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La bellezza delle cose esiste nella mente che le contempla.

We choose our favourite author as we do our friend, from a conformity of humour and disposition. Mirth or passion, sentiment or reflection; whichever of these most predominates in our temper, it gives us a peculiar sympathy with the writer who resembles us.

David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary

#philosophy #quotes #David Hume #Essays Moral Political and Literary #sympathy #art #artists

Eğer burada durup daha ileri gitmeyeceksek niçin bu noktaya kadar geldik?

#david hume #alıntı

on the mortality of president snow

this post has been in the works since i finished sotr, but i wanted to revisit ballad before sharing my thoughts. one thing i absolutely loved about sotr is that snow was not the #1 Main Antagonist so much as The Capitol, abstractly, because it hammers home one of the most essential points of the trilogy. we have this image of tyrants like snow as all-powerful, hyper-intelligent demigods four steps ahead of everyone else. like a snake charmer, they woo a population into submission with superhuman charisma. we have that concept of snow because that's katniss' view of him, and certainly the view he has of himself in ballad. snow in sotr entirely disrupts that perception. in fact, during each substantial interaction between snow and haymitch, snow appears, more than anything else, weak. in haymitch's words, "he's just a man, as mortal as the rest of us."

in private, snow's fragility is a striking juxtaposition with the young man he presents himself as in his own narrative. in the meeting at the heavensbee home, snow is retching and shuddering from poison. he seethes over how, half a century ago, the heavensbees were rich enough to keep books when he had to burn them. though haymitch doesn't, we know that he's word vomiting about the covey because he’s still not over a girl he had a thing with 40 years ago. the implications of this doomed tribute are so concerning to snow, a man with indefinite and unlimited authority and resources, that he arranges a meeting with haymitch under the guise of warning him that, should his behavior continue, his family will be harmed.

only, that's exactly what happens. publicly, snow and haymitch are caught in a chess match in which, each time the audience is paying attention, haymitch forces snow to forfeit a pawn. when haymitch slow claps over louella’s body, snow has no escape. he is "mocked" on camera by a boy wearing a covey necklace. later, the most snow can do on stage at the victor's ceremony is issue a subtle threat to "enjoy your homecoming." yes, haymitch's family will pay. but that wasn't what snow wanted. it wasn't sid who drank his milk. it wasn't willamae who flooded his watchful eye with its own tears. snow had been unable to kill haymitch, even in the middle of a televised battle royale. amongst the roaring applause for the victor, snow must crown him victorious, kneecapped by the demands of his own people.

not only is snow astonishingly fallible, but he is never solely responsible for any of his horrors. in ballad coriolanus was powerless, and he had to take matters into his own hands. he killed bobbin personally. he used highbottom's weakness against him by poisoning the morphling. only sejanus was not his death blow—but he, a lowly, rank-and-file peacekeeper, reported his friend knowing it would inevitably result in his death, no matter how much he tried to convince himself otherwise. in sotr, not a single one of the atrocities snow orchestrates happens by his hand. from lou lou to beetee and ampert to the games themselves to the deaths of sid/ma/lenore dove, each one involves a substantial number of people. each requires scientists and escorts and gamemakers and arsonists and peacekeepers willing to execute his plans.

so why would people back someone so feeble? someone who is not only personally weak, but whose power depends entirely on other people? because it's not snow they're supporting. it's not even the games, for which people still need convincing. it's what they represent. the message, even 50 years later, must be constantly reinforced to every citizen of panem with posters painted in blood to spread the narrative of "no capitol, no peace." in the districts, "no peacekeepers, no peace" means that, without the peacekeepers upholding the system with their guns and whips and ropes, they will be obliterated for their crimes. just like district 13. in the capitol, "no hunger games, no peace" means that, without the games to punish the enemies responsible for "starting" the war, they will forget and try again. and the capitol will fall besieged once again.

this messaging works because both sides still have people who remember the dark days. they remember the brutality of the capitol and the siege of the rebels. to the survivors, capitol and district alike, giving up their rights and self-determination is unequivocally worth preventing a return to war. it's not a conscious choice, of course. it's implicit submission. and the critical point is that people implicitly submit not to their specific role in upholding the system, and not even to snow, but to the narrative. to the opinion of government. to the inevitability of the system itself. and snow, as the #1 peacekeeper, manifests that narrative.

we meet characters from the districts and capitol alike who represent various points on the spectrum of implicit submission. people who swallow the propaganda wholeheartedly like drusilla, someone who lived through the aftermath of the war, who has dehumanized her enemies so much that she channels her cruelty and selfishness to abuse "their" children. ones who, in the face of hopelessness, forfeit their morality, like jethro callow and the booker boys. those who believe, as mr. donner does, that whatever facade of power their wallets provide is enough to spare them from the system which fuels that facade. and people like effie, whose kindness and humanity remains intact, who feel true sympathy for those who suffer in the name of upholding the system, but swallow like sugar the belief that it is for the greater good.

snow, specifically, appeals to each of these people, whether as a villain or as a savior, not because he is so intuitive or charming or brilliant as he considers himself to be, but because no one believes the propaganda more than coriolanus himself. throughout ballad, he constantly questioned his theory of governance, but he never, not once, questioned his core belief that the capitol is superior to the districts. that capitol people are superior to district people. when lucy gray threatened this fundamental reality by becoming someone worth loving, he first tried to distance her from his enemy by emphasizing her covey background. but when he went to 12 and saw her among his enemies, he decided he'd rather kill the piece of himself capable of love than consider that his belief system might be flawed. 40 years later, he's still not past her because she is the lock on the dam which keeps his cognitive dissonance from spilling over.

snow only learns one lesson in those 40 years, the one he adopts in the epilogue of ballad during his gamemaker internship: the value of a group project. he is successful in coming to power because he realizes that, whether they’re the intoxicated capitol crowd cheering on haymitch’s scar or the gamemakers who maysilee and maritte kill, every capitol citizen is fundamentally necessary to upholding the system over which snow now presides. regardless of their degree of complicity in its maintenance, the implicit submission of the feeble-minded masses is what keeps it running. what snow does not learn by the 50th games is that he is one of them.

not, of course, that he had the opportunity to understand that before—it was the heavensbees, after all, not the snows, who got to keep books for reading and not kindling. by the 50th games, however, coriolanus has no such excuse. yet, he still decides to send haymitch the milk pitcher in the arena. he could have had haymitch killed at any point before now, but he needs haymitch to suffer more than just an agonizing death. he needs him to die a selfish being, who deprived a poor, starving girl of her salvation, or live as a pariah, who poisoned her to survive. it is not just haymitch who needs to die. it is his poster. the opposition to the narrative. to the essence of snow's being. but it's that very choice which causes snow's plan to collapse. because his catch-22 is cut off by silka’s axe.

this moment, not his performance of illness to plutarch and haymitch, not his notice of a covey necklace while haymitch stands over a dead girl, not even his crowning haymitch victor, is what best portrays snow's weakness. that best demonstrates that he doesn’t have ultimate control over the depravity of the games and panem’s system of stratification and subjugation. snow fears chaos more than anything in the world, swallows the propaganda and rises to the top of the government in search of unimpeachable control. yet, despite his supreme power, he does not find what he seeks. because the fear, the pain, the oppression, and the deaths do not serve him; he serves them. his efforts are undermined not by some powerful capitol usurper, but by a scared and brainwashed teenager from district 1 desperate to get home to her family and to glory. his authority is undermined by his own belief system.

snow does not learn his true place during the 50th games. but the lesson is still there to be learned. and people do. plutarch, beetee, wiress, mags, and every subsequent member of the rebellion learn that snow is only one step of the battle. coin, too, learns it, training the focus of her most problematic adversaries like katniss and finnick on him so that they don't notice her. but no one learns the lesson better than haymitch. over time, he comes to realize that the threat to be defeated is a pitcher of milk, not a bag of gumdrops. the real enemy, the true antagonist, is not one man who positions himself as the villain, but the movement from where he sources his power. the real enemy has always been the capitol itself. snow was never the snake charmer. he was always just a snake.

which is why, when the war finally comes, haymitch is not among the parade of people clamoring to kill snow, but rather in the control booth directing the mockingjay. undoubtedly, haymitch wants snow dead. but, at this point, he has the perspective to recognize that his failure in the 50th games was snow's failure, too. which is why, when the war is won, he aligns his vote with katniss. because, after 25 years, he's come to know exactly what she's known from the minute she held out the berries. the lesson she learned from peeta, who's always understood that everyone, even snow, is a piece in the capitol's games. that snow’s death changes nothing. because the power is in the message, not the voice. and if the message isn't contained, its voice can change with a flip of a coin.

coriolanus snow is just a man, a mortal being. he has never been who the real enemy is. the enemy has always been the idea, the propaganda, that fueled him. from the words of a ballad and a declaration of love to the guidance of a mentor shifting the aim of an arrow, all four of the victors from district 12 learn in their own time how to fight this opinion of government. they learn not to implicitly submit. and it's because they do so that the the sun did not rise on a reaping ever again.

Themes of Implicit Submission in The Hunger Games (Book One)

I’ve just finished re-reading The Hunger Games (book one) and there are a few themes that I expect SOTR will develop based on Hume’s implicit submission theory. Specifically, these are the main six tactics I believe the Capitol uses to thwart another rebellion present in the first book alone:

Societal Pressure:

District 12 has a “keep your head down” culture. Any talks of rebellion are frowned upon. Any anti-government statements will cause social repercussions. It’s not just Katniss rolling her eyes at Gale in the woods, it’s how she has been groomed by the culture to keep quiet about the issues pervading life in the district:

“When I was younger, I scared my mother to death, the things I would blurt about District 12, about the people who rule our country, Panem, from the far-off city called the Capitol. Eventually, I understood this would only lead us to more trouble. So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts. Do my work quietly in school. Make only polite small talk in the public market. Discuss little more than trades in the Hob.… Even at home, where I am less pleasant, I avoid discussing tricky topics. Like the reaping, or food shortages, or the Hunger Games. Prim might begin to repeat my words and then where would we be?” (p.6)

All of this proceeds the statement:

“Even here, in the middle of nowhere, you worry someone might overhear you.” (p. 5)

Under this point, it is also telling that during the reaping ceremony, Katniss says the “boldest form of dissent [the audience] can manage,” is silence. Not outrage, not yelling, not like district 11, but silence (p. 24).

