Last time on Matched.com, trees are cut down, a poem is bought, and Ky kisses Cassia.
I say, “What can I do?” and he answers, “Let me believe in this, all of this, and you believe it, too.”
I’m sure someone, somewhere has talked like this, but that doesn’t make it good dialogue.
Anyway, so she goes on about how it may not be her first kiss but this one is different and everything is different and so on.
In sorting, she thinks about how she’ll keep it a secret so no one will ever know, because apparently all you have to do is not tell the secret police on purpose. And that night dreams of them doing ordinary couple things.
Everything I dream is something simple and plain and everyday.
That’s how I know they are dreams. Because the simple and plain and everyday things are the ones that we can never have.
Yes, she’s come to her senses. At hiking, she reminds him of the whole getting sent away thing.
“Have you ever heard of the prisoner’s dilemma?” Ky asks me.
“Of course.” Is he teasing me? “It’s the game you played against Xander. We’ve all played it before.”
“No, not the game. The Society changed the game. I mean the theory behind the game.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. “I guess not.”
“If two people commit a crime together, are caught, and then separated and interrogated, what happens?”
I am still lost. “I don’t know. What?”
“That’s their dilemma. Do they tell on each other in hopes that the Officials will go easy on them—a plea bargain? Do they refuse to say anything that would betray their partner? The best scenario is for both to say nothing. Then they can both be safe.”
We’ve stopped near a group of fallen trees. “Safe,” I say.
Ky nods. “But that never happens.”
“Why not?”
“Because one prisoner will almost always betray the other. They’ll tell what they know to get a break.
…
“But in the perfect scenario, neither would say anything.”
…
I trust you. We’ll keep each other as safe as we can for as long as we can.”
I suppose the Sisyphus bit should have tipped me off to what was going on with the game reference.
So, this is very, very stupid, in three ways.
First, if you want people to not know how the prisoner’s dilemma works, you shouldn’t make a similar game called prisoner’s dilemma, because that’ll just remind people of it, and then they’ll mention it to younger people, and it’ll get passed on.
Second, that isn’t the prisoner’s dilemma. The point of the prisoner’s dilemma is that the optimal result is to betray the other person, but that you’re fucked if the other person betrays you too, while if neither betrays the other you both get a good result. You fucking moron.
Third, there’s this dogmatic belief that game theory reflects reality when it really, really doesn’t. Game theorists produce nonsense and then spend their time trying to explain why people aren’t playing the game properly. The only people who act like the assumed players are sociopaths and game theorists, which should have given people pause when making any policy decisions based on it.
This gets back to what I said about razor blades in apples. People are capable of terrible things, but people are not terrible. People inherently like to help others, to be liked by others and to not like to cause others harm.
Do you know that if you look like you want to get something that you can’t reach, any child capable of it will try to get that for you? They’ll even stop playing and cross obstacles to do so, and then return to what they were doing without any expectation of a reward. Even infants incapable of helping will notice what you’re doing and stare at whatever the problem is. (Chimps will also help. This is one of the many reasons we shouldn’t do bad things to chimps.)
…Which also means that, on a practical level, no one relies on people betraying each other to police a society. You need dedicated surveillance instead.
Even the book’s admitted this. What happens when Em is having a breakdown? They hide her, becoming complicit, then offer her one of their own tablets, a second crime, and it doesn’t occur to any of them to worry another one of them would tattle to an official.
Our lips do not meet. Not yet. For once we do that, the Infraction will have been committed. The Society will be betrayed. And so will Xander. We both know this. How much time can we steal from them?
The whole Xander plot has been confusing me, and I think I get it now. Despite Cassia generally being a far nicer person than most of the protagonists we’ve seen, the book itself is still running on protagonist-centered morality. It doesn’t matter that Xander had no choice in any of this and the reason he’d be upset is because she’s cheating on him with someone else behind his back. All that matters is he’s not on their side.
She then glosses over an unknown number of days, stopping only to recount a strained Saturday night at the showing theater where Xander holds my hand and Ky acts as though nothing is different. There is a terrible moment at the end when the lights go up and I see the Official from the greenspace looking around. When she meets my eyes and sees my hand in Xander’s she looks at me and gives me a tiny smile and disappears.
