Divergent, Political and social background

Claudia Garcia Gonzalez

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INDEX

1. Political and social background ………………………………………….. 2
2. Political ideas in the plot ………………………………………………… 5
3. Bibliography ……………………………………………………………... 6

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POLITICAL AND SOCIAL BACKGROUND

The movie Divergent introduces us to a society that had been destroyed because of war (although details about what caused it are not given) and had to be rebuilt within 4 walls. In this society, humanity had been organized to protect peace above anything else, trying to stop history from repeating itself. In order to do this, people were divided into 5 factions depending on their capabilities. Each faction was associated not only with a role but with a personality, a way of thinking and acting that was shared by every member. We can see something really similar in one of Plato’s works; The Republic. In this book, Plato described how the perfect society would be, and, once again, he fitted people into different roles according to their ambitions and abilities. This division is what some authors consider to be the beginning of a political system called meritocracy.

A meritocracy follows the idea that, for the sake of achieving a functioning community while being as fair as possible, we must organize people following merit-based criteria. In Plato’s case, this was translated into isolating the best citizens (philosophers) so they could be the rulers of everyone else. At first glance, this can seem like a pretty reasonable way of doing things as it does give people the opportunity to grow as much as their intellect allows them to. Furthermore, meritocracy doesn’t make a distinction between men and women, nor give relevance to who your parents were when it came to achieving a place for yourself, as the gift of ‘intellect’ was not thought to be hereditary. However, if you take a closer look, you can see that nothing is as good as it seems. Meritocracy barely gives any space to a learning process, people either have the knowledge or they don’t. In the movie, this was portrayed in the initial trial everyone had to undergo to become a new member of a faction. This trial did not last long enough for anyone to learn a new skill and it just served as a filter to avoid the entrance of anyone who didn’t have a natural tendency to develop the traits that they were looking for. Moreover, this system does not take into account that not everyone has the same chances, so even though it’s technically possible for the son of mere workers to achieve a higher position, given that he does not have access to the same education nor opportunities as the son of philosophers, he will probably end up with a similar status as his progenitors. Once again, we see this situation in Divergent when most youngsters decided to stay in their birth faction as their values had been built around the ones they had grown up surrounded by, being conditioned to stay and lacking the real freedom to know and choose what they truly wanted. In the movie, both siblings of the Prior family picked a different faction, causing a small commotion that lead to Trish having to listen to comments that implied that something must have been very wrong with her birth faction for both of them to have left.  The last problem with this system is that everything is based on ‘merits’ but, what are merits in the end? Something is worthy just in the measure that is considered valuable according to a scale that must be created by a third party. The question here is, who decides what is valuable and what is not? And most importantly, is that really fair?  With all this in mind, we can conclude with the fact that a meritocracy has a good starting point, and it would work really well in an ideal world, however, when it’s brought to real life, we see that it drifts into an elitist system that ends up promoting mainly inequality instead of the other way around. 

If we make a comparison between the two distributions (Plato’s and the Divergent’s one), we can see some similitudes between them:[pic 3][pic 4][pic 5][pic 6][pic 7]

Firstly, for Plato philosophers were the most important citizens and were the only ones that had the capacity of governing the city. According to him, philosophers had to reunite the traits of three of the factions described in Divergent: Abnegation being the representation of selflessness and the continued prevalence of the common good over the ruler’s personal interests. Candor was the faction that defended truth over anything else and believed that openness was the only way to achieve a peaceful society. Lastly, Erudite was the faction of intelligence and it upheld that society had to be ruled by knowledge and blamed the past war on the ignorance of people. For Plato, the most important trait of a ruler was for him to have enough knowledge to be able to distinguish what was true and what was false. He wrote the Republic from a very naive perspective of life in which human nature was not corrupted and, therefore, the only requirement for someone to do the right thing was for him to know what that was. 

The second group was shared by both and it was formed by the soldiers, in Plato’s case, and the Dauntless faction in the Divergent society. The goal of this class was nothing more than to protect the city and its citizens. 

Finally, the last of Plato’s group does not really fit into the remaining Divergent faction. On one hand, Plato described the workers as people who had no further ambitions than to have a normal life, raise a family and eventually die. On the contrary, the fifth faction was Amity and it was formed by people who dedicated their lives to maintaining peace and they mainly valued kindness and forgiveness. 

Just as Plato in the Republic, the Divergent society assumed that people were born a certain way and, therefore, the educational system was not intended to teach people but to help them find their place. From the moment a baby was born, he was raised inside his parent’s faction until the age of 18 when he was allowed to pick the one he wanted to be a part of. It is interesting to point out that the faction chosen couldn’t be changed after this date. This was a representation of the way in which individuals were perceived as simple, not complex nor intelligent enough to fit more than two categories. This lack of complexity is exactly what made people’s behaviors so predictable and, therefore, easy to control. 

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