BLYTHE WOOLSTON
This is a scare tactic. I will land safely at the bottom. That knowledge is the only thing that helps me step onto the ledge.
—Divergent
As Tris stands on the ledge over a gaping hole so deep and full of shadow it seems bottomless, she is confronted with some very potent triggers for fear: height, darkness, the unknown. Even more powerfully, she has witnessed another person, a girl like herself, fall and die. There is no doubt that death is only a tiny misstep away.
Tris experiences a healthy reaction to this real danger: her heart races, her muscles tense, her stomach lurches, and she gets goose bumps. Those symptoms of fear are familiar because we have all experienced them. Scientists call this the “fight-or-flight” response because these physiological changes make us ready to rumble—or run—for our lives.
But it doesn’t take standing on the brink of an abyss to trigger those responses. A feather duster or pineapple can make a person freak out, freeze, and experience a full-blown state of fight or flight. What turns a pineapple into a source of terror? All you need to do is subtract light.
On a television reality show called Total Blackout, contestants blunder through pitch-dark rooms trying to accomplish a series of simple tasks like petting and identifying animals and inanimate objects. Meanwhile, the television audience gets to watch their struggles revealed via infrared photography. It is pretty funny to see a contestant terrified by the fuzzy pompom on top of a cozy winter hat. It would be a lot less funny to be that contestant, reaching out to touch the unknown, which could be a porcupine, scorpion, or the inside of a human mouth. What we can’t see is scary. A multitude of little blue canary nightlights exist for that very reason.
Fear of the dark, and the unknown in it, is one of an assortment of fears shared by many people. Others include fear of swarms, fear of snakes, and fear of falling. These all appear in the fear landscapes and simulations featured in Divergent. Christina’s wacky fear of moths? That’s a swarm, and swarms are bad news. A single bee sting can make a horse flinch; thousands of bees can kill it. The snake tattooed behind Uriah’s ear? Snakes probably writhe in his fear landscape, and if they do, he has a lot of company. Fear of snakes is not universal, but even people who aren’t afraid of snakes can identify photos of them more quickly than other more mundane things.1 Our ability to see and to assess our surroundings is surprisingly skewed toward “snake detection.” Research on macaque monkeys found far more vision-oriented brain cells dedicated to noticing snakes than anything else—even faces.2 For good reason: snakes can be deadly. And Four’s fear of heights? If you fall from the top of a ten-story tower, you might splatter like an egg on impact.
The connection between these common fears and real dangers is clear, but there are other fears that don’t have such justification. Remember that scary feather duster in the dark room? A person suffering from alektorophobia, the fear of chickens, might be terrified by the sight of that duster in a well-lit room. The same person might find an egg horrifying. Unless you share that phobia, being afraid of an egg may seem ridiculous and incomprehensible.3 It isn’t a rational response. And that’s part of the problem. Alektorophobia, like metrophobia (the fear of poetry) or the disorder nomophobia (the fear of being out of cell-phone contact), is completely irrational. Phobias are specific, persistent, intense fears that an individual knows are excessive or unreasonable. The alektrophobic understands that a live chicken can’t “get” her, much less a feather duster or an egg, but that intellectual knowledge doesn’t banish the emotion of fear. And that is really unfortunate because, while a chicken isn’t a significant danger, fear of chickens can be a genuine threat to health and well-being. In fact, chronic fear, justified or not, causes stress, and stress causes everything from high blood pressure and increased stroke risk to a greater vulnerability to cancer. There are a lot of people who wish they were Dauntless.
And that brings us back to Tris, standing frightened on the ledge—and acting despite that fear. How was she able to do that?
It wasn’t because she was “fearless.” The racing heart and goose bumps prove that. But something else is happening during those moments, and that something else is why she takes a step forward into the unknown: Tris is thinking. During those teeth-chattering seconds on the ledge, she analyzes the situation in a rational way. She weighs the evidence: the death she witnessed was an accident; the jump she is about to take is a test. When she bends her knees and jumps, it is a rational decision. Tris has taken one, two, three moments to process what she knows. And what she knows at that moment is that the fear she feels is all in her head. She is still experiencing the physical and emotional sensations of fear, but because she is able to reason, she can override those signals and choose to jump anyway.
If fear is “all in our heads,” how does it get there?
