by Leah Wilson
So, while irreparably flawed as a system to create more “genetically healed” Divergents, the Chicago experiment does recognize the idea of nurture. However, the “nurturing” it provides is far from optimal. It may even be counterproductive, especially in Dauntless.
FEAR TAMING, DAUNTLESS STYLE
Let’s apply what we know about the biology of fear to the Dauntless training program. Is it therapeutic? Does it provide the skills to control fear?
Let’s start by considering Dauntless headquarters. It’s a giant, dark hole in the ground that provides ample opportunities to die. What is the reasoning behind that? Tris sums it up pretty well when she says, “I have realized that part of being Dauntless is being willing to make things more difficult for yourself in order to be self-sufficient. There’s nothing especially brave about wandering dark streets with no flashlight, but we are not supposed to need help, even from light” (Divergent). For Tris, negotiating Dauntless’ dimly lit passages and rough floors is preparation for future moments when she will have nothing to depend on but herself. She imagines that to be a positive goal, but that sort of self-reliance comes at a cost. A culture that scorns “help” devalues teamwork and cooperation. The priorities of Dauntless are training and technology. Teamwork isn’t on the list. And we learn from Tobias that both the faction’s training and technology are becoming more brutal.
The simulations in the fear landscapes are a key part of Dauntless training. What happens during those sessions? As Tobias crisply describes the process to Jeanine in Insurgent, “The simulations stimulate the amygdala, which is responsible for processing fear, induce a hallucination based on that fear, and then transmit the data to a computer to be processed and observed.” Knowing what we do about stimulating the amygdala, the cascade of fear responses, and counterconditioning, it seems possible that the simulations might be used therapeutically. Time spent in a personal fear landscape is an opportunity to confront specific stimuli in a controlled situation. It sounds very much like the program used in fear extinction. However, considering Four’s repeated visits and the fact that his fears may change but are never extinguished, the technology doesn’t seem to be any great advantage.
As advanced as Dauntless technology is in evoking fear, the techniques they use to tame it are simple. When Four prepares Tris for her first visit to her fear landscape in Divergent, he gives her this instruction: “Lower your heart rate and control your breathing.” He might as well have said, “Deep, slow respirations cause a slowing of the pulse.” That’s how the principle was stated in a letter written in 1922.11 It works, but it’s not exactly cutting-edge technology in action.
As I was reading the Divergent trilogy, the multitude of serums made me curious: What about the potential for a “serum” that is an antidote to fear? Could we overcome fear with an injection?12
Research led by Moshe Szyf at McGill University indicates it is possible to “remove” the “residue” of fear from the brain. Ordinarily, rats neglected by their mothers are more fearful, less able to learn, and generally less healthy. But, when the researchers injected a drug called trichostatin A directly into the brains of rats deprived of nurturing care, that damage was undone.13 The result has been compared to rebooting a computer. Knowing what we do about epigenetic harm, that “reboot” could even provide a long-term benefit, preventing the effects of stress from being inherited by future generations.
Another option might be a modification of the Bureau’s memory serum. Instead of deleting memories as a means of social control, the memory serum might be better used to help individuals regain mental health. It appears to be an attainable goal. Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute have successfully targeted and erased specific memories from the brains of mice.14 Eventually, it may be possible to alleviate the disruptive memories related to PTSD. We could even use it to help people overcome addictions by wiping out associated memories that trigger cravings. Those suffering from debilitating, irrational phobias might look forward to relief.
But there is another strategy that requires fewer needles in fewer brains. Instead of reversing the damage done by fear, it is possible to prevent it. A brain that grows up in a secure, nurturing environment is more resilient and more resistant to the negative effects of fear in the first place. Reliable kindness and love can serve as a sort of immunization. Maybe Tris is able to endure and persevere throughout her trials because she received a dose of emotional serum in the form of good nurturing that strengthened her and hastened her recovery from stress and trauma.
In terms of making people fear resistant, Dauntless training probably does more harm than good. It neglects fear “prevention” and focuses instead on overcoming physical reactions by repeated exposure, and we’ve already seen how damaging that sort of constant stress can be. But there is another, bigger problem regarding the culture of fear in Tris’ Chicago, and it isn’t limited to the Dauntless. The entire faction system is an incubator for a particular variety of fear: the fear of others (or otherness). And that fear is one that almost inevitably leads to violence.
FEAR AND VIOLENCE
Social systems that are inherently unjust breed insurrection. This dynamic echoes throughout the trilogy. Inside future Chicago, the factionless live in abject poverty doing menial jobs. Evelyn’s “army” is composed of disenfranchised people without hope or opportunity. Outside, the world is divided into GP (genetically pure) and GD (genetically damaged). The GDs are lower status, which is brought home when Matthew tells Tobias the story of the violent attack on the girl he loved. The crime goes unpunished because the attackers are privileged GPs and the victim is considered to be less important. That injustice spurred Matthew to help Nita and her group of rebels. When the social order is so abusive, anarchy looks tempting. Tris observes in Allegiant: “It seems like the rebellions never stop . . . ” The factionless, the Allegiant, and the GD rebels are all militant groups, and their militancy is always in reaction to a system that marginalizes them.
Honestly, the world of the Divergent trilogy looks a little too much like the one I live in now. When the Dauntless, under influence, take to the streets and massacre the Abnegation, the result is hard to distinguish from propaganda-fueled ethnic cleansings in Rwanda, Germany, and Armenia, where people were systematically targeted and killed because they were perceived as a threat.
It doesn’t require hallucinations or activation of tiny transmitters to trigger that sort of violence. Remember the scene in Allegiant where the bullies attack a Candor boy because he has broken the dress code and is still wearing black and white? He wasn’t wearing the right color clothes. I wish that scene was unbelievably exaggerated and not something that could ever happen, but in the real world people have been killed because they wore the wrong color bandana.
Gang violence, eugenics programs that focus on genetic “purity,” and ethnic cleansing all have the same purpose: eradication of difference, the erasure of the Other. And the foundation of all of them is the same ancient fear. That same fear triggered the Purity War and flourishes in the fundamental distrust between the groups in future Chicago. It created a situation ripe for violence, and that violence occurred again and again.
We don’t have to live mired in fear. We have alternatives. We can become more like Tris. We can think before we act. We can recognize the amygdala’s response for what it is, an often-misguided overreaction. We can build on the empathic impulses born in our mirror neurons. We can learn to recognize our common humanity and respect difference. We can be models not of fear, but of tolerance and compassion. We don’t have to become the citizens of future Chicago; we could be free.
“Becoming fearless isn’t the point. That’s impossible. It’s learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it, that’s the point.”
—Tobias, Divergent
FEAR AND THE DAUNTLESS BOY
More than any other character in the book, Tobias is identified with and by his fears. He is called “Four” because he has only
four fears. It is through his instruction of Tris and the other initiates that we learn how the fear landscapes work and what their role is in Dauntless training.
Let’s take a walk though his fear landscape and look at each of his fears in light of what we know about how fear happens and why we fear the things we do.
We learn about his first fear, the fear of heights, even before his and Tris’ visit to the simulation. When Tris climbs up the Ferris wheel during the capture-the-flag exercise, she guesses the truth when she sees how he behaves. When Tris asks about it, Four replies, “I ignore my fear.” When presented with a height-related challenge in his fear landscape, Tobias leaps, demonstrating his ability to do just that. Stepping from the top of the Ferris wheel would have been a terrible plan, but in the simulated fear landscape, it’s a smart move, since the goal is to ignore the fear, to neutralize it. Through his repeated visits to his fear landscape, it seems that Tobias has learned how to persevere despite his fear.
Confinement—claustrophobic confinement—is the second of the fears he confronts in his landscape. Claustrophobia is one of the many manifestations of the fear of smothering. Like the fear of heights, this fear is common enough to qualify as a “preset,” but the fear in this case is compounded, made worse by his experiences as a child. His father used confinement in a closet as a punishment. That trauma amplifies the natural fear. One result is that this fear is more difficult to overcome. I have no idea how he usually solves this problem, but in this case, he is distracted and amused by Tris. It is only when he laughs out loud that this part of the trial ends.
Next is the situation where an armed woman presents a threat, but the apparent potential danger is not the fear at work. The challenge for Tobias is to pick up the gun and use it. He isn’t in a panic, but he dreads this act. (What is the difference between dread and panic? Dread happens when there is time to think. It is what Tobias is forced to experience as he lifts the gun, loads the single bullet, and pulls the trigger.) In this scenario Tobias confronts his own capacity for violence. Killing the woman, coldly and methodically, is the only way forward. There is something both brutal and banal about this act, one Tris imagines him having committed within the fear landscape a thousand times before. She even observes that Tobias accomplishes this step without much difficulty, but she may be underestimating the toll this deliberate killing takes on him. The worst possible outcome, and the fear he faces here, may be the day this part of the scenario no longer elicits an emotional response like fear—when it no longer “feels real.”
The next fear that he faces is his own father, Marcus, who abused Tobias repeatedly as a child. The scars of that sort of abuse run deeper than the marks left behind by the belt. Even now, when Tobias is an adult capable of fighting back, he cringes, defenseless against his abuser. The engine of the imagination has taken this traumatic memory and fused it with other fears: there are many Marcuses—a swarm of Marcuses—and the belts they carry slither like snakes.
As we learn in Allegiant, the fear landscape is always in flux. After Tobias faces and physically defeats Marcus in the real world, his fears change. Heights and smothering confinement still make an appearance, but he makes short work of them. That is when a new and horrible fear reveals itself. He is no longer afraid of suffering punishing abuse; he is afraid of the threat Marcus poses to his character, future, and identity. He is no longer afraid of Marcus the abuser, he is afraid of becoming that abuser. Tobias is afraid he will become like Marcus. It is a legitimate fear. One of the tragedies of child abuse is that those who experience or witness abuse are more likely to become abusers. This makes a certain sad sense when we think of the ways we learn as infants and children, of the mirror neurons in the brain, and how we imitate others. It is very difficult for Tobias to shake off that fear, to reclaim his own identity.
The final fear that Tobias faces is the fear of losing Tris.
When he leaves his fear landscape after he experiences the horrible grief of being unable to save her, he resolves not to use the simulation again. He doesn’t need to relive his fears; he needs to overcome them in the real world. Because it is there, moment by moment, that he risks loving Tris. It is there, moment by moment, that Four becomes Tobias, no longer defined by his fears.
Blythe Woolston would aspire to Erudite, fail catastrophically, and end up among the factionless. She is the author of Black Helicopters, a novel about a young suicide terrorist. Her earlier books, The Freak Observer and Catch & Release, reflect her interest in science. Her next book is full of imaginary monsters, because she needed a little vacation from the terrors of the real world, and wriggling tentacles are a pleasant change. She lives in Montana.
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1 Association for Psychological Science. “Evolution of Aversion: Why Even Children Are Fearful of Snakes.” Science Daily, 28 Feb. 2008. Accessed 11 Nov. 2013.
2 Quan Van Le et al., “Pulvar Neurons Reveal Neurobiological Evidence of Past Selection for Rapid Detection of Snakes,” PNAS (Oct. 28, 2013).
3 I’m mildly alektorophobic myself. I had a bad experience with a flock of fowl when I was very small, and I never quite got over it. Imagine my fear landscape, where giant chickens roam—it’s okay to laugh.
4 Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1899.
5 You actually have two amygdalae, one in each hemisphere of your brain. It’s just easier to talk about one of them. In addition to the role it plays in fear, the amygdala is also involved in other emotions, memory learning and communication. Amygdala: tiny but very influential.
