Divergent Thinking (27 page)

       
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.

The Rise of the Factionless

E
LIZABETH
W
EIN

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.

Although these few vaguely damning assessments of the factionless amount to
everything
we know about them by the end of
Divergent
, it is clear that they are going to be a source of unrest. However, it's not yet obvious that they're going to sow the seeds of revolution.

The next glimpse we get of the factionless isn't until nearly a fifth of the way through
Insurgent
, when Tris, Caleb, Tobias, and Susan leave the Amity compound to return to the city. Their group gets on an unlit moving train only to discover that it is full of factionless—all of them armed, one with a gun. Tris wonders where the gun comes from, but their other weapons are homegrown—a bread knife and a plank of wood with a nail sticking out of it.

Now, for the first time, we get a good look at some of these people. In the darkness, Tris is able to make out that their tattered clothes are a collection of faction colors: one man is wearing “a black [Dauntless] T-shirt with a torn [gray] Abnegation jacket over it, blue jeans mended with red thread, brown boots. All faction clothing is represented in the group before me: black Candor pants paired with black Dauntless shirts, yellow [Amity] dresses with blue [Erudite] sweatshirts over them.” Tris assumes the clothes are stolen, but that's showing her learned prejudice about the factionless; there's no reason to believe these clothes aren't just handouts or rejects, or even purposefully created disguises. Also, though Tris doesn't know it yet, there is a large Divergent population among the factionless, which is subtly foreshadowed in their multicolored clothing.