2. Division between Classes

The Capitol has created conflict within the districts to draw hatred to a local target. In the case of the first book, Gale remarks tesserae is a tactic to keep them divided.

“Gale knows his anger at Madge is misdirected. On other days, deep in the woods, I’ve listened to him rant about how the tesserae are just another tool to cause misery in our district. A way to plant hatred between the starving workers of the Seam and those who can generally count on supper and thereby ensure we will never trust one another. “It’s to the Capitol’s advantage to have us divided among ourselves,” he might say if there were no ears to hear but mine.” (p. 14)

Interestingly, tesserae is already known as the “courtesy of the capitol” as stamped on Haymitch’s shorts in SOTR. The Capitol markets tesserae as something it does out of goodness. It attempts to make itself seem well-intentioned via the distribution of necessary goods. It’s their courtesy, after all.

This point also includes the division between the districts. In the games, Katniss remarks how allying with the careers is essentially traitorous.

“No one from District 12 would think of doing such a thing! Career tributes are overly vicious, arrogant, better fed, but only because they’re the Capitol’s lapdogs.” (p. 162)

By treating certain districts better, the Capitol promotes distrust between the districts, dampening potential unionization with planted hatred. By choosing favorite children, the parent that is the Capitol forces the districts to fight.

3. Weaponized Language

The name of the Treaty of Treason, the treaty that makes the Hunger Games necessary per the law, is definitive of how the districts are forced to see themselves. They are the ones who committed treason by rebelling, and therefore they are guilty. They must repent by sending the children to the games. The permanent treaty, read during every reaping ceremony, enforces the guilt the districts are supposed to feel. In turn, the fact it is a “treaty” means the districts must have agreed to and signed it. Regardless of the circumstances around the signing of the treaty, the capitol then has the ability to wave it over their heads henceforth.

The name itself points a finger and keeps the districts forever at fault.

Furthermore, the fact Katniss is referred to by her district number until and even after she is given something to remember her by (the fire) further dehumanizes the tributes. During the parade, she says the citizens of the capitol have liked her and Peeta enough to "read the program" and learn their names (p. 70).

There are many more examples of villainizing and dehumanizing language in the book, but I have chosen those examples for the sake of brevity.

4. Propagandizing Education

A major theme in many dystopian novels is how the system treats education. In District 12, Katniss tells the reader:

“Besides basic reading and math, most of our instruction is coal-related. Except for the weekly lecture on the history of Panem. It’s mostly a lot of blather about what we owe the Capitol.” (p. 42)

A weekly lecture in a school is quite a lot of time to devote to any one subject. Seeing as how the rest of their curriculum revolves around district-specific content, the weekly lecture must be mandated across all districts, likely leaving the rest up to the discretion of the district itself. The Capitol once again emphasizes how the districts were wrong. It is repeated week after week, and eventually, it becomes ingrained in the social psychology of the district.

5. Hunger and Deprivation of Needs

Continuing from the section about Katniss knows the weekly lecture must be propaganda, saying,

“I know there must be more than they’re telling us, an actual account of what happened during the rebellion. But I don’t spend much time thinking about it. Whatever the truth is, I don’t see how it will help me get food on the table.” (p. 42)

This point coincides with my second point about the division of classes. By keeping the people hungry, they are too busy thinking about the lowest rung on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. They see those who have food, and they are the opposition in front of them, rather than examining the source of the problem. By keeping the people hungry, they are less likely to have the time or ability to even think about a collective uprising.

6. Limiting Flow of Information

The Capitol limits the flow of information between districts. In doing so, the districts are forced to make bridging assumptions about one another. This is revealed through Katniss and Rue’s discussion in the games:

“It’s interesting, hearing about her life. We have so little communication with anyone outside our district. In fact, I wonder if the Gamemakers are blocking out our conversation, because even though the information seems harmless, they don’t want people in different districts to know about one another.” (p. 203)

By keeping them separate, they can turn any district against another. They rely solely on the Capitol for information about other districts, and therefore the Capitol has all of the power.

Interestingly, another division between classes is shown through Peeta’s knowledge about other districts. He knows the different types of bread from the districts, implying the merchant class may have more access to information than those of the seam, leading to further division between classes.

All in all, these are the themes I expect to be addressed in SOTR based on the pretense of implicit submission.

See Catching Fire's themes here

See Mockingjay's themes here