When “The Hunger Games” first came out more than a decade ago, the dystopia it presented was compelling and sophisticated but also implausible. Recently, I wondered how it had held up and rewatched the first three films (I don’t know about the others).
My goodness, it was more prescient than it seemed at the time, including the stratification of wealth, the decadence of privilege, the abuse of power, and the complications of resistance. This series exists on many levels but strikes me as one of the more revealing fictional stories that forecast the overlapping of material decadence, desperate poverty, and the use of fear as a propaganda device.
As a political allegory, it covers the same intellectual terrain as Aristotle’s “Politics,” Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” and de Jouvenel’s “On Power,” but in a way that is more penetrating for readers and viewers—and particularly relevant for our times.
The entire series deals with the greatest conflict in history, that between liberty and power. Those fortunate enough to live in District One—the center of the empire—and socialize with the best, eat well, dress in increasingly preposterous ways (hair dyed in unnatural colors), follow all the trends, go to the right parties, and try to keep up with the social scene.
Each of the districts below it perform their assigned economic function of keeping the center living in luxury. Borders between them are strictly enforced. Your place in the sociopolitical order is determined by accidents of birth, with no broad economic mobility.
In order to maintain the order and keep rebellion at bay, the leaders in District One hold an annual extravaganza that combines fashion, violent games, and intense political messaging about the dangers of rebellion. Each district is required to send two randomly assigned tributes to the games, in which they face off in an arena in a battle for their lives with only one winner, as the people at the top watch with intense fascination.
Those who have followed the story until the final installment might have supposed that the problem was rather stark. One man, President Snow, held all the power. He was a cruel man, and he used every means to keep his power. He sat at the center of a capital city that pillaged the districts of resources and held power through fear.
If that is all there was to the problem, the solution would be clear: President Snow would have to go. With the source of the problem out of the way, all would be well. This was the thinking of District 12 heroine Katniss Everdeen for most of the series. And one can see why she would believe this. Snow is a ghastly figure, and he was personally responsible for vast cruelty and crimes. He deserved to be overthrown and for justice to prevail.
Plus, she supposed that everyone she knew shared her vision of the final goal: a normal life without oppression, without violence, without pillaging, without rigid geographic and caste classifications, and without televised death matches orchestrated to instill fear in the population.
There was more going on beneath the surface. The capital city of Panem was an autocracy but also the center of a nation-state, which is to say that the bureaucracy, the administrative apparatus, a standing military, a media enterprise, and its methods of rule could survive the death of the leader. This is the difference between a personal state and a nation state. The power apparatus of the nation state seeks immortality, a continuing life regardless of who happens to head it.
President Snow was the paranoid autocrat who, Katniss came to discover, was himself entrapped in a system that he had to maintain while seeking a successor. There were masses in the capital to keep entertained, potential betrayers within his own ranks, and rebellions constantly brewing. He knew for certain that his rule was fragile and that an iron hand was the only way to maintain this unstable system.
Another problem was that the system itself was attractive to competitors who long not for freedom as such but rather to inhabit the commanding heights. The problem of creating a world without power, then, became more complicated than the overthrow of the existing autocrat.
In every revolutionary situation, those who are most motivated to achieve the aim are those who seek to hold power themselves. So long as the machinery of legal violence exists, there will be those who seek to control it—and, as Friedrich Hayek said, it is usually the worst who make it to the top and spend their lives seeking to get there. Therefore, it is not just those who rule but also those who seek to rule who constitute a threat to liberty. This is how the existence of powerful nation-states ends up creating multiple layers of dangers.
This is the story of how Rousseau became Robespierre, how Russian liberalism became Bolshevism, and how so many meritorious movements against colonialism and corporatism have ended in dictatorship, tyranny, and famine.
Anyone who seeks to end oppression has to keep his or her eye out for those who would use the chaos and confusion of political upheavals to seize and exercise power in the future. This is what Katniss learned as she gradually discovered that her one-time allies had become skilled in the conduct of war, appreciative of the status that comes with leadership, and lusting for exercising state power themselves.
She came to discover this dark truth about the rebel armies when the leader herself admitted that she had every intention of retaining the Hunger Games as a mechanism of control following a successful coup.
Through this shocking revelation, Katniss learned that great lesson of history: It is not just despots who need to be kept at bay, but also those who most passionately seek to overthrow despots. In order to realize liberty, you need more than just loathing of those in charge; you need the ascendance of the love of true liberty itself and a system in place that guards that liberty against every attempt to overthrow it.
Once Katniss caught on to what was happening around her, she had to make a decision. Would she comply with the dictates of the increasingly centralized revolutionary forces or take a different turn and go her own way? The urgency of this decision was what turned “The Hunger Games” from being a simple Manichean struggle between one good and one evil into a real-life version of a massively multiplayer online game.
There are many applications of this principle in history, but one might pertain to U.S. foreign policy. In the 1980s, the United States sought to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan by supporting Islamic fundamentalists, who were then called “freedom fighters,” and they were given weapons and massive logistical support. After the Soviets left, the rebellion gradually metastasized into the Taliban, who ruled with an iron hand and were then overthrown after 9/11, leading to 20 years of U.S. occupation, which stirred resentment among the population, and a final deal that put the Taliban back in charge, enforcing their rule with the weaponry that the United States left behind in a chaotic withdrawal.
That’s a one-paragraph summary of three decades of incredible folly.
This saga coincided with a similar situation in Iraq after 2003, following a decade of embargoes, intermittent bombing, and harsh sanctions. The overthrow of the once-allied dictator Saddam Hussein brought to power not liberty-loving constitutionalists but rather a Shiite majority that oppressed, in turn, the Sunni minority that Hussein had represented. The Sunni insurgency against the Iraqi state caused a bloody civil war in Iraq that eventually spilled over into the rebellion against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and mutated into the “Islamic State.” Over the course of 25 years, Iraq went from a defeated and relatively quiescent state to a seething hotbed of poverty, violence, and hatred.
Fast forward to the Libyan case in which the overthrow of another dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, sparked what seemed like a populist blowback but was really part of a series of “color revolutions” that manipulated social media and the mainstream media into following U.S. foreign policy priorities. Combined with all of the other interventions, and alongside a surreptitious attempt to boot the Syrian overlord, the next stage saw the spread of ISIS into a region-wide insurgency that intended regional rule through bloodshed, which was finally put down by the Trump administration.
The point is that attempts to purge the world of an existing evil raise the very risky prospect of creating even more. And it’s not just about foreign regimes. A famous trait of democracy is that the urge to kick out one group of leaders is necessarily tied to bringing another group into power. The latter are often no better and sometimes worse than the former. This is one of the reasons for so much political nostalgia in U.S. politics: A look back almost always provides a better picture than a look at the present.
The simple lesson of “The Hunger Games” is that powerful people can do terrible things. We must resist in order to stop them. The more complicated lesson is that powerful institutions themselves are corrupt and that there will always be those lacking in moral scruples who are willing to assume the mantle of power.
That is precisely why the Founding Fathers struggled so hard to put in place a framework for rule that guaranteed, as a first priority, the rights and liberties of the people: a republic if the people can keep it.
There is general agreement today that the United States does stand at the precipice of something huge because the existing disequilibrium is simply not sustainable on multiple levels. The key question is always: What kind of society do we want to live in? Everyone needs a clear and compelling answer to that question today. There is no more standing on the sidelines to watch the action from the outside, like spectators in the Hunger Games.
At the end of the movie, we see Katniss out of battle gear, sitting in the grass, at her home, being bathed by sunlight, tending to her own life, cultivating her own personal vision of freedom, out of the limelight. Ruling herself, not others, and having regained a normal life. Perhaps that scene offers the best lesson of all.
