by Leah Wilson
THE BAD: BEING OUT OF A GROUP
There’s an unavoidable downside that comes with all those upsides: for a group to exist, there has to be something that makes some people “in” and other people “out.” Segregation, by its very nature, focuses on exclusion rather than inclusion, and that comes with the very real risk of not only setting person against person, but group against group—no matter how respectable, principled, and ethical a group might be.
People who remain “in” the group develop biases against those who are not a part of the group, and act accordingly. For those on the outside, the manifestations of these biases run the gamut from the mildly uncomfortable to incredibly harsh.
We see one of the milder manifestations of this kind of bias in the Chicago experiment early in Divergent, when Tris transfers to Dauntless and is immediately nicknamed Stiff. “Stiff” is the term other factions use to talk disdainfully about Abnegation. There’s a stereotype and accompanying slur for every faction: an Erudite is a Nose; a Dauntless is an adrenaline junkie; a Candor is a smart-mouth; Amities are “banjo strumming softies.” They’re all evidence of the prejudices that have arisen from the city’s segregation into factions. In Tris’ city, where the factions largely live separately, the expression of these prejudices mostly remains verbal. In our world, though, similar prejudices—between different races or sexualities or even groups like nerds and jocks—lead to violence all the time.
Those inside the group, or who want to be there, don’t avoid the negative consequences of faction life either. There is often a price one must pay in order to belong—and I don’t mean membership dues.
In order to join some groups, initiates must perform certain rituals that allow group leaders to evaluate their suitability to join. Sororities and fraternities on college campuses have rush weeks to screen students who wish to join them, then take on prospective members as pledges. Although many of the pledging rituals are relatively harmless (tending more toward having the initiates embarrass and/or demean themselves publicly), there are times when these customs become far more dangerous. Hazing of prospective members has, on occasion, led to serious physical harm or death—much like in the case of the Dauntless initiate who fails to make the roof when jumping from the train.
Despite these risks, many people continue to take part in initiations and hazings because their desire to get into a certain group is more powerful than their misgivings and fears. Tris herself stuffs down any emotion surrounding the girl’s death, rationalizing that being Dauntless is dangerous and people dying is an unavoidable aspect of her new chosen life. That risk is just the cost of being Dauntless.
That need to belong also affects members’ behavior. When you want to be a part of something badly enough, you’ll do a lot—maybe even anything—to belong, and that willingness to change your behavior in order to become part of a group can be exploited. During Dauntless initiation, the low initiate acceptance rate creates so much rivalry within the group that people like Peter are willing to maim and kill in order to remove obstacles that might keep them from being admitted to the group—which is what Dauntless leadership intends to happen. The desperation to become Dauntless drives initiates not only to get better at positive skills like throwing knives and overcoming fear, but also to become more brutal. And those who are not as strong or as ruthless can get hurt.
Even once you’re accepted into a group, things don’t necessarily get any easier or better. There are those individuals who initially feel like they belong, but as their new group’s dynamic becomes clearer, they’re no longer so sure. I never entirely embraced being a “turn on, tune in, drop out” hippie in the 1960s. I hung out on the fringe of the group with the people I felt closest to, never completely fitting in. When reading Divergent, I never felt like Tris and Tobias fit into Dauntless 100 percent, either—though they have their reasons for staying, just as I had my reasons for staying on the edges of hippie-dom.
The pressure to behave in a certain way also doesn’t go away; you have to adhere to the group’s standards (of behavior, or dress, or whatever else), or else lose your place. If you can’t conform, then you’re out—and even for those who don’t feel like the group is a perfect fit, that can be a powerful threat. The worst kind of “out” in Tris’ world is to fail your initiation and end up factionless, which Tris (and everyone else) believes is, as Tris says in Divergent, “a fate worse than death.” To be left in the world without the support and structure of your faction would be a difficult adjustment indeed. Especially given that Tris’ world requires estrangement from family and friends when you switch factions—the way many cults require their members to cut off contact with anyone from their former lives.
The Peoples Temple, formed by the charismatic James “Jim” Jones, encouraged new members to break familial ties and end prior friendships. Isolated from outside support, initiates were worn down by sleep deprivation, constant lectures, intimidation, and abuse until they were completely dependent on the church for their very lives. (Doesn’t sound much different than Dauntless initiation in some ways, does it?) In the end, over 900 of those lives were ended in Jonestown, Guyana, November 18, 1978, at the instruction of the Peoples Temple leaders—either by mass suicide or murder.
Which brings us to where things get ugly—to where groups become factions, and factions get scary.
THE UGLY: FACTIONS AND THEIR MANIPULATION AND USE
Earlier, I defined factions as smaller groups with common goals inside larger organizations. But there is a little bit more to it than that. Factions are usually formed in opposition to something—like how the Divergent trilogy’s factions are formed in opposition to things such as dishonesty and ignorance and violence. Except instead of just opposing certain ideas, most real-world factions form against groups of people. And when those factions are led by someone who has no problem justifying any means to attain their ends—whether those ends match the greater faction’s or not—they can become deadly.
