10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #5: “Look at the state they left us in”
The disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires... Panem is post-collapse. It’s also coming here
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.
It’s little commented on, but The Hunger Games is about civilizational collapse. In the books, before the reaping, the mayor of District 12 recounts the history of Panem: “...the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained” (the backstory of environmental disaster is not mentioned in the films). There’s also a later reference to “the destruction of the atmosphere.” Panem is post-collapse. It’s also our future.
The Hunger Games takes place at an unspecified future date, in the dystopian, post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, located in what is now the United States. The country is smaller than today, geographically and demographically. Apparently, large areas of land were made uninhabitable by rising sea levels and many people died (for example, the population of District 12 is said to be just 8,000 people).
As many reviewers have noted, Suzanne Collins is a very deliberate world builder, with lots of historical references and allusions. But the story really resonates because it looks forward. The future in the story isn’t really so futuristic, it’s fast oncoming social fact.
We don’t know exactly when, but we do know that the original trilogy is set more than a hundred years in the future. What it anticipates is our actual near future.
Remember the deceptive story that the Capitol tells about Panem’s history: “The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens.” In other words, the Capitol was strengthened by collapse. So it will be in our world.
Climate change and environmental destruction will lead to failing food production systems, widespread hunger, more conflict and refugees, greater social control and ultimately authoritarianism. Crisis will provide the opportunity for elites to establish new regimes built on segregation and exploitation. We’re already living in an early collapse politics which is increasingly divisive and autocratic. There’s much more to come.
In the world of The Hunger Games, environmental crisis destroyed the United States’ economy and agriculture. This resulted in a civil war over scarce food supplies, culminating in a totalitarian regime. But the districts rebelled against the Capitol. Hunger and conflict nearly killed off the whole of humankind, or at least the population of the former United States. The districts lost, leaving a highly segregated, autocratic society of poverty and backwardness for a majority, and extreme wealth and advanced technology for a protected few.
In our world, oncoming collapse also helps to explain young people’s trauma; they know (some of) what’s coming and have a sense of hopelessness, fear and frustration. The youngest generation have really only known early collapse: terror, war, economic crisis, social division, political instability and the rise of authoritarian populism. No one under 30 has known a stable climate. Not a single month in their lifetime has fallen within the temperature range, rain or storm activity that has governed the planet for the past 10,000 years. Successive generations will grow up into a world shaped entirely by collapse, forced to compete in a hunger games of their own.
If you’re young, you’re going to witness the destabilization of life on earth: massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, widespread flooding and hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat and permanent drought. Studies show that the fear of nuclear annihilation scarred children growing up in the Cold War. Gen Z is already scarred by their equivalent. Many young people think that they’ll die from climate change before they die of old age. It’s the reaping hanging over them.
At the same time, under capitalism, young people have been stripped of the possibility of change, even though they fear we face the end of civilization. Of course, many young people are fighting back, setting the stage for a generational war. Unfortunately, it’s one they’re likely to lose. We have no definitive guide to what will happen and when. But it’s inevitable, not a single problem we can avoid or engineer our way out of, but a civilizational predicament we’re locked into and which it’s too late to avoid. The roots of our crisis lie in an unfair, unequal, unsustainable, fossil fuel-dependent economic system, and the attempts to defend it which are using authoritarianism and populist politics as a distraction.
The Hunger Games isn’t really speculative science fiction, then. There’s no new technology here that we haven’t seen in many other future- set stories. The series is speculative political science, a warning that’s coming true. The future is already in our present. The world is catching fire.
We sometimes wonder how elites don’t see it. But they’re not in denial. For them, it isn’t capitalism that will collapse, it’s democracy, into full oligarchy. A Panem-like society isn’t the accidental outcome of this ideology, it’s the inevitable, and desired, endgame.
As the saying goes, it’s easier to envisage the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But for elites, the former doesn’t mean the latter. Power and wealth were all they really wanted anyway. Elites have signed a death warrant, effectively a Treaty of Treason (the Hunger Games’ founding document), for young people, the most vulnerable, the marginalized and disenfranchised. As collapse becomes unavoidable, the open secret of elites’ endgame becomes clear: a destroyed environment, fortress enclaves for the rich, segregated exploitation for the rest of us.
As we burn, they have no intention of burning with us.
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: