Read The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion Online
Authors: Lois H. Gresh
The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion (27 page)
According to Professor Joseph LeDoux, Principal Director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety:
Each time you form a memory, “your brain begins to form that memory in a temporary way that can be interfered with if nothing else happens. So you have to convert a temporary memory into a long-term memory in order to have that memory at some time in the future . . . instead of giving the protein synthesis inhibitor after learning and blocking consolidation, you give it after the retrieval of a previously consolidated memory . . .”
7
This is the method used by the tracker jacker venom in The Hunger Games series. It is what happens to Peeta courtesy of the government. And it’s all very real.
AD
999–1033
Another grand time for all doomsday prophets! New Year’s Eve AD 999 stretching through the first day of AD 1000: One can only imagine the self-flogging, the starvation, the shrieking and praying, and the packed churches.
The apocalyptic hysteria continued until approximately AD 1033 because, when Jesus didn’t return in AD 1000, mystics decided the end of the world would come on the thousandth anniversary of the crucifixion, AD 1033.
W
hat kind of society forces its children to mutilate, torture, and kill each other for entertainment purposes? What kind of society starves its own people? Enslaves them, whips and beats them, hangs and beheads them in public squares? Are the leaders of Panem
truly
evil? Or are they just doing what they think is necessary in “times of war”?
As for the children in the arena, we take it as a given that they are
not
truly evil; rather, they’re forced into gladiator roles by their elders, they really have no choice. But the effects of what they are forced to do—the mutilation, torture, and killing of other children—may harden them and make it
appear
that they are evil. If forced to kill for long enough, can children become
killer kids
? The next chapter, appropriately titled “Killer Kids,” touches on this subject. For now, we look at the nature of evil itself. What makes the adults in The Hunger Games trilogy so despicable?
And there’s no doubt that they
are
despicable. Some seventy-five years after the Dark Days, they’re still holding Hunger Games and Quarter Quells. Surely, the excuse that they must torture and execute people during “times of war” is invalid in their case. They’re so afraid of an uprising, as discussed in chapter 2, “Repressive Regimes and Rebellions,” that they make hell a way of life. But does this make them evil?
I would argue that the adult leaders of Panem in The Hunger Games are indeed evil, as evil as can be. Hunger Games evil isn’t at all the same as “zombie apocalypse” evil or other forms of fantasy horror evil that exist on a separate plane from people. Modern horror monsters can be in the form of human-eating zombies, blood-sucking vampires, killer werewolves, giant octopus-shark creatures from alien worlds, that sort of thing. But Hunger Games monsters are human beings. President Snow certainly can’t use the excuse that a huge wasp-vampire creature from outer space made him torture and execute children. He doesn’t claim that Satan made him do it. There is no supernatural basis for President Snow’s evil. He is responsible for all of his deplorable deeds and actions.
Those who follow him, the so-called Peacekeepers and the Gamemakers, as well as the citizens who dwell in the Capitol, are also responsible for their bad behavior. They eat and they party, they have plastic surgery and fuss over their fashions and appearances, they actively participate in getting the children ready for the Hunger Games. They’re portrayed, in some cases, as fairly loving and fun people, not truly despicable, but they turn away from what they’re doing and do not take responsibility for their own misconduct. Perhaps they can justify their bad actions with the types of excuses that Nazi citizens used in World War II, that their leaders make them ignore the killings and torture; but as noted earlier, the Dark Days were some seventy-five years ago—that is, World War X is not currently going on—so the followers can’t whine that they are acting in “time of war” any more than the leaders can whine about it. No. All of these adults are responsible for what they do to the children in The Hunger Games Series. Even Katniss’s mother,
who is not evil at all
, fails to protect her children.
The heroes are the children themselves, who eventually save the people of Panem from the adults. Of course, Haymitch and other adults do help the children and contribute to the rebellion in
Mockingjay
, but Katniss and the other kids are the ones who really get the job done.
People have always lived with conflicts, aggression, and territorial disputes. From the earliest times, some 6,000 years ago, we banded into units to survive the forces of nature, because after all, the power of several outweighed the power of one. Later, the power of many replaced the power of several.
As humans banded into larger tribes, then into states and countries, our struggles with nature were joined by our struggles against each other. Wars over territory, food, mates—all the attributes of survival in the animal world—took hold, and mankind fought itself in massacre after massacre. Rules, regulations, and laws were created in an attempt to govern our actions, and every alliance has had its military and police forces.
The notion of
evil
has its roots in ancient religious sources; as examples, the Old and New Testaments use the word hundreds of times but includes under the
evil
umbrella all sorts of immoral behaviors and bad actions. Evil in the Bible includes minor items such as touching crawling creatures.
In the Old Testament, evils abound in the Ten Commandments, in Deuteronomy, and Leviticus. For example, Deuteronomy 22:21 declares that a female’s promiscuous behavior is so “evil” that people should stone her to death. Chapter 7 lists abundant evils of the soul, including selfish behaviors, lust for objects rather than spiritual pursuits, coveting what other people have, and so forth. Leviticus focuses on religious laws related to everything imaginable: sacrifices, diet, childbirth, shaving, self harm, sorcery, strangers, hate, etc.
In the New Testament, Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians describes his age as “evil” (1:4–5) basically because mankind performs evil deeds. He warns that “if you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another (5:15).”
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He warns against “deeds of the flesh” such as immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, and carousing (5:19–21).
The Koran identifies similar behaviors as evil, and Zoroaster suggested that people are controlled by a god of light and good as well as a god of darkness and evil.
Theological arguments that try to reconcile the existence of evil in our world with the assumption of a peaceful, benevolent God are called a “theodicy.” The word comes from the Greek words, “justifying God,” and was first used in an essay in 1710 by the German philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz. A typical theodicy hinges on the argument that evil is the result of God letting people have free will. If mankind didn’t have the choice of doing good or evil, then people wouldn’t be any different from machines.
Religions are stocked with images of angels and demons, and also with angels who become demons; hence suggesting that there is a fine line between the two. The implication is that, given our free will, we can fall either way.
Consider Lucifer, the light bearer, the angel who fell from grace and became Satan. According to biblical accounts, his crime was to challenge God’s authority, and for this crime, he and his fallen angels were sent to Hell forever. Once good, he is now evil.
As with all evil governments, Satan has Beelzebub to do a lot of his dirty work. Beelzebub decides that the evil forces should corrupt people and make them evil, too; so Satan corrupts Adam and Eve, and they nibble on the apple, which in their time was a grievous sin with dire consequences.
Possibly, these religious ideas about evil come from the fact that in ancient times, people lived in small tribes that had to fight constantly for survival. Giving birth to and nurturing boys became essential to the success of one tribe over others. During combat, if one tribe had, say, twice the number of warriors than another, then that tribe would probably win the battle. Hence, in early religious sources, crimes relating to all sorts of things that might injure or otherwise hurt the chance of a tribe to survive would be pegged as evil. Rules (or “evils”) regarding cleanliness and diet also contributed to the potential of a tribe to survive. The smaller the chance for infection and potentially deadly illness, the greater the chance for survival.
Definitions of evil vary from time to time, from culture to culture, and from individual to individual; that is, some people think it’s evil to hit a child, while others reserve the term evil for greater crimes such as torturing and murdering a child. It’s hard to know where to draw the line.
Noted scholar Susan Neiman suggested in her best-selling book,
Evil in Modern Thought
, that perhaps a reasonable way to define evil is that it “shatters our trust in the world.”
2
In his best-selling book,
The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil
, Andrew Delbanco further defines the term as expressed during a 2001 PBS interview:
[T]here are human beings who are able, by convincing themselves that there’s some higher good, some higher ideal to which their lives should be dedicated, that the pain and suffering of other individuals doesn’t matter, it doesn’t have to do with them . . . That they’re expendable, that it’s a cost that’s worth making in the pursuit of these objectives. So evil for me is the absence of the imaginative sympathy for other human beings.
3
Delbanco’s definition clearly places the government leaders of The Hunger Games into the category of evil. The pain and suffering of other people, albeit children, doesn’t matter to them; in fact,
they promote the pain and suffering of children
. Other people, albeit children, are expendable, in the pursuit of the higher ideal of quashing any remote chance of rebellion.
