The Invisible Counterpoint

Divergent There are five factions everyone gets to choose to count part of. One of them dresses in modest clothing, and are deathly afraid of over-spicing their food for fear of sin -- Abnegation, of course. They look showered … which is about their only physical difference to what lies outside the factions -- the homeless, who've gone whole-hog destitute. When choosing day comes, they hope their children will choose their clan, even when they'll be baited with the Dauntless, who are totally bad-ass and own the streets, and Erudite, who are essentially the officer's club, absent the brandy. Since the parental bond is a nest of sympathy the society seems bent on showing it can rape, at the moment of choosing kids really do feel like they've got a choice -- and so of course flee their parents' pathetic asses left and right. Their parents pretend they're happy, which is hard to do, after being raped, and so just look like they've just been. The main p...

Andrew O’Hehir wrote: […] Instead, I’d rather go beneath the surface to look at the structural function of these stories – the role they play in the cultural economy – where I think we can identify even more intriguing similarities. Both “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games” are fundamentally works of propaganda disguised as fantasy or science fiction. They’re not propaganda on behalf of the left or the right, exactly, or at least not the way we generally use those words in America. They are propaganda for the ethos of individualism, the central ideology of consumer capitalism, which also undergirds both major political parties and almost all American public discourse. It’s an ideology that transcends notions of left and right and permeates the entire atmosphere with the seeming naturalness of oxygen in the air. But at least if we acknowledge that it is an ideology, we can begin to understand that it limits political action and political debate, and restricts the heated warfare bet...