JULIA KARR
The heat of a summer afternoon turns oppressive, and even though the sun still shines brightly, the atmosphere is as dark and charged as if storm clouds were gathering. Streets fill with military vehicles and soldiers. Shots ring out. A general and his wife lie murdered in their garden—both shot in the back, execution-style. Another military leader is dragged away from his new wife as they’re embarking on their honeymoon and shot dead. A journalist is gunned down; a political rival is hacked to death; numerous high-ranking military, religious, and political leaders are arrested and die by firing squad.
Though almost eerily similar to the simulation-controlled Dauntless massacre of unsuspecting Abnegation leaders, this was a real event. In his nonfiction book In the Garden of Beasts, about American ambassador to Germany William Dodd during Adolph Hitler’s ascension to power, author Erik Larson describes the chilling scene that unfolded in Berlin on June 30, 1934, at Hitler’s order—an event that came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives.
When Jeanine orders the deaths of the Abnegation leaders, she does so without mercy and with the coldhearted intention of removing anyone who might try to thwart her purpose—a purpose that included complete control over the factions and a government of her own design, over which she would rule. Her plan, like Hitler’s, could not have succeeded without highly trained, tightly controlled factions of soldiers at her disposal—in Hitler’s case, the SS and Gestapo; in Jeanine’s, the simulation-controlled Dauntless.
I had just finished reading In the Garden of Beasts when I picked up Divergent, and I was immediately struck by the similarities between fiction and real life. Both books point out the dangers of blind obedience to any faction, group, or leader. And both show how easy it is to manipulate people who follow a leader unquestioningly (whether because they truly believe their leader is infallible or because they happen to be simulation controlled).
Factions—smaller groups within a larger organization that share a common goal—can be dangerous. The factionless in Chicago are well aware of this. Daily they deal with a lack of basic human necessities, like proper clothing, adequate housing, nutritional food, and medical care, just because they couldn’t or didn’t want to belong. But the faction system in the Divergent trilogy is also responsible for estranging families, tearing apart friendships, ignoring intolerance and bullying, and suppressing the human spirit—not just expelling or killing anyone who can’t, or won’t, live up to the demands of whichever faction they are in.
Unfortunately, all this happens in the real world, too.
However, I’m getting ahead of myself. In order to better understand how groups go from good, to bad, to downright awful, we need to first look at what leads people to gather together with like-minded individuals in the first place.
THE GOOD: BEING IN A GROUP
It’s human nature to gravitate toward people who like the same kinds of things that we do. It’s also empowering and affirming to be part of a group with others whose beliefs are in sync with your own. This is why there are clubs, political parties, and all kinds of different groups, formal and informal, organized around shared experience or shared interests. Spending time with people with similar experiences or values validates the way we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us. It gives us an anchor in what can often feel like storm-tossed seas of life options and emotions.
In the Chicago experiment, we originally learn that the factions are organized around shared beliefs and shared aptitudes. Later, of course, we learn it’s also organized around shared identity: similarly modified genetics. So it makes a lot of sense that the Choosing Ceremony takes place at sixteen. Teens are at a point in life when they are beginning to question the values they grew up with and look for their own place in the world. At sixteen, I was searching for my own identity, as were most of my friends. Tris’ secret longing as she watches the Dauntless arrive at school each day reminded me of my own desire to become someone different than the small-town girl I was. Whereas Tris aligns herself with Dauntless, I gravitated to the counterculture of the 1960s. Both choices were extremely different than our backgrounds, and both offered a feeling of belonging and a camaraderie with people with whom we could identify. When you find a group that supports who you feel you are inside, you’re eager to be a part of it.
Besides identity, another reason to be part of a group is common interests and shared goals. You might join a drama club because you’re interested in theater and want to be involved in a play. You might not be able to (or even want to) act, but you might have a knack for or really enjoy set building, costuming, or makeup. In groups like this, everyone adds value, whether they’re onstage or behind the scenes. Even though their talents (their aptitudes, you could say) are diverse, they are all integral to the group, and especially its ability to achieve its goal: putting on that play.
Very frequently, a united group can achieve things a single person cannot. Historically, trailblazers like the Puritan colonists or America’s early westward-bound pioneers joined together to travel and carve out settlements in foreign surroundings. Although the Puritans had a shared goal of religious freedom, the settlers had varied reasons for traveling west. However, everyone within each group shared the need for safety and survival. That collective need bonded the community because they all knew they were more likely to survive if they helped each other and acted as a connected whole than if the members thought and acted only as it concerned them individually.
Another benefit of joining a group is that it can provide structure and guidance, a safe haven where things make sense. Before Jeanine’s failed coup, faction members in Divergent knew both their roles within their faction and their faction’s role within the larger community. After Evelyn and the factionless take over control of the city, it is not surprising that some people would want to return to the familiarity of the faction system—or that they would form another group, the Allegiant, so quickly. The faction system was flawed, but it helped people feel secure in the knowledge of who they were and what their purpose was. Losing that is never easy. “And I’m not sure how Dauntless I really am, anyway, now that the factions are gone,” Tris thinks in Allegiant. “I feel a strange little ache at the thought . . . some things are hard to let go of.”
Belonging is a powerful thing. It can create bonds so powerful and passionate that you can easily feel a closer kinship with a chosen group than with your birth family. In Tris’ world, you can see this feeling (and see this feeling being reinforced) in the motto “faction before blood.” She and her newfound friends become as close as, if not closer than, her family ever was.
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 existence” (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.