Before we can answer that question, we need to understand what Tobias in Allegiant describes as “a complicated, mysterious piece of biological machinery”—the brain.
FEAR IS A GIFT FROM OUR ANCESTORS
Evolutionarily speaking, each of us is the conclusion of a success story. We exist because our ancestors lived at least long enough to reproduce before they drowned in a shipwreck, fell off a cliff, or were lunch for a cave bear. And fear played a role in that success. When it comes to survival, fear is a powerful advantage. It not only drives risk avoidance, it gives us our best shot at surviving when danger is unavoidable.
Charles Darwin, the sharp and observant mind that perceived the possibility of evolution, was very interested in fear. He conducted an experiment using himself as the subject. Here is his description of it:
I put my face close to the thick glass-plate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.4
Why was Darwin so spooked?
It wasn’t because he was a coward. Far from it. Darwin signed on for a voyage around the world aboard a wooden ship less than one hundred feet in length. The Beagle was the sort of ship known as a “coffin brig,” notoriously hard to steer and prone to sinking. Darwin went because he wanted to collect scientific specimens, to slog through South American jungles crawling with snakes and spiders and critters with hungry bellies and sharp teeth. Field science is not a career for the squeamish. Then, after he returned, he published ideas that ran contrary to common belief and made him the target of harsh criticism. Every single one of those decisions required courage. But when he visited the zoo, he couldn’t control his body’s reaction to the striking snake.
So what was going on? After repeated trials, Darwin was intellectually prepared for the puff adder’s attack. His brain knew the glass barrier provided absolute protection. He wasn’t surprised by the sudden appearance of the animal; he knew the snake would strike. But whenever it did, that certain knowledge evaporated and Darwin flinched. Fear got the better of him.
When it comes to understanding fear, we have an advantage that Darwin didn’t. He could only observe the behavior of animals, including himself, and record the ways in which they all responded to danger or perceived threats. He could not see what was happening inside the bone box of the skull. Thanks to technology (fMRIs) we can actually watch a living brain at work. We can see which parts of the brain are active in response to pictures of spiders, snakes, and angry faces. We can, essentially, see fear happening inside our heads.
One thing that these studies have revealed is the outsized contribution to survival played by a little biological gizmo the size and shape of an almond called the amygdala.5 It might not look like much, but when it comes to danger, it is the emergency first responder.
Remember the symptoms of fear that Tris experiences as she prepares to jump? They are all part of the wave of responses the amygdala activates. It is the amygdala that prods the hypothalamus to release the cascade of chemicals and nerve impulses that jolt the entire system into fight-or-flight mode.
Her heart was “pounding so fast it hurts.” That rapid heartbeat is a signal of changes through her circulatory system. Blood is flowing faster and more abundantly to the muscles in her arms and legs, the large muscles that are essential to running and defense. Her brain is also getting a richer supply of oxygen and energy through the bloodstream. Meanwhile, her arms are noticeably pale because the capillaries nearest her skin have contracted as part of the system-wide diversion of blood supply.
The “lurch” Tris feels in her stomach could be linked to a quick shutdown of her digestive system. As important as digestion is to survival in the long term, in the short term the energy required for that process can be put to better use elsewhere.
Even the goose bumps that rose on her arms are survival oriented. Granted, human goose bumps may not seem like much of a defense now, but once upon a time, our furrier ancestors might have benefited. Goose bumps are caused by the pilomotor reflex, which is the same reflex that makes a scared kitten puff up to three times its actual size. Appearing bigger can discourage potential enemies and might make the difference between being eaten for lunch and living to reproduce.
Why do all of these fear symptoms happen so fast? Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and his colleagues have been studying the role of the amygdala in fear responses and have discovered that certain kinds of sensory information—like sudden, loud noises—aren’t processed and interpreted. Instead, they are transmitted directly to the amygdala, jolting it into action. This fear circuit takes only milliseconds.6 Since the information traveling on this shortcut isn’t processed by the conscious part of our brains, the reactions aren’t under conscious control; everything that happens, from changes in blood flow to the eruption of goose bumps, is involuntary.
Short of surgically removing the amygdala, there is no way to break this fear circuit. You can’t “decide” not to respond because the reasoning, decision-making part of your brain isn’t consulted. That’s why Darwin couldn’t stand still when the puff adder struck; he was being protected by a part of his brain that didn’t take time to think things over. It was getting quick-and-dirty information—and acting immediately to keep him safe.
So, one important answer to the question about how fear gets into your head is this: you are born with it. Even newborns exhibit the fundamental fight-or-flight protective responses long before they can fight or flee. But there is another way that fear gets into our heads: we learn it.
FEAR IS A LEARNED RESPONSE, OR HOW TO TERRORIZE A BABY IN A FEW SIMPLE STEPS
Little Albert was about nine months old when he was used (and, it must be said, abused) as the subject of a psychological experiment done in 1920. If you have ever been around a little human at that age, you know they are curious creatures, interested in the world, and it can be a full-time job keeping them out of harm’s way. This is how I imagine Little Albert to have been, and when I watch the movies made in the laboratory, when I see how interested he is in dogs, bunnies, white rats—even fire—I see a little brain learning all it can. Through his own experiential exploring (and hopefully with some parental protection), Little Albert would have learned that it’s a bad idea to pet fire or to put his fingers in that part of the doggie. He would have learned about real dangers in the real world. But the researchers intervened and exposed him to a process that changed how he learned about fear.
While Little Albert was just looking around the room, thinking his little baby thoughts, the researchers banged on a metal pipe and made the sort of noise that causes the amygdala to go to red alert. Little Albert was—like you, me, or Charles Darwin—unable to control that fear response. Then the researchers started systematically linking that noise, and the fear response it evoked, to a little white rat. Before this “fear conditioning” Little Albert was interested in the rat. By the time he had been thoroughly “conditioned,” he reacted to the sight of the rat with fear. It wasn’t necessary to make the noise because his amygdala had learned to associate the animal with the horrific clang. It took no more than the sight of the rat to cause fear in Albert. Even worse, his little brain generalized his experience. At the end of the experiment, Little Albert was terrified of all furry things, even fur coats and Santa’s white beard.
Sad as the story of Little Albert is (and it makes me want to cry), it did point the way to an important possibility regarding the control of fear. If fear can be learned through conditioning, it might also be possible to unlearn it. Through the process known as fear extinction, a fearful person is repeatedly exposed to a stimulus that causes fear. All of these encounters take place in a controlled situation where nothing bad happens. The person is encouraged to be aware that the fear they are experiencing is an overreaction. Eventually the stimulus is “unlinked” from the fear response. Called counterconditioning, this system for unlearning fear essentially erodes the connection in the brain between a stimulus and a response. The technique is used therapeutically to assist those living with PTSD, chronic anxiety, and irrational phobias. While struggling with generalized anxiety, Veronica Roth herself found relief through counterconditioning that helped her retrain her brain.7
FEAR IS CONTAGIOUS, OR SEEING IS FEELING
There is at least one more way that fear gets into our heads: it’s contagious. It doesn’t spread by germs. We catch it via sight. When you see another experiencing fear, you are very likely to experience fear yourself. So fear can spread just fine without help from Jeanine’s hallucinogens, fear serums, or transmitters. There are cells in your brain dedicated to making sure you catch fear from others. Those cells are called mirror neurons. As an Erudite scientist explains in Insurgent, “Mirror neurons fire both when one performs an action and when one sees another person performing that action. They allow us to imitate behavior.”
Brain scans have caught this special category of cells at work and made it clear that they offer a wonderful advantage: they make it possible to learn that it is a bad idea to touch a hot stove without getting blistered fingers ourselves. Merely observing another’s experience gives the brain the information that it needs to make the association between stimulus and response. That is a significant benefit in terms of survival.
Remember when Tris was on the brink of becoming the first initiate to master her fear and jump into the Dauntless headquarters? Mirror neurons—and Jeanine8 says in Insurgent that Tris has an unusually high number of them—were active in her brain. Not only was her amygdala causing her to experience fear in response to direct sensory experience, the mirror neurons in her brain were registering the example of the poor, fallen girl.
But “catching fear” isn’t the only function of mirror neurons. They are also essential to developing the social bonds that link us. The uncontrollable inclination to imitate others is called modeling by psychologists, and it is a shortcut to learning the ropes of social communication and cooperation. Mirror neurons don’t just make us flinch when we see someone else stub a toe, they also make babies react to facial expressions by imitating them. Those shared facial expressions are the foundation of social bonds.
Our mirror neurons may have originally evolved to help us avoid danger, but they have grown along with other aspects of our human brains, like the ability to think symbolically and use language. And when we hear a story, watch a play, or read a book, they make it possible for us to become emotionally invested in the lives of imaginary characters—like Tris, Tobias, and the other people we “know” through reading and observing in our imaginations while we read Divergent. It amazes me. When we read about Tris and her mirror neurons, mirror neurons are firing in our brains, too.
This is why we can become immersed in a story and why the characters in it become so real to us. This is why, according to recent research, reading fiction makes us more empathic. Reading stimulates the activation of mirror neurons, the same brain cells that are key to caring about others. If you were horrified and saddened by the treatment of Little Albert, if you cringe when a contestant on Total Blackout weeps and gropes in the darkness, if you cried at the end of Tris’ story, you may have exhibited another capacity of the brain: the ability to experience the suffering of another. You experienced the power of mirror neurons to make us empathize.
Unfortunately, there is a limit to the power of mirror neurons, and it is related to their power to connect to those around us. Our mirror neurons fire more easily when we see a face like the faces we already know, which, in turn, makes it easier for us to communicate and cooperate, but what happens when we encounter a stranger, someone different from ourselves? In one telling experiment, researchers hooked subjects up to EEG monitors and showed them a series of videos of men picking up a glass of water. When the person in the video was of a different race or ethnicity from the subject, the subject’s mirror neurons were less likely to activate.9 Less activity can translate into less empathy, and reduced empathy can change the way we respond to others. When someone knocks on the door and requests help, activated mirror neurons can mean the difference between a helping hand and rejection. Without an empathic connection, all that remains is an unknown, and we have already discussed how terrifying the unknown can be.
It is easy to confuse difference with danger and be afraid. When that fear is coupled with a justification, no matter how flimsy, violence can result. Fight or flight? When it comes to encounters with other human beings, all too often, the choice is fight.
THE FUTURE CHICAGO EXPERIMENT, OR LOW-TECH, SLOW-FORM GENETIC ENGINEERING
When Tris escapes Chicago in Allegiant, she discovers that her Divergence isn’t a flaw, it is the desired result of a generations-long experiment with the goal of “healing” genetic damage. The cause of that damage? The direct manipulation of genes. David refers to it as “editing humanity,” but we call it genetic engineering.
Genetic engineering is the introduction or elimination of DNA in an organism. Say you want a plant that glows in the dark. You might try to take the firefly genes responsible for bioluminescence and introduce them into a plant’s DNA. More usefully, if you want to study a human illness but need an animal model, you could use genetic engineering to create mice with a similar problem by inactivating key genes. These “knockout” mice are providing insight into cancer, heart disease, aging, and anxiety. Outside of the laboratory, genetic engineering is playing an increasing role in agriculture, creating crops that are more disease or drought resistant and even “immune” to herbicides. This is, of course, very controversial. Many worry about unforeseen consequences. And that brings us back to David and the origins of the future Chicago project.
Scientists in Divergent’s world once tried to “knock out” the genes linked to negative traits like cowardice, dishonesty, and low intelligence. The results of that direct approach were catastrophic. On the individual level, eliminating a trait like cowardice resulted not only in courage, but in aggression and violence. Or as David explains to Tris, “Take away someone’s aggression and you take away their motivation . . . Take away their selfishness and you take away their sense of self-preservation” (Allegiant). On the social level, the Purity Wars erupted.
Learning from this, the Bureau of Genetic Welfare decided to take a slower, less-invasive approach to genetic “improvement.” They are willing to wait for generations to pass in order to eventually produce a higher number of “genetically healed humans.” But slow approach or not, future Chicago is still another genetic experiment like the one that caused the Purity War to begin with. If we evaluate that experiment’s design from a purely scientific point of view, it’s a terrible plan, and unlikely to produce the desired results.
Basically, the future Chicago is a selective breeding program. Selective breeding is a very ancient technology; humans have practiced it since the domestication of dogs and the dawn of agriculture. Every delicious pineapple, every fast-growing turkey with overdeveloped breast muscles, every potato destined to be french-fried is the result of generations of tinkering with genes via selective breeding.
Human beings are just as malleable as turkeys or pineapples. We are organisms that reproduce, passing along genetically coded traits. Some of those traits are easy to see, like eye color. Others are not so visible, like the inclination to take risks. Remember Darwin and his willingness to go sail off and slog through jungles? It is possible that he was influenced by his own “adventurer” gene. Even smoking cigarettes—that weird habit of the Candor—may be an expression of DNA. Research indicates that willingness to try the first cigarette is tied to a risk-taking gene, and addiction is also a genetic predisposition.
Nothing is simple when it comes to genes, and tinkering in hope of enhancing one trait can cause the emergence of another, unexpected trait, even when that tinkering isn’t done directly to the DNA. A fifty-year-long fox-breeding experiment is great evidence of this. Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev focused his breeding program on a particular behavioral trait—tameness. Only the tamest members from each litter were allowed to mate. The resulting generations of foxes were tamer. They were very friendly and sociable around humans. But they also had floppier ears, a wider variety of coat colors, and shorter noses. If you selectively breed for tamer foxes, you end up with an animal that looks a lot like a domestic pooch. Judging by the products—like Jeanine and Eric—of the Bureau’s long-term breeding program, future Chicago is full of unintended consequences.
What about the intended goal, the production of those desirable Divergents? Future Chicago is doomed to be less successful than the fox-breeding experiment for several reasons. First of all, there is no geneticist making the decisions about which of the subjects will mate and with whom. They keep track of the family trees, but they don’t do what Belyaev did with the foxes by controlling which foxes mated. If the goal is Divergence, then a faction system that encourages mating from a limited gene pool where a single trait dominates is counterproductive. It’s like trying to produce “tame” foxes by breeding from a closed-group selection of foxes that may or may not show any tendency to tameness. And all that is further complicated by the “Choosing Ceremony,” where the breeding animals choose which gene pool to enter. (If the very idea of “captive breeding” of humans revolts you, it should. Ethical scientists would never behave in that way. But there is nothing ethical about science as practiced in the Divergent trilogy.)
Since the faction system makes the production of Divergence less efficient, why did the Bureau of Genetic Welfare build it into the social fabric of future Chicago? David tells Tris that this social order, with its clear cultural divisions, was meant to “incorporate a ‘nurture’ element.”
Nurture matters, there is no doubt about that. A baby raised in an environment where sharing and generosity are valued is more likely to imitate those behaviors (go mirror neurons!). A baby raised in a culture where the rule is “spare the rod, spoil the child” is more likely to use violence to solve problems (mirror neurons, no!). The factions are designed to enhance the traits valued in each of those “cultures.” And nurture doesn’t only influence behavior. The effects of nurture (or the lack of it) can be inherited.
It’s an amazing fact: if your grandmother or grandfather had a stressful life, you may be more prone to anxiety. The change isn’t genetic; it is epigenetic. That prefix epi-means “on or above” and that’s where your grandmother’s hard life has left its traces—in proteins that encode on the outside of the chromosomes she passes down and that can affect the expression of certain genes. We know that environmental factors, like stress, can influence which genes get turned on and which ones don’t. This may be one reason why stress can have such long-term effects on health: it actually can cause cells to grow abnormally and result in disease, even cancer. That is bad enough. That those stress-induced changes can move right along, borne by sperm and egg cells, into future generations is even worse.
There is new and dramatic evidence that fear itself can be inherited due to epigenetic transfer. Researcher Brian Dias conditioned a group of male mice to associate a specific smell with painful shocks.10 (This is similar to the fear conditioning of Little Albert.) Later, those male mice fathered litters of pups, which shared their fathers’ fear reaction to that scent without ever experiencing the pain. Those pups were born “knowing” what their fathers had learned the hard way. While the actual mechanics of this transference are still a mystery—this is far from settled science—it is clear that an environment rich in fear can have a remarkably lasting impact.
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. <http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080227121840.htm>.
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. <http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/10-questions-with-veronica-roth-author-of-the-divergent-trilogy-part-3-did-you-plan-these-books-no-really/>.
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. <http://www.abstractonline.com/plan/ViewAbstract.aspx?mID=3236&sKey=b8777f87-e87b-48ce-b047-9e2b36b833dc&cKey=b4c82dcd-2a7d-4393-b8bc-661cde6c2678&mKey=8d2a5bec-48254cd6-9439-b42bbl51dlcf>.
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.