10 ways The Hunger Games is our present – and our future. #9: “They’re afraid of you”
How regimes try to contain young people
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.
Brutal competition, the stark division between winners and losers, constant surveillance, the pressure of perfomative living, the fear that life might be over before it’s really begun...of course The Hunger Games speaks to young people. In its dramatization of ordinary young heroes fighting for their lives, and to retain their dignity and integrity, they see their own world and who they might have to be in it.
The Capitol and its commentators want them to submit to its propaganda, to doubt their own senses, and to blame themselves for failing to fit into its fraudulent constructions. But the reality of the system is revealed in what they feel and experience: fear, anxiety, trauma, alienation, hopelessness.
But why does the Capitol go to all of this trouble to treat ‘its’ young people so horrendously, at the risk of generating widespread disgust at its rule? The answer is because its fear of them is even greater.
Which is why The Hunger Games is about containment, and the fundamental fear that Capitol elites have about the people of the districts. Katniss, the other tributes, the districts, even the victors – all are constantly contained and herded, by fences, borders, Peacekeepers, artificial arenas and deadly hazards, pervasive propaganda and reality TV productions.
In our world, young people will live in a future of walls, of containment driven by collapse, environmental destruction, scarcity and a sociopathic elder elite’s fear of losing power. More than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, young people are unconstrained by fears of authoritarian ‘socialism.’ New walls need to be constructed, of individualism, intolerance, hopelessness and passivity. Working out what’s real and what’s Capitol propaganda will be crucial, the first step to surviving the coming hunger games. And let’s remember that the Capitol wouldn’t bother with its propaganda if it wasn’t fundamentally scared of us.
In The Hunger Games, Katniss is the last person to recognize her significance, and our potential to bring down the walls. Despite starting the story in numbness and self-doubt, Katniss will come to recognize she’s not to blame, that it’s the system, and that recovery and healing, personal and collective, will only be possible if the true source of terror is confronted.
But the Capitol and the rebels identify her power long before she does. What she wakes up to is not the full horror of the system, she’s more than aware of that. No, what she comes to understand is that, in the world of Panem, survival is unavoidably a revolutionary act.
The Capitol tries to contain its children because it’s terrified of them politically, because despite its propaganda, there’s nothing natural or inevitable about the state it’s created and coerces people into accepting. Its fear of youth is really its fear of how they could challenge its institutions of exploitation. In Panem, the Games are a pre-emptive punishment against young people’s revolutionary potential.
What The Hunger Games points to, an important part of its success with young readers, is its examination of how youth oppression is so normalized that we often don’t notice it.
Adults should protect young people, not punish them. But protective adults are too often absent. The activist and organizer Andrew Slack has noted the prevalence of “orphans versus empires” in much popular fantasy, from Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and Superman and many other superheroes, to Harry Potter. As Andrew suggests, this isn’t a coincidence.
Orphanhood is also reflected in The Hunger Games. Katniss and her sister Prim have lost their father and effectively their mother as well. Katniss is angry about her mother’s resignation, even though she can understand it. Like many children from dysfunctional homes, Katniss keeps their situation secret from the outside world, out of fear of the authorities taking her and her sister away into ‘care.’ The other young people don’t really seem to have present parents either. And then, being taken from their homes and forced to fight in the Games represents the ultimate orphanhood.
But politically as well, as young people push further into the world, they discover another orphanhood. There is no real adult leadership, responsibility or nurturing in Panem. And not enough in our world either. Young people are orphans of a system that has abandoned them, and humanity. Like Katniss, they’re a generation left to figure it out for themselves.
Oh, and it turns out that the elders in the Capitol are right to fear the young people of Panem.
In our world, as conditions worsen, there will probably be some kind of generational rebellion. Frustrated by the lack of response to crisis, some young people will become more militant, even take violent action against a system that’s doomed them. But like the first rebellion in The Hunger Games, against the overwhelming power of the Capitol this is likely to fail. Violent protest will be used to justify state repression, and then we’re heading into the hunger games.
So whether we read The Hunger Games in generational, geographical, historical, colonial, economic, environmental or class terms, it depicts our most likely endgame. Propaganda about freedom and free markets will be replaced by calls for security for a few and serfdom for many. The Capitol will openly serve corporate interests against workers. Control will be achieved through state repression and economic segregation, an authoritarian capitalism. These regimes will favor older people and contain and immiserate the young. The serfs will be heavily policed and militarized, aided by advanced technology and near-total surveillance, a digitized dictatorship. Media spectacle and shock tactics – perhaps some future version of the Hunger Games, probably a punishment for ‘political dissidents’ – will be used to deter popular resistance.
For the masses, the system will induce exhaustion and a focus on survival. A minimal meritocracy will buy-off a small part of the non-elite, but in reality social advancement will be severely limited. This new order will not be popular, but it will be justified as necessary to preserve society against ‘hostile forces.’ This system needs a name. After The Hunger Games, we could call it ‘capitolism’.
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: