Divergent Thinking

by Leah Wilson

  What becomes apparent over the course of the events in Divergent is that in this society the corporate sector is driving the train on how the military is utilized, and the government is providing absolutely no oversight at all. Erudite, the faction that has goals that are not beneficial to the society as a whole, has control of Dauntless, the faction capable of physically enforcing said goals, and that’s a very dangerous combination.

  As soon as Erudite’s leader, Jeanine, perceived something or someone (in this case Abnegation and the Divergent) as a threat to the fabric and structure of society, she utilized Dauntless to neutralize that threat.

  Any given group of people is going to include a percentage of sociopaths—those who kill without conscience (aka murder) and commit what in the US military would be termed as war crimes. In Dauntless, you have a certain type of Erudite transfer.

  Because they are genetically engineered to value knowledge above all else and, according to David in Allegiant, are lacking in compassion for others, the Erudite are more likely to lack the filter that would prevent a “genetically pure” human (or human from another faction) from killing. So, when Erudites transfer to Dauntless, they have a tendency to become cruel, bullying, conscienceless, and highly intelligent killing machines. In short, sociopaths.

  A perfect example of this is Erudite transfer Eric, who seems to take joy not just in causing others pain, but also in resorting to any means necessary to climb to the top of his social sphere—to win or be the best. We know from Tobias that Eric was ruthless in his initiate class. Even two years after graduating, he is constantly gunning for Tobias, viewing him as a rival and threat and looking for a way to permanently remove him despite Tobias having made it very clear he has no desire to move up in the Dauntless ranks.

  (Peter isn’t an Erudite transfer—he’s originally from Candor—but between his Eric-like ruthlessness during initiation and his defection to Erudite in Insurgent, it’s easy to mistake him for one. In Divergent, Peter takes out Edward with a knife to the eye while he sleeps because Edward is at the top of the ranking structure, and then later makes an attempt on Tris’ life after it becomes clear she is the next highest-ranked initiate. After all, David says in Allegiant that lack of compassion is a flaw of Candor’s, too.)

  But the blame for Dauntless’ devolution cannot solely be placed on Erudite. Others, like Dauntless leader Max, while not (as far as we know) Erudite transfers, were easily influenced and controlled by Jeanine. Max was responsible for changing the training methods to make them more competitive and brutal, as well as appointing Erudite transfer Eric as a Dauntless leader, at Jeanine’s demand, thus assisting her in creating an army she could use to wipe out the Divergent. While it can be assumed that Dauntless was already slowly becoming a more brutal and violent faction due to the lack of civilian oversight and harsh initiate attrition rate, the moment Jeanine placed a target on the Divergent, the priorities of Dauntless changed.

  Further evidence of Jeanine and Erudite’s influence on Max and Dauntless is the fact that the Dauntless leaders were not only complicit in, but actively a part of, the enslavement of their Dauntless troops’ minds and the use of them to murder the peaceful Abnegation faction. No matter how far Dauntless had degraded toward unnecessary violence and brutality, they were not yet at the point where they would attack and murder an entire faction (especially a faction that would not fight back), and Erudite knew this, which is why they put Dauntless, as a whole, under the simulation serum.

  But how did Jeanine convince the Dauntless leaders to do what they knew to be morally wrong and act contrary to their faction’s manifesto, “We believe in shouting for those who can only whisper, in defending those who cannot defend themselves”? By twisting words and providing what is referred to in the military as “top cover”—an authority they could blame for their actions, the ever-familiar excuse that “I was just doing my job.”

  In 1961, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of social psychology experiments where he measured people’s willingness to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience and moral code.

  Three individuals were involved in each experiment: the Experimenter, the one running the experiment; the Teacher, the subject of the experiment (a volunteer); and the Learner, a confederate of the researcher pretending to be a volunteer. The experiment began by taking two volunteers and identifying who would be the Teacher and who would be the Learner, then separating them in different rooms, from which they could communicate but not see each other. The Teacher then asked a series of questions of the Learner, and for every incorrect response given, the Teacher was told to administer a shock to the Learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments.

  Unknown to the Teacher, the Learners were not actually receiving shocks. Once safely in a separate room, the Learner set up a tape recorder that played prerecorded sounds of pain (screams) for each shock level. At a certain level the Learner would also bang on the wall that separated him from the Teacher, and then escalate things by complaining about a heart condition, until eventually ceasing to respond altogether.

  Once the Learner stopped responding, most Teachers (the actual test subjects) indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the Learner. Some of the Teachers paused earlier, at 135 volts, and began to question the purpose of the experiment. However, most of those who questioned the experiment continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few of the Teachers began to show signs of extreme stress (such as nervous laughter) once they heard the screams of pain coming from the Learner. Of the Teachers observed, 65 percent of them took the experiment all the way to the highest shock of 450 volts, despite the Learner’s screams and frequent pleas to stop the experiment.

  In the experiment, if the Teachers indicated their desire to stop, they were given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

  1.Please continue.

  2.The experiment requires that you continue.

  3.It is absolutely essential that you continue.

  4.You have no other choice, you must go on.

  If the Teachers still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was stopped after the Teachers had given the maximum 450-volt shock to the Learners three times in succession. Again, 65 percent of the Teachers took the experiment all the way to the end. Additionally, none of the Teachers who refused to administer the final shocks insisted that the experiment itself be terminated, nor left the room to check the health of the Learner without requesting permission to leave.

  We’ve already established that humans, by their very nature, do not desire to inflict physical pain on each other. So how could this have been the experiment’s result? The answer goes back to our tendency to obey authority and the protection authority grants us from being held accountable for our actions.

  The results of the study demonstrate that, when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support, people are more willing to do things they’d normally consider immoral or wrong. They can rationalize their behavior by saying that because they were under orders, what happens is not really their fault. If an authority is saying it’s fine—if the experiment is still happening and hasn’t been shut down—it must be okay. It’s a natural instinct for people to do what those around them are doing, even if it means doing something they would normally morally oppose, or never consider doing alone.

  Six years after these experiments, one of the Teachers/test subjects in the experiment sent a letter to Milgram, explaining why he was glad to have participated despite the stress involved: “While I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority.”

  Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 articl
e “The Perils of Obedience”:

  Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.1

  There are countless examples through all of recorded history of this behavior—more recently with the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. And we see the same principle at work in Divergent, both literally, with Dauntless leadership, and metaphorically, with the rest of Dauntless. For Max, Eric, and the other Dauntless leaders aware of Jeanine’s plans, the massacre of Abnegation is just a matter of following orders; they are able to shift responsibility to their Erudite masters and say, “I was just doing my job.” For the rest of Dauntless, the serum administered to them takes away any and all culpability for their actions. People like Christina and Will literally have no choice other than to do their “jobs.”

  Put another way, Dauntless plays the role of the willing “Teacher” in Erudite’s “experiment.”

  There’s really no one thing that led to the downfall of Dauntless, and in turn the downfall of the entire faction system. In aviation, there is a popular model of accident causation called the Swiss Cheese Model, otherwise known as the Cumulative Act Effect. In this model, an organization’s defenses against failure are depicted as a series of barriers, represented as slices of cheese. The holes in the slices represent weaknesses in individual parts of the system. As long as any weaknesses (e.g., lack of proper civilian oversight, lack of purpose, a 50 percent attrition rate) vary in their size and position across the “slices,” the organization’s defenses will still hold. The system fails when the holes in each slice momentarily align, permitting “a trajectory of accident opportunity.” In other words, no one of these issues with Dauntless would have caused its downfall, but all of them together certainly did.

  By not being given a real purpose or proper civilian oversight, Dauntless was set up to fail by the very organization that wanted it to succeed. For all their knowledge about genetics, when the Bureau of Genetic Welfare forced segregation into factions, yet had no crossfaction oversight, they failed to take into account basic human nature that is encoded in all of us at the deepest levels. We need a purpose and we need each other.

  Janine K. Spendlove is a KC-130 pilot in the United States Marine Corps. In the science fiction and fantasy world she is primarily known for her best-selling trilogy, War of the Seasons. She is also the cofounder of GeekGirlsRun, a community for geek girls (and guys) who just want to run, share, have fun, and encourage each other. A graduate of Brigham Young University, Janine loves pugs and enjoys knitting, making costumes, playing Beatles tunes on her guitar, and spending time with her family. She resides with her family in Washington, DC. If she had to pick a faction, she’d go to Dauntless and look to shake things up a bit. Find out more about Janine at JanineSpendlove. com.

  ___________________

  1 For further readings on this subject, I recommend Phillip Zimbar-do’s book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

  On the surface, Allegiant feels like a radical departure from Divergent and Insurgent. Most of the characters are the same, but they’re in an entirely new place, dealing with new knowledge and new situations. The relationship between Allegiant and the rest of the trilogy isn’t so much about the plot—though of course the events at the Bureau directly affect the fate of the city. Rather, the relationship is thematic, as Tris and her small group of Allegiant find themselves confronting the same issues of control and societal upheaval they thought they’d left back in Chicago.

  The events of Allegiant reflect earlier events in a number of ways, but the clearest narrative echoes are between the factionless and the fringe. Here, Elizabeth Wein traces the role of the factionless over the course of the trilogy, and looks at what they and their fringe counterparts have to say about how change happens, in Divergent’s world and in our own.

