, badly written and completely implausible based on human physiology, BUT! It's a perfect example of a dystopian novel where the government sucks but is considered a necessary evil, so I included it in this list.

Basically, the publication of The Hunger Games gave rise to a sci-fi subgenre of novels where the main character(s) faced a corrupt government or ruling class or system that everyone (or mostly everyone) actually acknowledged was in fact corrupted. Generally this government came into power after some sort of apocalyptic something or other:

1)    The Chemical Garden Trilogy—a series of natural disasters and the outbreak of a genetically transmitted virus (incurable as of book 1) that killed about 50% of the world's population when males hit 25 and women hit 20 and is slowly eradicating everyone else as those birthdays approach. In this series, the government isn't the problem. It's the father-in-law of the MC; he's basically lord of the manor, as it were, and she's stuck under his power unless she escapes. This ruling class (subject to the government, but with more power than everyone else) is the corrupt group.

2)    The Divergent Trilogy—the outbreak of a huge war (though this governing system put into place afterward, while somewhat corrupt, is not totalitarian, and has only been in power for perhaps three or four generations; the corruption doesn’t begin to truly manifest until a couple years before the events of the first book)

3)    The Hunger Games Trilogy—a series of massive, catastrophic natural disasters crushing the American population to about 500,000 people (if that) set up the establishment of the current government about 150 years before the start of the trilogy; a war 74 years before the book's beginning started to take out said government, only to be quelled by the complete nuclear eradication of 1 of the 13 rebel districts (among other measures).

4)    The Iron Codex Trilogy—an alternate-history of the 1940/50s during the Red Scare, so no natural disasters, but with the appearance of strange preternatural creatures that actively hunt humans about 50-100 years prior to give the humans an "enemy" to fear, similar to what the Nazis did with the Jews; also set against the backdrop of a much more intense Cold War without the historical influence of World War II.

5)    The Lunar Chronicles—set in a country that kind of sucks regarding civil rights anyway (China, part of what's called the Eastern Empire after World War III; yes, that's WW3) and during a long-lasting outbreak of an incurable but highly contagious plague known as letumosis (thus giving the government the right to shut stuff down, arrest people, etc. if evidence of this disease is found). You actually see the difference between the Eastern Empire and France in book 2; the dystopian part is only in book 1 so far, and only for the main character, a cyborg (considered less than human in that country). Also set during the very tentative cease-fire between Earth and a technologically advanced alien race that wants to wipe us out for being an inferior species, so we've got the us/them mentality in use as well.

6)    The Razorland Trilogy—zombie plague and chemical/nuclear warfare about 60 years ago drove everyone underground (as far as the MC knows) into enclaves run by small councils.

7)    The Red Death Duology—war, natural disasters, and terrible incurable plagues created by chemical warfare maybe 20-30 years prior to the start of the novel; in this one, the government isn't so much the problem as a single (insane) person running the government in a principality set somewhere in Europe or the Mediterranean (they don't tell you which; only that there are crocs in the water, but they might've been imported by the psycho). Things really go to Hades in book 1 when the leader of the rebels decides to infect everyone with the Red Death (yep, from the Poe story) as a means of waging war on the city and its psychotic prince.

After the apocalyptic something or other, the government may start out nice, but then turns evil or malevolent in various ways, slowly, stealing the rights and livelihood of the people over time by corrupting those who can be corrupted and killing those who can't. That's a big background plot device in The Red Death Duology, The Hunger Games Trilogy, and The Iron Codex. And unlike in the old utopian/dystopian  novels, people actually notice. How they handle it may vary, and such discussions are for other blog posts, not this one.

A quick aside: I left out a few series that might seem to fall under this category—The Matched Trilogy by Ally Condie, for example, or The Delirium Trilogy by Lauren Oliver. The reason I left these out is because to explain how they fit the parameters would be an entire blog in and of itself. I'll get to it at some point, though, I promise. I've already reviewed Lauren Oliver's Delirium, but I intend to write an essay/blog about it at some point as well. I also plan on doing a four-part essay on apathy, blame, fear, and hope as used by dystopian governments in novels as effective coercion tools, here.

So, to sum up: in order to have a dystopian novel (whether utopian/dystopian or straight up dystopian), tyrannical governments/rulers/ruling forces must be present. For it to be a dystopian novel without the concept of utopia, the masses can't buy into the dictatorial lies.

Now everybody go read The Iron Codex. It's awesome!

LA Knight