The trouble often starts when one group feels threatened, endangered, or believes that another group is in some way undermining theirs. If that happens, they may turn against the offending group. They may become a faction.
Prejudices are built on difference. That’s not ideal, but it’s hard to avoid, and as long as those different groups are equal in power, most people aren’t really getting hurt. When two groups are forced to compete against each other for resources like money or power—the way Hitler claimed the “pure” Germans and Jews were—that’s when they become factions. And when one faction wins—when one faction gains power over the other—difference becomes an excuse to prevent the other group from having the same opportunities and access to resources as the dominant group. The more powerful group’s prejudice is institutionalized.
We see it in the Chicago experiment with the factionless. Faction members appear to live comfortable lives with plenty of food and readily available housing. The factionless—those who couldn’t cut it in a faction—are not so lucky. They struggle to obtain enough to eat, much less clothes to wear and comfortable places to sleep, and no one in the factions does much about it; the Abnegation are the only ones who seem to care at all. The factionless are not just different from faction members, they’re less worthy. Even though many of them have jobs—“the work no one else wants to do” (Divergent)—they don’t get the same access to the city’s resources as faction members do because they don’t deserve it.
The situation outside the city is similar. In Allegiant, we are introduced to two new factions: GPs, or the genetically pure, and GDs, or the genetically damaged. The Bureau’s subtle (in the compound) and not-so-subtle (in the fringe) treatment of GDs as inferior to GPs is yet another example of what happens when one group has power over another. GDs are told they are equals, yet they live every day with inequalities. A murder of a GD by a GP might be prosecuted as a case of manslaughter, if it’s prosecuted at all. GDs are not allowed to move into positions of authority in the Bureau, included in
decision-making, or allowed to have leadership roles—those are reserved for GPs. (Although the GD are allowed to be useful, people like Nita know they are considered second-class citizens and can never rise further than they already have.) And those GDs who live in the fringe lack as many services and rights as the factionless do in Chicago. Even the term used to describe them reflects the imbalance of power: they’re not just genetically different, they’re genetically damaged. The very name implies inferiority. No matter how supposedly scientific the evidence behind the Bureau’s reasoning is—human nature made the separation between GP and GD a rift that eventually became a chasm.
To people like David, the GD are not fully human; they are merely damaged goods, or in the case of the GD living in Chicago, lab rats. Their memories, identities, and lives are expendable. As Tris puts it, they are “just containers of genetic material—just GDs, valuable for the corrected genes they pass on, and not for the brains in their heads or the hearts in their chests” (Allegiant).
Sadly, you don’t have to look too far in our own society to see inequities among groups theoretically based on genetics—those between races and ethnicities. In fact, it was impossible for me to read about the genetically pure and damaged without thinking of how ethnicity and race are used as the basis of so many spoken and unspoken barriers in our world. It’s way too easy to come up with examples of groups who were—and still are—discriminated against, in ways both large and small: slaves and Native Americans in the United States, Aborigines in Australia, Roma in Europe—the list goes on and on. But, since In the Garden of Beasts is on my mind, I have only to look as far as Nazi Germany to see the terrible places that kind of pure/impure thinking can lead. Hitler’s stated purpose was to form a pure Aryan nation. (Reminiscent of David’s genetically pure, isn’t it?)
Often, such prejudices, and the reasoning they hinge on, simmer just under the surface. But an unscrupulous leader can bring these prejudices to a boil and manipulate them to meet his or her own needs.
You can see this at work in Divergent with Jeanine and the Erudite. Jeanine’s fear of Abnegation revealing the Edith Prior video, which could lead to the dissolution of the faction system and a loss of power for her as faction leader, leads her to spread lies about Abnegation, saying that they are hoarding food and supplies, and slandering Tris’ father and other Abnegation leaders with the goal of turning the other factions against them. She clearly convinced the Dauntless leadership—and who knows how many more?
This was the same tactic used by Hitler against the Jews prior to, and throughout, World War II. Unlike Jeanine’s devious undermining of Abnegation through rumors and innuendoes, Hitler was never subtle about his anti-Semitic rhetoric. His views that Jews hated the white race, stole from the Germans, became wealthy on the backs of working German people, etc., was initially spread via his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, and once in power, Hitler openly blamed the Jews for everything from Germany’s loss of the World War I to 1929’s German Depression. He tapped into Germans’ dissatisfaction and their established prejudices against the Jews, and used it to build, then solidify, his own power.
It wasn’t just the Jews. Whoever was deemed unsuitable (and Hitler’s list was long—the Roma, homosexuals, the disabled, certain religions . . .) was targeted, first through innuendo and rumor and then through laws like the “Aryan clause” in Germany’s civil service laws, which banned Jews from holding government offices. And then there was the Gleichschaltung, or “Coordination,” which “[brought] citizens, government ministries, universities, and cultural and social institutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and attitudes” (In the Garden of Beasts). This was the Nazification of Germany, whereby all organizations (including religious, educational, and civic) were either brought in line with Nazi policies or became forbidden and were disbanded. Workers unions were dissolved, no other political parties were allowed, and there were compulsory organizations (such as Hitler Youth, Labor Service, and Young Maidens) that started in childhood and progressed to adulthood. If you were in (which was mandatory for all who qualified), there was no way out.
