10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #7: “I’ve never been a contender in these Games anyway”
The games the Capitol makes us play are not natural at all
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.
The Hunger Games are a televised gladiatorial combat event in which 24 teenagers, called tributes, are forced to fight to the death in a deadly, natural-looking but actually artificial arena. The winning tribute and their home district are rewarded with food and riches. The Games provide entertainment for the Capitol. Most importantly, they remind the districts of its overwhelming power.
Panem’s rulers present the Games as a celebration, and also perversely an unending punishment for the districts’ past rebellion. But the Games embody the Capitol’s ideology in a deeper way. They normalize a destructive set of social ‘values’ which serve the elite, namely brutal competitive individualism among the poor. This is really why the Games are so important to the Capitol.
The Games promote a brutal competitive individualism that seeks to obliterate all other values, and humanity itself. They exert the Capitol’s control beyond its economic exploitation of the districts, into peoples’ ability to envision an alternative future free of domination.
But the Games also have another role: promoting the illusion of meritocracy. In the film adaptation of the first book, President Snow explains to Seneca the Gamemaker the reason for the Hunger Games. He could easily pick 24 children from the districts and shoot them, but the important thing is to have a winner. This gives people a glimmer of hope: “A little hope is fine. A lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is fine, as long as it’s contained.”
Suzanne Collins suggests how the system manages dissent through this modicum of meritocracy. The economy offers no possibility of advancement, but through the Games there’s the promise to the victors of a life of luxury and the adulation of the Capitol. Of course, it’s a small chance, first to be chosen for and then to survive the tournament. But while the Games strike terror in the poorer districts, competing in them is something that some young people in the career districts actually hunger for.
The Capitol’s presentation of the Games – two young tributes from each district “to be trained in the art of survival and to be prepared to fight to the death” – is of course deceptive. The environment of the arena provides the illusion of choice: competitors can adopt different strategies and use whatever skills they like. They could even make the ‘choice’ not to kill. But as noted, its meritocracy is a myth, since the career tributes typically win, and sponsors typically favor those most likely to prevail. The game is rigged against the poorest districts from the start.
It’s frequently forgotten that the term ‘meritocracy’ was not meant to be taken literally. It was coined in 1958 by the sociologist Michael Young in his essay The Rise of the Meritocracy as a satire of the seemingly merit-based education system in the UK at the time. Young claimed that this system only appeared to reward the intelligent and hard-working; in reality its testing masked a selection process that served the already privileged, rather like the pre-Games judges’ scoring system in The Hunger Games that favors the career tributes who have been training from a young age. Even if a few can climb into privilege, this doesn’t justify the wealth of the Capitol. In a deeply unjust system, meritocracy is a myth. The odds are never in our favor.
This meritocracy serves another purpose. In theory at least, the Games are every man and woman (child, really) for themselves (the supposedly natural elite of the Capitol never puts up its own competitors). But the objective is to crush feelings of solidarity and interdependence between the districts, which is to say, the ordinary working and middle class (such as they are) of Panem. Much as how modern states use class, religious, ethnic and other differences to divide the working class and hinder their organization, Panem uses the Games to foster competition rather than cooperation between the districts, despite the fact that they have more in common with each other than anyone inside the Capitol’s citadel. They literally get the districts to fight against each other.
At first sight Panem may not resemble a ‘free market,’ but there are more similarities between the two than we might think. The Games particularly model capitalist competition. We’re compelled to see others as tributes. There are limited resources – artificially limited, in turns out, to force us to fight each other.
The only times that more supplies are made available, this too is designed to make competitors act more ruthlessly. This happens at the start of the Games to ensure an initial spectacular bloodbath, and later on, when the Gamemakers construct a ‘cornucopia’ in the center of the arena, a treasury of weapons and supplies that the tributes can try to seize. (Smartly, Katniss goes in the opposite direction, and later she destroys the cornucopia to try to level the playing field. It’s a victory, but it still means she’s trapped within the competitive logic of the Games, leaving the other tributes hungrier and more defenseless.)
As in our economy, the people of Panem instructed that the rules are unchangeable, even though the Gamemakers manipulate them for the Capitol’s benefit. As competitors, we’re fundamentally on our own. And we’re told that the winners – in theory the strongest and smartest, but actually those most suited to this particular game – deserve all of the spoils.
Even if we see how the game is constructed, we find ourselves thinking that any alternative values such as kindness, compassion, collaboration are for losers. Like Katniss, we come to believe that such impulses, rather than being the only route to our collective survival, represent our greatest danger. This is the struggle, then, for us to avoid becoming the monsters they want us to be.
However, the spectacle of the Games also creates an opportunity for the subversion of the Capitol’s story of subjection for the “good of the nation,” ultimately into one of personal sacrifice, of love, demonstrating a different kind of unity. This is the spark that Katniss sets off when she volunteers. And it won’t stop there.
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: