The Hunger Games: Part 4: The Desire to Subvert Evil
I don’t want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I’m not.
Peeta, The Hunger Games, 141.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146.
In spiritual terms, the Capitol in The Hunger Games is symbolic of the satanic mechanism. Here’s why – the satanic mechanism is based on violence, but it’s a violence that leads to a feeling of peace. As I discussed in part 3 of this series, the Capitol desires peace, and achieves a semblance of peace through the violence of the Hunger Games. The citizens of the Capitol unite in their shared desire for the Games, as they happily watch 24 teenagers fight to a bloody death (The Hunger Games, pg 141). Of course, the 24 tributes want to survive the Games, but survival cannot be shared – the Capitol sees to it that only one tribute can survive – so they must compete to the death. It is indeed a satanic, evil, monstrous event.
And, of course, we should fight against such satanic, evil, monstrous events in our world. But fighting evil can be very dangerous because when use the same violent methods as our enemy we risk becoming just like them. The Hunger Games is explicit about this danger to our identity.
Peeta struggles most profoundly with the dangers of fighting the evil of the Hunger Games. Peeta tells Katniss that he wants to fight back against the Capitol, but he also wants to maintain his identity (142). He worries that fighting against the Capitol might change him into a monster. Katniss then asks the key question, “Do you mean you won’t kill anyone?” (142) Peeta responds
No, when the time comes, I’m sure I’ll kill just like everybody else. I can’t go without a fight. Only I keep wishing I could think of a way to … to show the Capitol they don’t own me. That I’m more than just a piece in their Games.
Katniss responds very practically by telling Peeta to not worry about his identity and just worry “[a]bout staying alive” (142).
This question of identity, violence, and survival is the critical issue of The Hunger Games, and the reason the series is so powerful is that it is the critical issue facing humanity. Like the characters in these novels, we have a fear of death, and we would rather put someone else in the place of death than go through it ourselves. But I think Peeta is on to something very important. In using violent methods to subvert evil, do we become evil ourselves? Just like everyone else who the Capitol throws into the Games, Peeta kills (162) and Katniss kills. Katniss explicitly attempts to subvert the Capitol through revenge (48, 236-7). Which brings up a question – in all of this violence and revenge, do Katniss and Peeta become, as Nietzsche warned, the very monsters they try to defeat?
Near the end of the first book, we discover that the Gamemakers have resurrected the 21 murdered tributes and turned them into “mutations” (333). They are wolf-like monsters that have the human quality of each of the 21 tributes. These human-monsters have one satanic desire that unites them, and that is to kill the remaining tributes.
Now, you may claim that Katniss and Peeta avoided becoming monsters. And, if you want to be very literal about it, you’d be right. But Cato, the other surviving tribute, didn’t literally become a monster, but throughout the book he is portrayed in violently monstrous ways. He’s the one who wanted to find Katniss and kill her in his own way without anyone interfering (217).
In the end of the first book, Katniss and Peeta are the last remaining tributes. It is true that they find a way to avoid killing each other. But their strategy for survival is based on death. They subvert the Capitol’s violence through their own violence, their potential double suicide.
Do Peeta and Katniss avoid becoming monsters? If monsters use violence to achieve their goal, then they have indeed become monsters. They have become the monstrous double of the Capitol. This monstrous doubling of two adversaries through violence is a major theme of The Hunger Games series, and we will explore more as we move into the next two books.
But before we do that, we have one more topic to explore in this first book. It is the possibility of an alternative way of subverting evil. In fact, it’s the only way to subvert evil and avoid the apocalyptic future of The Hunger Games.
The Hunger Games Blog - Table of Contents
The Hunger Games Part 1: The Hope for a Better World
The Hunger Games Part 2: The Desire for a Better World
The Hunger Games Part 3: The Desire for Peace
The Hunger Games Part 4: The Desire to Subvert Evil
The Hunger Games Part 5: The Desire to Love
The Hunger Games Part 6: The Fear of Death and the Hope for Life: Katniss and Perpetua
The Hunger Games: Part 3: The Desire for Peace
I recently came across a controversial statement about peace that I’d like to discuss with you. Here it is – our desire for peace actually makes us violent. (See Rene Girard’s book Battling to the End, especially page 44.) Sounds counter-intuitive, huh? I mean, if everyone desired peace, wouldn’t the world be a more peaceful place? Maybe not. The Hunger Games offers us a way to understand this idea
I don’t know about you, but it’s easy for me to hate the Capitol of Panem. It keeps the districts down through oppression and violence – ultimately through the violence of the annual sacrifice of teenagers called the Hunger Games. But here’s the thing about the Capitol – it desires peace and it creates a sense of peace and order in the Capitol by uniting through violence against the districts. The Capitol thinks that the districts are a threat to peace, so the Capitol uses violence as a method to subdue the districts. About 74 years before the events in The Hunger Games, we are told that the districts rebelled against the Capitol. Katniss, the main character of the novels, narrates that this rebellion created
… the Dark Days, the uprising of the districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the dark days must never be repeater, it gave us the Hunger Games. (18)
It is the Capitol’s desire for peace that fosters the violence and oppression of the Hunger Games – because the Capitol thinks the Districts are a threat to peace. Indeed, the Capitol believes the Districts are barbaric, but it never questions its own violence as barbaric. (See page 74.) Indeed, in its use of violence to create peace, the Capitol believes itself to be unquestionably good. (84) Of course, you and I can easily question the “goodness” of the capitol because we know its sense of peace comes at the expense of the districts, whose citizens have to deal with the realities of violence and oppression every day.
Again, it’s easy for us to hate the Capitol. But here’s the sad truth about us humans. We’ve always used violence as a method to achieve peace. There’s a bit of the Capitol in all of us because violence does give us a sense of peace as it unites us against a common enemy. We all want peace, and we always tend to see another as an obstacle to that peace. So, we must subdue or destroy the other to achieve our desired peace. We see this not just in The Hunger Games, but we see it throughout human history. For example, the Pax Romana (or Peace of Rome) was created through the use of violence to subdue those that Rome believed threatened their peace. The Aztecs also used violence that created a sense of unity against an enemy. (See Father Robert Barron’s excellent video on The Hunger Games by clicking here.) Unfortunately, this method of achieving peace through violence remains with us today. In a desire for peace, the United States wages war against a common enemy. In an article called “The Bad Apple,” peace journalist Bob Koehler quoted a veteran of the war in Iraq,
The military turned hadji into a disempowering word. My sergeant major said, ‘The hadji is an obstacle. Get him out of the way.’ Denying a person their name gave us permission to separate ourselves from the people of Iraq. Thus, when a boy was hit by a truck, the CO said: ‘He’s gone, move out.’
The truth about violence that The Hunger Games points to is that humans have always believed our violence to be unquestionably good because we have faith that our violence will lead to our desired peace. The problem is that there is always one more obstacle to peace, one more bad guy that needs to be defeated. Who is the good guy when everyone believes in their own goodness and in their right to use violence to kill one another? To put it another way, does our use of violence turn us into monsters?
We’ll explore that question in my next post on The Hunger Games.
The Hunger Games Blog - Table of Contents
The Hunger Games Part 1: The Hope for a Better World
The Hunger Games Part 2: The Desire for a Better World
The Hunger Games Part 3: The Desire for Peace
The Hunger Games Part 4: The Desire to Subvert Evil
The Hunger Games Part 5: The Desire to Love
The Hunger Games Part 6: The Fear of Death and the Hope for Life: Katniss and Perpetua
The Hunger Games: Part 2: The Desire for a Better World
He made you look desirable!
-Haymitch, The Hunger Games, 135
We must understand that desire itself is … directed toward an object desired by the model.
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 146.
The Hunger Games presents us with a post-apocalyptic world living with a fragile peace. (For a summary of The Hunger Games, click here.) Violence is front and center with the annual ritual called The Hunger Games in which two young people from each District are entered into a bloody contest to the death that reminds us of the Roman Coliseum. (See Julie Clawson’s wonderful book The Gospel and the Hunger Games.) But all that bloodletting is meant to prevent a bigger outbreak of violence, like the one more than 74 years ago that nearly destroyed all life on the planet. We are not told much about that old conflict. We don’t know what it was about or what started it, but in this article I’d like to reflect with you on conflict and what we know about how it gets started.
Most theories of conflict focus on the differences between the two adversaries, because that’s all the adversaries can talk about. When we are in a conflict with someone, we claim to be as different from each other as night is from day, as good is from evil. Yet, conflict is not due to our differences, but due to our similarities. Indeed, there are extreme differences in The Hunger Games between the Capitol and the Districts. They are divided into the power elite and the oppressed workers, the well-fed and the starving, the rich and the poor and so on. But the differences, while they may exist in a very real way, are insignificant as triggers for conflict. Think about it this way, if there is an apple on the table (I mean the kind you can actually bite into) and you want it but I don’t, well, there’s no problem at all. But here’s where the conflict begins – as soon as I see that you want the apple, I get a little craving for it. In fact, the more I hear you talking about how good that apple is going to taste, the more I want it. And if I reach for it, trying to head you off at the pass, your desire will be both frustrated and intensified by the display of my desire. You see, we come into conflict with one another because we share desires, desires we learn from one another. Now there’s an easy way out of the conflict – I can admit that your desire preceded mine. I can even thank you for reminding me how good apples are and then I can pick some up on the way home from work. But we rarely take the easy way! I am most likely to forget that I borrowed my desire from you and see you only as a big ole meanie who won’t let me have my apple. Instead of a model for desire, I see only an obstacle to the fulfillment of my desire and that is the recipe for conflict.
So if we want to understand conflict in the Hunger Games we can’t let ourselves get distracted by the differences. We have to look for shared desires. We have no information about the old conflict, but we can look at the potential for conflict that exists in the present of the first novel. The thing that the Capitol wants more than anything is prevent open rebellion. Stated positively, we can say that the Capitol wants peace and it goes to great lengths to get it, most notably forcing 24 teenagers to murder each other on nationwide television each year as a form of entertainment. I’ll discuss how the Hunger Games work to keep the peace in the next article. But what is interesting is that the Capitol sees the Districts as a threat to peace and, you guessed it, the Districts think the same thing about the Capitol. Both want peace and both see the other as the obstacle to its fulfillment. It is seeing the other as obstacle that allows each side to justify their hatred and violence against each other. I don’t owe obstacles anything, except their destruction. As the story progresses through the second and third novels, we will see all manner of violence committed in the name of peace. If, on the other hand, I recognize that we share the same desire for peace, I recognize myself in the other and that might be enough to at least slow my hate to a simmer. Unfortunately, what usually happens is an escalation to all out warfare as the Hunger Games will show us.
There is another example in the Hunger Games of shared desire, but one that does not lead to conflict but instead to love. It is the desire of Peeta for Katniss, which he openly displays in front of the entire country during his interview. The audience is sympathetic to Peeta, “For unrequited love they can relate to” (130). In other words, they openly allow Peeta to be their model of desire. At the end of his interview, the audience roars in approval of Peeta’s expression of love. Katniss blushes in embarrassment and after the show she confronts Peeta and yells, “You had no right! No right to go saying those things about me!” (134) Haymitch, their mentor, sees this happening and responds to Katniss by saying:
You are a fool … Do you think he hurt you? That boy just gave you something you could never achieve on your own … He made you look desirable! And let’s face it, you can use all the help you can get in that department. You were about as romantic as dirt until he said he wanted you. Now they all do. You’re all they’re talking about. (135)
The audience’s desire for Katniss is openly borrowed from Peeta’s desire – he reached for the apple and they want it, too! Peeta’s love for Katniss is actually contagious because like all good fans, the Capitol audience is not ashamed of their open admiration for these two celebrities from District 12. Peeta’s desire for Katniss is also explained by this contagious aspect of desire, as Peeta openly claims that “a lot of boys like her” back at District 12. (130)
The Hunger Games reveals how shared desire can lead to conflict and to love. This is of great importance if we desire a better world. When we find ourselves locked in rivalry with some wicked other who only seems to want to deny us the very thing we want, we may be caught in the trap of denying how that very rival has taught us what to desire. Learning what to desire from others is nothing to be ashamed of, it’s just how humans work. The danger comes when we think our desires are our own. That is, we run the risk of feeling justified in knocking others to the ground on our way to the apple. When Jesus talks about forgiveness in the Gospels, I think he means that we need to remember that the one who seems deserving of our hate may be the one we have the most in common with. The enemy that seems so different from me, may be my mirror image and want the same things I want precisely because I want them. It’s weird to think about conflict that way, but the next time you crave an apple (or an Apple) look around and see who else is thinking the same thing.
The Hunger Games Blog - Table of Contents
The Hunger Games Part 1: The Hope for a Better World
The Hunger Games Part 2: The Desire for a Better World
The Hunger Games Part 3: The Desire for Peace
The Hunger Games Part 4: The Desire to Subvert Evil
The Hunger Games Part 5: The Desire to Love
The Hunger Games Part 6: The Fear of Death and the Hope for Life: Katniss and Perpetua
The Gift That Keeps Re-Gifting
I have gotten a reputation in my family as a re-gifter. I accidently gave some monogrammed hand towels back to my daughter and a snowman appetizer dish to my daughter-in-law in two memorable senior moments. Luckily, they both laughed heartily at my mistake and thought I was adorable rather than tragically stupid. Doesn’t everyone know you are not supposed to re-gift to the giver but to someone else? I tried to soften my mistake by protesting that this didn’t mean I didn’t want or like their gifts – I liked their gifts so much, in fact, that I thought they would make great gifts for them! They weren’t convinced but at least I tried.
I mention this because I want to talk a little bit about the things we want and what that says about who we are. It’s the perfect time of year for it. We just got through December when everyone is asking each other, “What do you want for Christmas?” and we are in the middle of January when we are all asking ourselves, “What self-improvement resolution should I make – and break – this year?” What we want and who we want to be are as closely tied to one another as December is to January. Let’s take a quick look at how.
Most of the year we happily live with the delusion that our desires arise spontaneously from within our deepest selves. But in December that delusion is harder to maintain because advertisers are in an all-out, full court press operating on the opposite premise: that our desires can be influenced and manipulated from the outside. Think about your Christmas wish list for a minute – how did you come to want what you wanted? Did you see an advertisement that got you thinking about jewelry or a new coat? Did a celebrity interview entice you to see a movie or buy a book over the holidays? Maybe you saw someone using a new phone or overheard a conversation about a trendy restaurant for New Year’s Eve and you found yourself texting on your new device from the restaurant bar.
I bet you can connect each item on your list to the source of your desire, a source that lies somewhere outside of you. Even things that seem to be deeply personal don’t originate inside us. For example, this year what I wanted most was not a thing at all, but to feel happy during the holidays. Sometimes the season goes by so quickly and I am so stressed out that I don’t enjoy the parties and the family time very much. Clearly, sometimes I don’t even remember who gave me what gift! But I worked on it this year and I’m happy to say I got my wish. But where did that wish come from? I wish I could say that I was smart enough to know that the most important gifts aren’t things you can buy in a store, but not so. The truth is that I learned this from some great teachers over the years – Ebenezer Scrooge for one, Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life and so many other holiday movies for another, and my spiritual disciplines of yoga and daily prayer are great teachers, too. All those influences somehow combined together so that this year I wanted to be more like Jimmy Stewart than the gal with the new diamond necklace in the Kay Jewelry commercials.
You see, advertisers have got one thing very right – our desires are suggested to us from the outside. The tricky part is that when they nestle inside it feels as if they have always been there. But that’s just a convenient delusion that preserves our sense of independence and soothes our easily bruised egos. It’s really much healthier to let go of all that ego gratification and accept the truth that all our desires originate outside of us. Having unattached desires is what allows human beings to learn and grow and be the most innovative of all species. Other animals have instincts, but we have free-floating, unattached desires – yeah for us!
The trick of life is to be really smart about who and what we let our desires get attached to. The big mistake we often make at Christmastime is that we let advertisers and others we think are smarter, prettier or sexier than we are direct our desires for us. The important thing to remember is that our desires don’t take a direct path to objects – our desire is always deflected toward an object by someone we want to be like. That’s how the advertisers do it – they show us smart, pretty, sexy people with the objects they want us to buy. It’s genius, really. But allowing advertisers to dictate our desires is not genius. They are the worst kind of models because they don’t want what’s best for us, they want what’s best for them, which is for us to open our wallets and fork over the cash or swipe the plastic, as the case may be.
Fortunately for our souls, January follows right on the heels of this month of marketing mania. Making New Year’s resolutions forces us to take a hard look at who exactly we want to be like: the skinny girl, the ripped guy, the powerful boss, the smart professor, the sexy friend, the popular celebrity, whoever! These are our models of desire. Before you make any resolutions, you might want to ask yourself if you are happy with your models. Can you trust them? Are they truly unselfish models, wanting for you only what is best for you? If not, you might want to shop around for different models. They may be fictional, historical or spiritual; you may find them in books or plays, at church or work or close to home. The best models are the ones who truly love you or inspire you to live a joyful, fulfilled and peaceful life. At least that bit of wisdom is the gift my models have given me, and I guess this blog is my attempt to share that gift with you. No senior moment this time, no accidental re-gifting. Learning the truth about desire and how to choose models is a gift worth re-gifting – pass it on!
Temper Tantrums Diffused: A Christmas Gift for Parents
The Christmas season is upon us and so is that classic parenting problem: the temper tantrum in the toy aisle of Walmart. You know the scene: you are rushing to buy gifts for your nieces and nephews and your child decides he has to have some toy or other right now or he will die. Of course you say “no” – you are a smart parent who knows well enough that children aren’t the best judges of what they need, but your child is not going to take “no” for an answer. You explain, distract, offer him his favorite stuffed animal, all to no avail. Your child will not be soothed and you feel the eyes of judgment focused mercilessly on you as other parents with their well-behaved children coldly steer around you. To end the humiliation, you give in and buy the toy. We all know what happens next, don’t we? Maybe the next day, or maybe when you get home, maybe as soon as your darling is buckled into his car seat, the must-have-or-I-will-die toy loses its fascination and you begin to metaphorically kick yourself for being a failure as a parent.
Okay, not a pretty picture, but all parents have been there and there’s no point in beating ourselves up about it. Stuff happens. So let’s take a more constructive look at this scene and ask the big question: What is going on with this child? Why all the drama for the toy? If we understand desire as springing from within us then the toy actually does represent something that he truly, desperately, inconsolably wants. Despite being aware that advertisements geared toward children have a strong influence on their desires, that kids want what their friends and older siblings have, we still default to a deeper belief that a child’s desires arise from within his little self. But if that picture of desire is true, how do we explain how quickly the desire fades away? We might say that it faded as quickly as it arose, but that still begs the question of where it came from in the first place. If the desire is an intrinsic part of the child’s self, then it should have a bit more staying power, shouldn’t it?
A closer look at the temper tantrum reveals that what is on display is not passion for the toy – it is a display of passion itself. What your child is demonstrating is the power of his desiring muscles. They are intensely, immensely strong in children and when they get attached to an object, that object is elevated to a position of incredible value by the power of the desire itself. Unfortunately for you, your child’s desire just happened to latch on to this random object in the toy aisle, but let’s be clear: the object doesn’t matter. Remember the old Clinton presidential campaign slogan “It’s the economy, stupid”? That was a great slogan to keep the campaign from getting distracted by things that didn’t matter. Well, in our scenario the toy is the distraction and understanding desire is the key to a successful (parenting) campaign.
So here’s what I suggest: First, keep your sense of humor. The child flailing around in the toy aisle with sobs that rival Rachel weeping for her children is a total hoot! No one should fall for the drama, and believe me when I tell you, your child doesn’t believe it either. That is unless you give in. If you do, you send the message that he was right, the toy WAS necessary for life because if it wasn’t you wouldn’t have given in, right? You are the adult and are supposed to know better. So what do you think it does to his trust in you when his desire fizzles? A few incidents don’t cause much harm, but if you repeat a pattern over time of reinforcing the child’s sense that the object matters, then he will learn to seek fulfillment through possession of objects. And learn it he will because desire itself doesn’t learn. No amount of fizzled fascination will ever teach desire that the object wasn’t all that important. Desire just desires endlessly. Learning what to do with our desire, when to trust it and when to discipline it; when to follow its lead and when to deny its provocations – that’s what growing up is all about and that’s what parents are supposed to teach their children.
So the next time this happens to you – and it will – have a good laugh right there in Walmart. Treat that temper tantrum like the really funny game of dress up that it is. Because the truth is your child is trying on a desire that doesn’t fit very well and makes him look a little ridiculous, so be sure you get the joke. That will release a lot of tension and may be enough to diffuse the tantrum. If your little imp has whipped himself up into such a frenzy that he doesn’t notice your shift in attitude, well, you may have to put off your Walmart shopping spree and exit the store for now. Be consoled that you will be leaving with a healthier parent-child bond, and that’s something even Walmart doesn’t stock on its shelves.