The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion

by Lois H. Gresh

  As for the children in the arena, we take it as a given that they are not truly evil; rather, they’re forced into gladiator roles by their elders, they really have no choice. But the effects of what they are forced to do—the mutilation, torture, and killing of other children—may harden them and make it appear that they are evil. If forced to kill for long enough, can children become killer kids? The next chapter, appropriately titled “Killer Kids,” touches on this subject. For now, we look at the nature of evil itself. What makes the adults in The Hunger Games trilogy so despicable?

  And there’s no doubt that they are despicable. Some seventy-five years after the Dark Days, they’re still holding Hunger Games and Quarter Quells. Surely, the excuse that they must torture and execute people during “times of war” is invalid in their case. They’re so afraid of an uprising, as discussed in chapter 2, “Repressive Regimes and Rebellions,” that they make hell a way of life. But does this make them evil?

  I would argue that the adult leaders of Panem in The Hunger Games are indeed evil, as evil as can be. Hunger Games evil isn’t at all the same as “zombie apocalypse” evil or other forms of fantasy horror evil that exist on a separate plane from people. Modern horror monsters can be in the form of human-eating zombies, blood-sucking vampires, killer werewolves, giant octopus-shark creatures from alien worlds, that sort of thing. But Hunger Games monsters are human beings. President Snow certainly can’t use the excuse that a huge wasp-vampire creature from outer space made him torture and execute children. He doesn’t claim that Satan made him do it. There is no supernatural basis for President Snow’s evil. He is responsible for all of his deplorable deeds and actions.

  Those who follow him, the so-called Peacekeepers and the Gamemakers, as well as the citizens who dwell in the Capitol, are also responsible for their bad behavior. They eat and they party, they have plastic surgery and fuss over their fashions and appearances, they actively participate in getting the children ready for the Hunger Games. They’re portrayed, in some cases, as fairly loving and fun people, not truly despicable, but they turn away from what they’re doing and do not take responsibility for their own misconduct. Perhaps they can justify their bad actions with the types of excuses that Nazi citizens used in World War II, that their leaders make them ignore the killings and torture; but as noted earlier, the Dark Days were some seventy-five years ago—that is, World War X is not currently going on—so the followers can’t whine that they are acting in “time of war” any more than the leaders can whine about it. No. All of these adults are responsible for what they do to the children in The Hunger Games Series. Even Katniss’s mother, who is not evil at all, fails to protect her children.

  The heroes are the children themselves, who eventually save the people of Panem from the adults. Of course, Haymitch and other adults do help the children and contribute to the rebellion in Mockingjay, but Katniss and the other kids are the ones who really get the job done.

  People have always lived with conflicts, aggression, and territorial disputes. From the earliest times, some 6,000 years ago, we banded into units to survive the forces of nature, because after all, the power of several outweighed the power of one. Later, the power of many replaced the power of several.

  As humans banded into larger tribes, then into states and countries, our struggles with nature were joined by our struggles against each other. Wars over territory, food, mates—all the attributes of survival in the animal world—took hold, and mankind fought itself in massacre after massacre. Rules, regulations, and laws were created in an attempt to govern our actions, and every alliance has had its military and police forces.

  The notion of evil has its roots in ancient religious sources; as examples, the Old and New Testaments use the word hundreds of times but includes under the evil umbrella all sorts of immoral behaviors and bad actions. Evil in the Bible includes minor items such as touching crawling creatures.

  In the Old Testament, evils abound in the Ten Commandments, in Deuteronomy, and Leviticus. For example, Deuteronomy 22:21 declares that a female’s promiscuous behavior is so “evil” that people should stone her to death. Chapter 7 lists abundant evils of the soul, including selfish behaviors, lust for objects rather than spiritual pursuits, coveting what other people have, and so forth. Leviticus focuses on religious laws related to everything imaginable: sacrifices, diet, childbirth, shaving, self harm, sorcery, strangers, hate, etc.

  In the New Testament, Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians describes his age as “evil” (1:4–5) basically because mankind performs evil deeds. He warns that “if you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another (5:15).”1 He warns against “deeds of the flesh” such as immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, and carousing (5:19–21).

  The Koran identifies similar behaviors as evil, and Zoroaster suggested that people are controlled by a god of light and good as well as a god of darkness and evil.

  Theological arguments that try to reconcile the existence of evil in our world with the assumption of a peaceful, benevolent God are called a “theodicy.” The word comes from the Greek words, “justifying God,” and was first used in an essay in 1710 by the German philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz. A typical theodicy hinges on the argument that evil is the result of God letting people have free will. If mankind didn’t have the choice of doing good or evil, then people wouldn’t be any different from machines.

  Religions are stocked with images of angels and demons, and also with angels who become demons; hence suggesting that there is a fine line between the two. The implication is that, given our free will, we can fall either way.

  Consider Lucifer, the light bearer, the angel who fell from grace and became Satan. According to biblical accounts, his crime was to challenge God’s authority, and for this crime, he and his fallen angels were sent to Hell forever. Once good, he is now evil.

  As with all evil governments, Satan has Beelzebub to do a lot of his dirty work. Beelzebub decides that the evil forces should corrupt people and make them evil, too; so Satan corrupts Adam and Eve, and they nibble on the apple, which in their time was a grievous sin with dire consequences.

  Possibly, these religious ideas about evil come from the fact that in ancient times, people lived in small tribes that had to fight constantly for survival. Giving birth to and nurturing boys became essential to the success of one tribe over others. During combat, if one tribe had, say, twice the number of warriors than another, then that tribe would probably win the battle. Hence, in early religious sources, crimes relating to all sorts of things that might injure or otherwise hurt the chance of a tribe to survive would be pegged as evil. Rules (or “evils”) regarding cleanliness and diet also contributed to the potential of a tribe to survive. The smaller the chance for infection and potentially deadly illness, the greater the chance for survival.

  Definitions of evil vary from time to time, from culture to culture, and from individual to individual; that is, some people think it’s evil to hit a child, while others reserve the term evil for greater crimes such as torturing and murdering a child. It’s hard to know where to draw the line.

  Noted scholar Susan Neiman suggested in her best-selling book, Evil in Modern Thought, that perhaps a reasonable way to define evil is that it “shatters our trust in the world.”2 In his best-selling book, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, Andrew Delbanco further defines the term as expressed during a 2001 PBS interview:

  [T]here are human beings who are able, by convincing themselves that there’s some higher good, some higher ideal to which their lives should be dedicated, that the pain and suffering of other individuals doesn’t matter, it doesn’t have to do with them . . . That they’re expendable, that it’s a cost that’s worth making in the pursuit of these objectives. So evil for me is the absence of the imaginative sympathy for other human beings.3


  Delbanco’s definition clearly places the government leaders of The Hunger Games into the category of evil. The pain and suffering of other people, albeit children, doesn’t matter to them; in fact, they promote the pain and suffering of children. Other people, albeit children, are expendable, in the pursuit of the higher ideal of quashing any remote chance of rebellion.

  Harking back to the need of ancient tribes to survive, more modern group survival mechanisms include Delbanco’s definition. If all members of a group adhere to the leaders’ values and methods of control, the better the chance that the group itself will survive. People justify evil actions in the group by telling themselves that they are willing to do anything that is necessary to defend and strengthen the community.

  The group survival reasoning is a form of evil in which moral virtues and idealism support violent actions. This so-called idealistic evil pushes terrorists to kill both other people and themselves without remorse. Their inner strength spurs terrorists to commit relentless and merciless atrocities.

  But before modern terrorism, severe brutality was common among groups that considered themselves idealistically superior to those around them. One obvious example is the Crusades, which divinely sanctioned torture, mutilation, and murder involving millions of people. The Pope called for Christians to gain control of the Holy Land from the heathens, and the Crusaders brutalized people while considering themselves good men with high morals, serving their Church and God.

  During the First Crusade, Arabs from the town of Aleppo tried to defend themselves, but they failed miserably against the onslaught of the armored knights. After beating down the resistance, the Crusaders hacked off the heads of the Aleppo men and catapulted the heads into the town of Antioch, hoping the citizens in that walled city would not resist them.

  Also, during the First Crusade, the knights took Jerusalem, massacred the Muslim citizens, then burned alive Jews in their synagogue.

  While modern people rarely think of the Crusaders as good and just men who treated unarmed citizens decently (and that is quite an understatement), the word crusade is still used when talking about organized movements whose purpose is the greater good. We have crusades against terrorists, drugs, crime, and so forth.

  Murder fits most definitions of evil. Murder of children is almost universally accepted as evil. The perpetrators of the murders—for example, President Snow and his cronies—clearly plan and intend to torture and kill children in the most excruciating and horrific ways possible. They know and delight in the fact that the children will suffer immensely. They have no shame. It is this excessive use of suffering that makes the leaders evil. They could choose to limit freedoms without torture and death, but they choose instead to commit evil acts that go over and beyond what is required to maintain control of the people. It’s interesting to note that the Anglo–Saxon roots of the word evil were “over” or “beyond.”

  Scientific laws do not define evil with mathematical precision or experimental proof. As mentioned earlier, there are a thousand gray shades of evil, ranging from murder to theft to bullying to innocent comments that make someone commit suicide. However, if we look at evil as not being supernatural, but the result of a wide range of human behaviors, both intentional and innocent, then we can examine it in a more scientific manner.

  Recent explanations for the behavior of serial killers usually revolve around extra Y chromosomes or insanity. It’s been suggested by scientists that a genotype of XYY causes men to fly into fits of anger, into rages, into acts of great violence. Insanity, as we all know, is often used as a defense for violent crime. Yet, not only serial killers murder people. Seemingly normal people commit acts of evil every day.

  As for being born evil, it seems unlikely. Some scholars claim that there are scientific roots in the evil mind, that a newborn baby with a perverse twist in his DNA will grow up to commit atrocious crimes; that no matter how much this baby is loved from the moment of birth, it won’t matter.

  But then, there’s the theory that evil people are born with what researchers call criminal or risk genes.

  In 2002, a group of scientists working for the Institute of Psychiatry in London claimed that they had discovered “the criminal gene.” According to the scientists, the particular gene was strongly linked to criminal and antisocial behavior. Children from poor circumstances were nine times more likely to act unlawfully when compared to other children living in similar circumstances if they had a particular variation of the gene.4

  Needless to say, not everyone agreed with the findings of the Institute of Psychiatry. Especially when Nuffield Council on Bioethics located in London declared that a criminal’s genetic makeup should be taken into account during his trial and his sentencing.5 Politicians on the right immediately suspected a plot to pardon criminals for the most unforgivable sins using the argument that such acts were a result of genetics not intent.

  Rising like tidal waves from both sides of the political spectrum came dire warnings of early twentieth-century eugenic programs, which championed sterilizing criminals so that their traits would be wiped out of future generations. These stories were quickly followed with talk of Nazi genetic experiments in the 1930s, forced sterilizations of specific groups, and the possible existence of an “alcoholic” gene that turned ordinary Englishmen into drunkards. No one wanted to be categorized by their genetic code. Nor did either political party want criminals set free due to a mix-up in their genetic code. At present, there’s no agreement on whether the criminal gene actually influences behavior or not. The argument has moved out of the scientific community into politics and it’s doubtful any resolution to the question will be soon found. Evil remains a matter of behavior, not genetics.

  Several personality disorders—psychopathic, sadistic, antisocial, and schizoid—have been linked to violent crimes. If a person can’t empathize with and have compassion for other people, then he’s most likely to commit violent crimes against them. The brain becomes wired for violence. The perpetrator becomes addicted to the high he gets from his atrocious crimes.

  Psychopaths empathize with but lack compassion for other people. Schizoids are aloof and lack both compassion and empathy. Many of these people don’t fit into ordinary society and have immense trouble forming emotional bonds. And if someone has psychopathic, sadistic, antisocial, and schizoid traits, then he will probably commit evil acts.

  However, these killers are not mentally ill, and in fact, they most definitely know what they’re doing and they enjoy it. To be insane, a person must be unable to distinguish right from wrong, he must be unable to assist in his own defense.

  A psychopath is quite different from someone who is psychotic.

  The psychotic person suffers from severe mental disorders that are probably caused by biological factors. For example, schizophrenics can be confused, they have delusions and hallucinations. They tend to be withdrawn, depressed, and anxious.

  The psychopathic person, as defined by doctors, has a disorder of character or personality. These people are lucid, they do not hear voices or see things that don’t exist. They can be quite charming. They do not suffer from increased angst, depression, or insecurities. Many simply lack any compassion or empathy for their victims.

  Evolutionary psychologists tell us that our minds evolved long ago to help us survive. We learned how to recognize each other’s faces, how to recognize and cope with cheating, how to choose mates, and how to talk to each other. Various groups of neurons might handle something like language and be located in one area of the brain—in the case of language, it is located in the area known as Broca’s area. Other groups of neurons might not be located in the same area. In this way of looking at the brain, small modules of neurons feed information to larger modules. Even smaller modules feed information to the small modules, and so forth, until at the lowest level, an individual neuron fires during specific events.

  A neuron fires electrochemically, meaning that chemicals produce electric signals. When chemicals
in our bodies have an electric charge, they are termed ions, and ions in the nervous system include sodium and potassium, each with one positive charge; calcium with two positive charges; and chloride with one negative charge. Neurons are surrounded by a semi-permeable membrane that lets some ions pass through while blocking other ions.

  When the neuron is not firing, the inside of the cell is negative compared to everything immediately surrounding the cell. The ions keep trying to pass from the inside of the neuron to the outside, and vice-versa, with the membrane controlling the balance. For example, when the neuron is not firing, potassium ions pass easily through the membrane, and for every two potassium ions the membrane allows to enter the neuron, it allows three sodium ions to leave. Basically, there are more sodium ions outside the neuron and more potassium ions inside it. At rest, when the neuron is not firing, the difference in voltage between the inside and outside of the neuron is approximately -70 millivolts, meaning that the inside of the neuron is 70 millivolts less than the outside.

  When a neuron sends information down an axon away from the cell body, neuroscientists say that there is an action potential or that a spike has occurred. The action potential is created by a depolarizing current, which creates electrical activity. An event, or stimulus, occurs that moves the resting potential of -70 millivolts toward 0 millivolts. The stimulus causes the sodium channels to open in the neuron, and because there are more sodium ions outside the neuron than inside, sodium ions flood into the neuron. Because sodium ions have a positive charge, the neuron becomes more positive and depolarized. When depolarization shifts downward to approximately -55 millivolts, the neuron fires an action potential, which is known as the threshold. If the neuron never reaches its threshold, it won’t fire.