by Leah Wilson
Nita doesn’t even offer up any real proof the Bureau is bad—not at first. “I can show you evidence,” she says, “but that will have to come later.” Yet Tobias is still willing to go along with the rebels’ plan, resulting in the death of his friend Uriah and almost causing him to lose Tris, which is the only thing he really seems to care about.
Later, Nita shows Tris and Tobias that the Bureau supplied the serum used to control the Dauntless at the end of Divergent, the serum indirectly responsible for the death of Tris’ parents. That’s why I understand Tris immediately wanting nothing to do with the Bureau. Providing Jeanine with that serum is truly an unforgiveable act. But so is setting off explosives inside the Bureau, killing innocent people—namely Uriah, the only guy who was able to maintain a smile through all three books.
Though Nita hates what the Bureau has done to the Abnegation, she can’t really argue that trying to prevent the collapse of the faction system wasn’t for the greater good. The current state of the city in Allegiant is proof of that. Nita’s words: “Evelyn is effectively a dictator, the factionless are squashing the faction members . . . Many people will die.”
Nita’s argument against the Bureau really crumbles when she tells Tobias, “If we believe we’re not ‘damaged,’ then we’re saying that everything they’re doing—the experiments, the genetic alterations, all of it—is a waste of time.”
A person can’t believe they’re genetically damaged or not. The science is there. And by using deadly force, Juanita and the rebels are reinforcing the deeply held (though extremely bigoted) belief that genetically damaged individuals are inferior—crude humans prone to violence who caused a war that almost resulted in the destruction of everyone in America. Imagine if instead the rebels led by example and organized some kind of society on their own where GDs had a role, where peace was kept, and where they could show the Bureau that being GD doesn’t mean you need to be watched like a hawk.
“For the people who live in the fringe, it seemed more appealing to opt out of society completely rather than to try to correct the problem from within, like I intend to do,” Nita says (emphasis mine). What Nita doesn’t appear to realize is that by bombing the Bureau, she’s no longer trying to change the system from within; she’s become an Insurgent, attacking from the outside to destroy it. Furthermore, it’s revealed the rebels weren’t after the memory serum at all, but the death serum. They were prepared to kill innocents, the same way the Bureau actively participated in the deaths of innocents inside the city limits. Neither their methods nor their results were any better than the Bureau’s.
Sounds like nearly equal footing to me.
WHERE DOES TRIS FIT IN?
Since Tris, Tobias, and their crew end up fighting against the Bureau, basically finishing Nita’s work, I think it’s safe to include them on the side of the rebels, even if they disagree with how the rebels go about things. But—and this may be a tough question because Tris is the hero of the story—is it really any better for her to erase the memory of the Bureau employees before they can do the same to the residents of Chicago?
Tris admits that the entire Bureau compound can’t possibly know what their leaders have done, but she’s willing to erase their identities anyway, the very thing she condemns the Bureau for wanting to do in Chicago. Tris says in regard to the Bureau’s plan for a total reset, “It’s not sacrifice if it’s someone else’s life you’re giving away, it’s just evil.” But then she does exactly that—sacrifice the memories of everyone at the Bureau to save the people in the city—even after Tobias tries to talk her out of it. All of those people in the compound are now simply gone.
Tris argues that the Bureau doesn’t want to stop the revolution in the city to save lives, but to save their experiment. Isn’t that the same thing? Especially in the long term. The whole goal of the Bureau is to restore order to a semi-lawless world.
The Bureau, evolving slightly on a moral level, wants to reset everyone in the city in order to save lives (and, admittedly, the experiment). I say evolving since it wasn’t that long ago they decided it was easier to wipe out the Abnegation to maintain order. But Tris sees the idea of a memory wipe as equivalent to murder. Taking away someone’s identity is taking away who they are, and thus their entire life. I really can’t argue with that. Then Tris readily plans to—and accomplishes—wiping the memories and identities of everyone in the Bureau. What is worse: Erasing memories in order to neutralize the brewing war inside Chicago, or erasing the memories of thousands of Bureau employees to stop the memory erasure in Chicago, and then have the war happen anyway?
Yes, Tris does an awful thing—the equivalent of mass murder, according to her—but what would’ve happened if she hadn’t? Would the rebels have eventually succeeded with their death serum? Maybe. Would Chicago have fallen, most of its citizens victim to the internal wars and uprisings? Probably.
In this, Tris isn’t so unlike the Bureau. She is willing to sacrifice for the greater good—her greater good. What she does is terrible, but it saves the people she loves and believes in most. Which is all she wanted. Trapped in a bad situation with no good options, she makes what she feels is the best choice, and that is all that can be expected from a real human being.
SO WHO’S WORSE?
This wouldn’t be a very good smackdown if I just said there are pros and cons to both sides, but didn’t pick one as the greater of two evils. While reading Allegiant, and while writing the beginning of this essay, I was pro-Bureau. But while I think the Bureau is on the right side of things, I can’t get behind them. Probably for the same reasons that Tris couldn’t: their end does not justify their means.
So I’m going to say my heart lies with the rebels’ cause, but not with them specifically, terrorists that they are. I don’t think the Bureau was ever going to give the GDs a chance to prove that the experiment wasn’t necessary. Amar says it best: “Genes aren’t everything . . . People, even genetically damaged people, make choices. That’s what matters.” Yes, Amar. Yes, it does. This very idea is what the Bureau is afraid of most.
Caleb, for all his faults, holds on to this one nugget of wisdom from Natalie Prior: “She said that everyone has some evil inside them, and the first step to loving anyone is to recognize the same evil in ourselves, so we’re able to forgive them.” But forgiving GDs for their part in the Purity Wars isn’t something the Bureau seems capable of. GDs would never have been given a chance to rise above. And as we see, they do rise above. Chicago has a bright future at the end of Allegiant, even with pesky things like the need for policemen and politicians (can I get an UGH?).
At the same time, I can’t ignore the Bureau’s logic. I think there is something to genetic damage. In the broken world of Divergent, they’ve been searching for order for seven long generations. Would the Bureau really have spent all those centuries studying GDs if there wasn’t something to study? What’s the benefit? “Control, maybe?” Nita offers. I don’t know. I want to believe there has to be some kind of onward progression—an insanely slow progression, yes—to allow an experiment like that to continue for so many years. Otherwise, wouldn’t it have been shut down by the government centuries ago as an unnecessary cost? But we all know people don’t like change, and for a system as ingrained as the Bureau, where people are raised to work there from birth . . . well, maybe they would’ve kept at it for seven more generations, and seven more after that.
Deep down I want to believe that the Bureau does not hate the genetically damaged as much as Nita thinks they do. They let the GDs work on their airplanes, for crying out loud! Would you let someone you thought was inferior work on your airplane? No, you would not. You’d trust that job to the most competent person you knew. So it’s sad to see the Bureau not trust GDs to hold the highest positions of power in their organization. It makes no sense, and only weakens their stance.
That’s one of the reasons I hate the Bureau. I wish they were better. They have the capacity to be better. After seven generations, ma
ybe it was time to give up and simply let people live. If the Bureau were destroyed, and no one had seen the Edith Prior video, I think Chicago would’ve been just fine. Tris and Tobias would’ve figured out a way to neutralize Evelyn and Marcus, and their tiny little world would’ve chugged right along. Imperfect, not without bloodshed, and perhaps only until enough Divergents came along to render the old system obsolete, but the seeds for democracy were already there in the hearts of people like Tris Prior.
What I want to see is the story after Divergent. Can peace last? What would the next thing we found wrong with each other be? Only Veronica Roth can know.
Maybe the Bureau just reminds me too much of the current dystopia we’re living in, a nation where the citizens are spied on and controlled, albeit through things like laws and the distribution of wealth rather than serums.
Perhaps once upon a time the Bureau was a necessary evil, in those precarious days after the Purity War, when America truly was teetering on the brink of total annihilation. But not anymore.
We know now that there is more than one way to handle the effects of genetic damage—the trait-based factions were one option—and it doesn’t have to involve breeding humans back to genetic “perfection” over a number of generations.
Tobias, a genetically damaged boy who finds he can grow, he can change, and he can hold on to those changes because they’re all that’s left of the love of his life, is proof of that.
After pumping gas for nine years to put himself through college, Dan Krokos, now twenty-eight, dropped out to write full-time. He is currently hard at work on three separate projects: the final stop for Miranda North in the False Memory series, the next adventure for thirteen-year-old Mason Stark in The Planet Thieves series, and his first adult thriller. All of Dan’s books have been optioned for film or television, and False Memory recently won the International Thriller Writer’s Award for best Young Adult book. He enjoys riding his Harley, playing MMORPGs, and drinking coffee.
If he had to choose a faction, he’d choose Dauntless. They have the most fun. But he’d go with Amity if they were into zip-lining and jumping into nets and stuff.
Are factions good or bad? It’s a debate that comes up many times in the Divergent trilogy, including two notable occasions in Allegiant: inside Tris’ city, as the Allegiant discuss their desire to reinstate the factions, and outside it, when David attributes Chicago’s success to the faction system. But neither time does the series offer up a definitive judgment. All we know for sure is that, at least in the world of Divergent, factions are effective . . . if sometimes at great cost to individual freedom. Here, Julia Karr takes on the benefits of belonging, the shortcomings of segregation, and the evils to which division and exclusion can leave us open.
FACTIONS: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
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.