At the street level, the Coordination worked much like Erudite’s smear campaign against Abnegation, or against the Divergent: spread evidence to support existing prejudices (the Stiffs were being greedy, hoarding resources the other factions needed; the Divergent were dangerous) and watch human nature take over. In the Garden of Beasts relates the “amorphous anxiety” that changed German lives “like a pale mist that slipped into every crevice . . . You began to think differently about whom you met for lunch . . . In the most casual of circumstances you spoke carefully and paid attention to those around you.” Fear of being identified with anything forbidden turned friends against friends, and families turned against their own—much like Caleb turned against Tris.
Although Jeanine’s attempted destruction of Abnegation is horrific, it is noteworthy that none of the other factions step up to defend Abnegation. Amity flat out refuses to help except as “a safe house for members of all factions” (Insurgent). Distracted by Jeanine’s campaign against Abnegation, the factions lack the willingness, or foresight, to recognize that what happened to Abnegation could just as easily happen to them. And I can’t help but compare this to the rest of the free world, which initially refused to censure or condemn Hitler’s actions. World leaders stuck their collective heads in the sand until Hitler’s atrocities could no longer be ignored.
Leaders like Jeanine and Hitler have been around since humankind began, as the founders of the experimental cities must have known. Why else would they have invented the memory serum to reset experiments gone bad? I doubt that the Bureau GP ever recognized in themselves the same cruel and self-serving actions—the same manipulation of others for their own ends, made justifiable by their prejudices—that they were using the memory serum to prevent. Certainly David didn’t seem to—before Tris erased his memory.
ARE FACTIONS NECESSARY?
Of course, one way to prevent manipulative, self-serving leaders from exploiting factions’ prejudices would be to get rid of factions altogether. As John Dickinson, one of America’s founding fathers, wrote in 1768, “By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.” Is there any reason not to try to prevent factions from forming in the first place?
Despite the Bureau’s claim that Chicago is the most successful experimental city because of the factions, I think the factions were the biggest flaw in their design. Chicago may have lasted longer than the experiments without factions, but it, too, eventually falls apart—and no doubt would have sooner, without the Bureau’s serum interventions.
Dividing people into groups, and then allowing those groups to evolve into egocentric entities whose members have little or no respect for anyone outside of the group, can only result in conflict and further separation between the groups. This is as true inside Chicago as it is outside it.
What’s missing from the faction system—what the faction system makes difficult, if not impossible—is empathy for fellow humans. In order for a government to be successful, all factions—whether the Divergent trilogy’s factions or those in our own world—need to work together, respecting the strengths and differences of each.
Integration—getting to know different people and exploring new thoughts—is a key component in increasing respect and tolerance for others and the best chance of combatting the group-based prejudices we naturally tend toward. In the Divergent trilogy, there’s no better example of integration than Tris. She’s fearless, but her selfless Abnegation tendencies soften the harsh edges of Dauntless, and her Erudite intelligence gives her the ability to reason, question, and modify her beliefs even in the midst of life-threatening situations. In one respect, the Bureau was right about the Divergent being able to save them: the qualities that make Tris Divergent are the very ones her world needs most.
It’s human nature to establish groups. Evelyn tells Tobias, “People always organize into groups. That’s a fact of our existen
ce” (Allegiant). Sympathetic natures attract us to each other. But in any successful group, it’s the inclusion of and compassion for all its members that truly allow the group to flourish. When a group devolves into cliques and factions, it becomes disempowered. Had the Chicago experiment continued to appreciate the diversity and individual strengths of all the factions, it wouldn’t have fallen apart. But fighting the baser human tendencies—to aggrandize oneself and one’s faction at the expense of others—is a continual struggle.
A world tempered with empathy, kindness, and respect can only be achieved through vigilance, mindfulness, and close scrutiny of those in power. It’s not easy, but nothing worth having is.
Julia Karr is the author of two teen dystopian novels, XVI and its sequel, Truth. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with her cats, Frankenstein and Esmerelda. If she had to choose a faction she’d choose Amity, since her free time is spent keeping peace between the cats and tending her garden.
Janine Spendlove is not only a YA author, but also a Marine, who as of this writing works as a legislative liaison to the US House of Representatives. So she’s in an especially good position to offer insight on Dauntless’ devolution from its original principles to what it becomes under Jeanine’s influence—and what both the Bureau and Dauntless itself could have done differently to prevent that change.
THE DOWNFALL OF DAUNTLESS
JANINE K. SPENDLOVE
War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.
—Georges Clemenceau
The point of civilian control is to make security subordinate to the larger purposes of a nation, rather than the other way around. The purpose of the military is to defend society, not to define it.