  EMERGENT

  The Rise of the Factionless

  ELIZABETH WEIN

  I find it really hard not to think of the factionless as a kind of sixth faction in the Divergent trilogy. Emergent would be a good name for them if they were going to have a faction identity—though of course the whole point of their existence is that they don’t identify with any faction. As the Divergent trilogy opens, the factionless are the underprivileged outcasts of faction society. Over the course of the trilogy, they become the revolutionaries who want to lead the way to a new world. Their path is riddled with violence and good intentions gone awry, and their attempt to reform society gives us a painful insight into the nature of revolution.

  My dictionary defines “emerge” as “to rise from an obscure or inferior position.” Something that is “emergent” arises unexpectedly; one of its synonyms is “urgent.” It’s the root of the noun emergency, which suggests panic and urgency when you hear it, although there’s nothing in the word “emerge” that evokes these connotations.

  Nor is there any indication, in the beginning of Divergent, of how uncontrollable the emergent factionless will become by the end of the trilogy. They are presented early on as the downtrodden of the world of Tris’ ruined city, the homeless without a face. They scare Tris in the vague way the homeless scare the middle class in our own world: she doesn’t like the way they look or smell, but she’s really more afraid of sharing their fate than of what they might actually do to her.

  In the first book we never see anything that leads us to believe there is anything more complex to this down-and-out level of society. When Divergent opens, the first time Tris mentions the factionless is when she describes the area in which they live. Tris is more familiar with the factionless than she’d like to be because the Abnegation live in close proximity to them: the Abnegation have purposefully decided that part of their mission of selflessness is to provide for the factionless.

  The area where the factionless live, according to Tris in Divergent, is a place of collapsed roads, stinking sewer systems, dumped trash, and empty subways (we don’t learn until Allegiant that this destruction was heaped on them from outside when an uprising was quelled by the United States government). Tris tells us the factionless have to do “the work no one else wants to do. They are janitors and construction workers and garbage collectors; they make fabric and operate trains and drive buses. In return for their work they get food and clothing, but, as my mother says, not enough of either.”

  This information is just loaded with contradictions, which should tip us off right away that there’s more to the factionless than Tris realizes. The factionless are described as doing the “work no one else wants to do,” but the work Tris describes them doing is absolutely necessary to a functional society—city life, even in a half-inhabited ruin, would grind to a halt without janitors and construction workers and garbage collectors. Tris says they “make fabric,” yet they have to be given clothing—why don’t they make their own clothing out of the fabric they produce, even if they have to steal it? And what’s so terrible about being a bus driver?

  The willing reader, sympathizing with Tris, may find it easy to ignore these holes in her understanding of the factionless. But we need to remember that she is still quite ignorant of them at this point. Her mother is more closely, though still (Tris believes) indirectly, linked to them—“she organizes workers to help the factionless with food and shelter and job opportunities.” Tris’ first encounter with one of the factionless takes place early in Divergent, when she has to pass a factionless man on a street corner. She stares at him, which encourages him to ask her for a food handout. When she offers him a bag of dried apples, instead of taking them, his behavior becomes threatening: he grabs her wrist, makes a suggestive remark, and insults her—but then his aggressive manner falls away and as he takes the apples,
he warns her to choose her faction wisely.

  We don’t learn much about the factionless in Divergent that’s not filtered through Tris’ deeply suspicious and fairly uninformed viewpoint. The factionless beggar’s evident poverty and threatening actions are what Tris expects from him—it’s almost as if he’s playing along with her expectations. But then he does the unexpected and gives her advice. It’s good advice, too—“Choose wisely.” Perhaps the man is speaking with regret of his own choices. (It’s also, for Tris, advice that is loaded with irony. The one thing she doesn’t want to choose, of course, is wisdom, the wisdom of the Erudite.) Already in this scene, the description of the factionless that Tris gives us undermines her own stereotype of what she expects the factionless to be.

  We get intriguing hints about the factionless throughout Divergent, but we’re never told anything in detail. Tris tells us her mother once baked banana-flavored bread with walnuts for the factionless, but Tris herself is never allowed to taste such “extravagant” food until she enters the Dauntless compound. Will reminds the other Dauntless initiates that Dauntless police “used to patrol the factionless sector,” and Tris points out that her father was “one of the people who voted to get the Dauntless out.” His stated reason was that the poor don’t need policing, but given the close ties hinted at between Abnegation and the factionless, could there be more to it than that? Words like “patrol” and “police” are our first hints that the factionless might turn out to be a fighting force to be reckoned with.

  When the new Dauntless initiates’ families visit the faction transfers in Divergent, Cara, Will’s older sister, shows Erudite prejudice against Abnegation by accusing Tris’ mother of using her factionless charity agency for the purpose of “hoarding goods to distribute to your own faction.” When we meet Jeanine in person during her attempt to control the city, she also connects the factionless and Abnegation, telling Tris that both the factionless and Abnegation are “a drain on our resources.” Jeanine intends that the Erudite should get rid of both of them.