The four words that explain why The Hunger Games resonates politically with young people
I’d suggest the words are: the game is rigged.
Talk about great timing: the first Hunger Games book was published in the midst of a global financial crisis - literally on the day investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and the crisis entered its most acute phase. The resulting austerity was inflicted mainly on the young, the poor and minorities. Much of The Hunger Games’ generation has lived with a lack of opportunity and ever-growing inequalities in generational wealth and power, alongside war and terror, and reality-twisting politicians.
Put simply, many young people don’t believe they stand a fair chance anymore. Nor do they think this is likely to change; we’re probably going to see the same thing happen in the wake of the pandemic, in which again, already, the young, the poor and minorities have been hardest hit economically.
And what should worry elites most is that many young people also know why.
This is from chapter five of my forthcoming book Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games, out on 30th April/1st May 2021:
“The Games aren’t just a distraction. They also perform a propaganda role in establishing a dominant set of social values, values that legitimize the state’s brutality and enforced inequality, and corrode the natural social solidarity that might threaten the Capitol. The Games model and promote, attempt to naturalize, the Capitol’s broader ideology: brutal competitive individualism for the masses, eternal punishment for the poor, and a hopelessness that they can ever really win. They are the engineered embodiment of the degradation for which the Party in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four strives: “In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement...Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.”
Even 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 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. It’s possible to grant the Capitol credit that this may also be a conscious part of its ideological design for the Games, a way to reinforce that the game is rigged against the poorest districts from the start.
But 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). 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.”
Stay Alive: Surviving Capitalism’s Coming Hunger Games is published in paperback and e-book in April/May 2021 by Zero Books and can be pre-ordered from the following places now: