10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #10: “Because that’s what you and I do. Protect each other”
The real revolution that lies hidden at the heart of The Hunger Games
This is a series of blog posts based on my new book, Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games, published in April/May 2021 by Zero Books.
In The Hunger Games, young people are offered up as sacrifices for the elite-controlled state. They face a punitive and divisive economic system, environmental collapse, authoritarian populist politics, sophisticated media manipulation and total surveillance. For Americans and others who don’t recognize the dystopia that’s already here, let alone the one to come, it’s either because they feel safely ensconced in the Capitol or because they’ve already accepted its Hobbesian propaganda.
It’s the authoritarian populists of the right who’ve benefited the most politically from early collapse. As it advances further, collapse will tear to pieces the left’s desire to direct an essentially stable state to share wealth much more widely. Collapse is corroding social trust, tolerance, truth. Crisis and scarcity are being used to spread fear and scapegoating. The elite’s endgame is working.
As our societies struggle to respond, people’s despair and disengagement with democracy will continue to grow. Confidence in it has already weakened across Western countries; this has increased political instability and made populaces more prey to demagogues and disinformation. More people will look to seemingly ‘strong leaders’ and reject liberal principles in favor of promises of greater ‘security.’
Unfortunately, because of early collapse, our age of conflict, anger, polarization and denial is the worst possible context in which to try to engineer a more rational future. The Capitol is winning collapse. It looks like the districts have already lost.
In the backstory to The Hunger Games, during the Dark Days, the war between the Capitol and the districts nearly wiped-out humanity. At some point the districts were forced to surrender, perhaps to save whoever remained. An armistice was signed, resulting in the Treaty of Treason. Perhaps the ultimate advantage held by the Capitol is that it’s happy for people to die to protect its dominant position in Panem. Just like elites in our world.
For the center-left, there will be no steady progress toward the perfect social democratic, let alone democratic socialist, order. For the radical left, there will be no universal global revolution. Once, we might have thought that if we want to live in a different world, this world has to end. Now, this world is going to end, but in totally inhospitable ways. The challenge is how we might survive, and maybe one day, begin to build different worlds.
But The Hunger Games also contains the seeds of a different, better world, and it plays out starting in the Arena. In the Games, Katniss befriends a young girl from District 11 called Rue. When they become allies, they learn more about each other’s districts than they’ve ever been taught in school or through Panem’s state-controlled media. This begins to bridge the system of segregation: a cross-racial alliance between two of the poorest districts in Panem. Katniss and Rue recognize their common oppression under the power structure. This is not how the game is supposed to be played.
Then, Rue’s death politicizes Katniss, or rather, brings to the surface her buried emotions. It breaks through Katniss’ wariness about connections with people. Now, the debt becomes political, the obligation becomes for Katniss to make a statement, to defy the Capitol.
Katniss memorializes Rue in a bed of flowers, an act of humanity. Now her actions are conscious: she repeats the three-finger solidarity salute from District 12. It’s a clear demonstration of defiance: if the Capitol doesn’t own her, maybe it doesn’t own the districts either…
In the film, we cut to a seemingly spontaneous uprising in District 11. The workers destroy machinery and sacks of crops. Peacekeepers rush to snuff out the spark of revolt. But something has started, something that can’t be unseen.
Katniss would like to be totally self-reliant; she thinks this is crucial to survival under the system. But she can’t be, and The Hunger Games is partly the story of how she comes to realize the importance of her interdependence with others. Survival, let alone social change, can’t be individual, it has to be collective. It can only happen together.
Such small acts of kindness might seem inconsequential, but they can be the seeds of change. In our political climate, which increasingly rests on the idea that empathy is impossible, kindness might not be a distraction from radical change. Maybe it is radical change – or at least the beginning of it, as the spreading ripples of cooperation and compassion played out in the Arena, and subsequently beyond, suggest.
In The Hunger Games, a revolution emerges – or had it been planned for some time? My new book, Stay Alive, ends by examining the nature of this revolution and its implications for dissent in our own world – what it suggests about how regimes fall, and most importantly how revolutions need to be based firmly in justice if they stand any hope of creating a truly just society.
Some commentators suggest the ending of the series is essentially anti-political. The new Panem is no utopia. In the longer-term it may not even survive as a free and fair society. Katniss seemingly withdrawing from it, at least from its political life. Not continuing to fight for justice, isn’t this what the Capitol would have wanted? What kind of journey has she been on, if she ends up here?
But as I write in the book, there’s another interpretation. Katniss not only survived the Hunger Games, she did it through collaboration and compassion. And ultimately, faced with a difficult choice, she stood against hierarchy and exploitation in all its forms, and paid the price. Now, understandably, she hopes for healing.
What Katniss really represents is a hidden revolution – a kind of revolution that we don’t have to wait for, one that we can start to live every day, starting now.
But for more about that, you’ll have to buy the book.
Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games is published in April/May 2021 by Zero Books and can be pre-ordered from the following places now: