So. Let’s talk about societies.

This book can’t decide if it’s a straight dystopia or a dystopia by way of utopia. Things seemed like the latter except when suddenly everyone’s acting like it’s the former.

The most basic thing is, do people believe in the government or do they believe the government will crush them if they don’t pretend? Those aren’t the same thing at all, and you can’t just say kids aren’t aware they’re living in the latter type – even if they’ve never had it explained to them outright, they’ll have been taught to be afraid of the government, and by the time they’re a certain age their parents would sit them down and explain why they have to be careful.

Is this new society the result of some social sickness where everyone went down the wrong path, or is it just a dictator got in and started removing anything that might risk their control? The longer the story goes on, the more I’m left feeling like the explanation is the second. There’s no interest in why people would act like this, no worry about trends in our own society, no real interest in what the motivations were. It is because it makes for a controlling dystopia.

As I mentioned, we don’t know the differences between singles and matches. Are singles celibate or not? Are they also banned from entering each others’ houses and if so, why? Can you give up a match or are you stuck for life with it? How do their lives work? Are matched pairs or singles treated differently when it comes to determining where they live? How many people stay in the same area with friends and family and how many are uprooted? Do they move people after adulthood? They don’t seem to move anyone with kids, at least, but does that go for everyone?

The official mentioned they decide how many kids people can have. That appears to be two. That means they’re below replacement rate even before factoring in all the singles (not all couples will have two children, after all). Are they overpopulated? They don’t seem to be crowded and I can’t tell if they’re lacking in resources. We know they burn practically everything instead of recycling it and that meat is commonplace in their food, both of which suck up a lot of resources. Is that because they can afford it or because their society isn’t able to adapt properly to stress? Why are the individuals so deprived, is it necessity or choice?

(What happens to kids that aren’t perfect?)

What does the “Hill” actually look like, is it actual old forest or just an area left to run wild? Why was it left like that? What made them consider putting a path up it? What about the old areas Cassia’s father is going through – how did everyone just leave those, what’s keeping looters out, why are they processing things from them now? To return to the resource question, why do they seem reliant on the old artifacts dug up, why can’t they make their own china plates?

What are the Hundred History Lessons? What sort of history do these people have? What are her other classes like? Is she getting a real education or are they just there to occupy her time? What are the poems they kept, and what is the official literary analysis for them and other media, is it just a matter of treating interpretation as objective or is it twisted to serve their purposes? What basics do they believe everyone should know if they think no one should know things they don’t need to use?

If we get the answer to any of those questions, I assume it’ll just be based on what’s the most controlling, oppressive option, because the underlying answer is because the people in charge are evil. That’s likely why the author doesn’t think any of these need to be addressed, to her they’re obvious.

Personally, I don’t think saying a dictator did it is really all that much better than a wizard. It’s the whys that matter. Why a dictator gets control is a story, a dictator doing the predictable things to keep control isn’t. So what’s interesting here is why their society decided to go down this path instead.

This place looks hugely regressive. Some sort of massive backlash against whatever was going on at the time happened. You can see the people who’d make the attempt at times – look at how half of evangelical Christianity has formed itself into a giant cult. Say the crazy cultists break themselves in half while the other side eats itself alive over fear of everything. Do you know something amazing? People don’t put razorblades in apples. But people are absolutely certain other people will.

Of course, other things were going wrong at the same time. Let’s say resource shortages, maybe coupled with some pandemic that turned out to have a cure, but a pricey one. Sudden depopulation coupled with the survivors getting obsessed with fair distribution of resources. Could add in environmental toxins and such causing a lot of birth defects to encourage this concern over who gets to have children, but it’s not necessary to explain it.

The poems and such were one of the casualties of this – part of the problem, people said, was drowning in too much information, too many choices, so no one could figure out what the right one is. Think of the nightmare it is to figure out what’s good and bad food, or figure out which of those are in the complex mixtures of “food” we actually buy. Do cell phones cause cancer? Laptops? Plastic? Bread? And at the same time, everyone gets a voice and a vote, everyone gets to weight in on huge, complex decisions, with the result they’re making steadily worse ones or else failing to even tune in. And when things did fall apart, the lack of shared common ground between people can’t have helped at all.

So cut everything back. The minimum of culture, shared by everyone. Know your own job rather than having opinions on how your neighbor should do theirs. Determine things by statistics rather than gut feelings or half-remembered anecdotes, have decisions made by those whose job it is to make them rather than everyone.

You can see how people could think this was the answer, even if it turns out it wasn’t.