People Will Rise Up: Babylon 5 vs The Hunger Games
This thought coalesced around the time I saw this lecture and we were talking about The Hunger Games. One of my first problems with the story is that I think there is no way people will be willing to live under oppression and fear. One of the things I loved most about Babylon 5 is when they described the Earth-Minbari war, the Minbari were superiour to the Humans in every way. They were beaten back and the Minbari got all the way to the Sol System. They fought all the way to Mars and Humans were on the brink of annihilation. It wasn’t what stopped the war but the Minbari were in awe that a people were so stubborn and so unwilling to give up. Only on the footsteps of Earth did they acknowledge surrender and even then, people still joined in a fight, that they knew could not be survived, just so civilian rescue ships could evacuate. Because people are stubborn and will fight for what they think is right.
And so, I was facing a big problem with the idea that The Hunger Games were 74 years on going. And I was shocked that a people were oppressed for so long without a fight. I can’t remember, in human history, an oppression so long without some fighting, some resistance. And it resonated for me with the Arab Spring. Here was our current real-life example that a people in the dumps, knowing and seeing that things could be better, chose to rise up and claim what is rightfully theirs.
And the reason for all of this, also echoed in the wonderful Where in the World is Osama Bin-Laden?, is that, regardless of what the government in power says, the people on the ground just want to live their lives in peace and care. They just want to provide for themselves and their children and not have to worry too much about a war, or starving to death or religious extremism.
And that’s what I think, and thankfully Mockingjay partially alleviates that: that the will to survive, the need to provide for one’s family and close-knit group, and the desire to live a your life in relative peace is all that is needed to fight oppression of any kind and even impossible odds.
A recent article I read (which, unfortunately is time limited so I won’t bother linking it) describes how the development of projectile and mass destruction weapons drove the evolution of society and culture towards the democratic republic we know today. What I got from it is that society has, is, and probably always will be built upon the balance between the elite and the masses. Don’t kid yourself, until the advent of unlimited power, this is how it will be. So the elite use the middle and lower classes to their benefit and the masses allow it, up to a point. When that point comes, there is a protest or a revolution. And thus, the masses are willing to accept a lower living standard than what is available at the top of the ladder. They are willing to accept taxes and mandatory service and various other things as long as they are provided for with sufficiency and are allowed to live their lives in peace.
But when that balance tips too much is when we have revolutions and that is why Babylon 5 rings much more truer to heart than The Hunger Games. If The Hunger Games world ran the way I think it should have, people would be plotting from year one and the revolution would have come by year 30 or 40 at the latest.
Posted in Humanity, Thinking Out Loud by Eran with comments disabled.