6 During observation of a rat brain, the travel time was clocked at twelve milliseconds (.012 seconds).
7 Ms. Roth sought therapy for her GAD years after she wrote Divergent. She shared her experience on this blog: Granger, John. “10 Questions with Veronica Roth, Author of the Divergent Trilogy, Part 3.” The Hogwarts Professor. 6 March 2013.
8 According to Jeanine’s logic, the abundance of mirror neurons in Tris’ brain indicates that she is untrustworthy and a danger to others. Her mirror neurons make it easier for her to imitate others, to be deceptive, to be a spy. Unsurprisingly, Jeanine’s is a distorted perspective.
9 Jennifer N. Gutsell and Michael Inzlicht, “Empathy Constrained: Prejudice Predicts Reduced Mental Simulation of Actions during Observation of Outgroups,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (Sep. 2010).
10 Dias, B.G. and K.J. Ressler. “Presentation Abstract: ‘Influencingbehavior and neuroanatomy in the mammalian nervous system via ancestral experiences.’” Neuroscience 2013.12 Nov. 2013.
11 C. W Lueders, “Voluntary Control of the Heart Rate through Respiration,” JAMA 79 (1922).
12 The fear of needles and injections is fairly common, but not in future Chicago, judging by the abundance of hypodermics and, in Dauntless, tattoos.
13 M. Szyf, I. Weaver, and M. Meaney, “Maternal Care, the Epigenome and Phenotypic Differences in Behavior,” Reproductive Toxicology (2007).
14 Erica J. Young et al., “Selective, Retrieval-Independent Disruption of Methamphetamine-Associated Memory by Actin Depolymerization,” Biological Psychiatry (2013).
If I had to sum up the Divergent trilogy in a single word (and, okay, if both choice and sacrifice were taken), I’d pick family. Family and its attendant baggage are what drive most of Tris’ and Tobias’ decisions, whether we’re talking Tris’ commitment to protecting the information her parents died for or Tobias’ fear of his father. Mary Borsel-lino delves further into the role of family, both in Tris’ and Tobias’ stories and in the series as a whole.
THEY INJURE EACH OTHER IN THE SAME WAY
Family in the Divergent Trilogy
MARY BORSELLINO
The journey from childhood to adulthood is one that, by its very nature, requires us to leave behind the child versions of ourselves. This means that, in order to discover who we are and what our personal moral stances on the issues in our lives entails, we have to go through a process of rejecting our parents. It’s normal, it’s healthy, and it can be very frightening.
The Divergent novels tap into this fear, not only in the obvious ways, but also through the use of the archetypal Hero’s Journey. In its most basic form, the hero’s journey is this: a hero sets out on a quest to get something needed at home, accomplishes the quest and gets the prize, and then returns home with the prize in order to provide the help needed there. If you interpret the “prize” of the Divergent novels to be mature self-discovery, then it becomes clear that Tris is on this very same kind of journey throughout the series.
Because of the trilogy’s structure, with each novel offering new layers of revelation about the true nature of society, it’s not obvious at the outset of Divergent exactly what it is that is needed in the society—what it is that Tris must venture out and return with. Nevertheless, her story starts the way the hero’s journey does: she leaves behind the family and life she’s known. Over the course of the three books, she tries on different versions of herself, maturing and changing as life teaches her more lessons. Then, knowing herself and who she is, Tris returns “home” to the values that her parents taught her and leans on those values to find the strength and selflessness she needs to sacrifice herself for the future of those she cares about.
Even outside of the kind of life-and-death adventures found in fiction, this journey—rejecting your role as your parents’ dependent child, discovering who you are apart from them, and then ultimately coming back to forge a new adult bond with them—is a huge part of what it means to grow up. As Tris and Tobias both discover, it’s only once you know who you are outside of the context of your childhood family unit that you can come to know and understand your parents on equal footing.