So…I guess we’re supposed to think their incredibly stupid plan isn’t incredibly stupid. Cassia acting exactly like she did prior to getting warned proves she listened! No need to check out how she behaves when she’s alone with Ky thinking she’s completely unobserved.
an ache of longing goes through me, an ache so deep and real that I can still feel it later, when I think of that night. The longing isn’t for Xander, it’s for the way things used to be between us. No secrets, no complications.
She does manage to spare a bit of actual guilt as well, so there’s at least that.
And then it’s back to Ky – who, incidentally, she’s also keeping secrets from. She didn’t tell him about the fact his name showed up on her card, her belief he’s her real match or that she already knew he was an aberration before he confessed it.
Sometimes Ky asks me if I remember things. “Remember Bram’s first day of school?” he asks me one day as we move fast through the forest to make up for all the time we spent writing earlier on the hike.
“Of course,” I say, not thinking it’s at all weird for someone to remember my sibling’s first day of school.
So yeah, looks like we’re going to get some Peeta creepy here. At least he only knew her since ten and at least he had a reason to never act on any crush he had and his dad wasn’t also in love with her mom and encouraging the whole affair.
But anyway, so, her brother’s first day of school. They get cake and balloons, the latter of which are only ever used for the first day of school. Bram was excited, but then refused at the last minute.
my mother took it in stride. “Don’t worry,” she whispered to me. “The Officials in charge of his pre-School care center warned me this might happen. They predicted he’d have a little trouble with this milestone.” Then she knelt down next to him and told him, “Let’s get on the train, Bram. Remember the balloons. Remember the cake.”
“I don’t want them.” And then, to everyone’s surprise, he began to cry.
Her mother starts to panic. We’re told that her mother had a lot of trouble getting pregnant and he was born weeks before her thirty-first birthday, the cutoff age for having children which is probably just sloppy writing because the author wasn’t thinking about the difference between conception and birth, but seems to be implying that a pregnancy that went past that point would be aborted.
I knew if the crying kept up much longer we’d be in trouble. Back then, an Official assigned to watch out for problems lived on each street.
See, this is the sort of thing we should have been hearing all along! This is some good police state creepiness.
out of the corner of my eye I saw someone knocking on the Official’s door at the house right next to the air-train stop. No. Bram already has too many citations from the care center.
But this falls down. Who was knocking? You must know the people in your neighborhood, Cassia, and even if you weren’t close to this person, seems you should want to remember the person trying to get your brother in trouble. You should also know the official, shouldn’t you?
And why doesn’t Bram know? Why isn’t he scared of the official and the citations, why don’t they try to use that to get him on the train? (It’d even tell us a bit about how Bram feels about those citations. Maybe he doesn’t want to go to school because he got in trouble at the daycare.)
Cassia tries a bunch of things to get him onto the train, finally saying there’s a way to play games with the scribe he’ll use for writing and she’ll show him.
There weren’t any games on the scribe, of course. I had to invent some, but I’m not a natural sorter for nothing. It took Bram months to figure out that none of the other kids had older siblings who hid patterns and pictures in screens full of letters and then timed them to see how fast they could find them all.
That was why I knew before anyone else that Bram would never be a sorter. But I still invented levels and records of achievement and spent almost all my free time during those months coming up with games I thought he would like. And even when he figured it out, he wasn’t mad. We’d had too much fun, and after all, I hadn’t lied. I had known a way to play games on the scribe.
This is terribly sweet. It’s also something that belongs in the Giver, not this book.
Remember, no one’s allowed to create. Cassia’s capable of typing words, but she can’t even type a letter of her own to her grandfather, she picks out prefab phrases. Yet she’s able to whip up new puzzles on something not even intended for it? Because sorting?
And yep, Ky says that’s when he fell in love. “Because I saw the way you cared about your brother and because I saw that you were smart enough to help him.”
…because everyone else would just have left the kid to his fate?
Don’t get me wrong, it was good of Cassia to do this, but not exceptional. When I say I like how nice Cassia is, it’s because Cassia’s nice in a very normal, human way, not because she’s ready for sainthood.
Then Ky asks when she noticed him.
For some reason I can’t tell him. I can’t tell him that it was his face on the screen the morning after my Match Banquet—the mistake—that made me first begin to think of him this way. I can’t tell him that I didn’t see him until they told me to look.
“On the top of the first hill,” I say instead. And I wish that I did not have to tell him this lie, when he knows more of my truth than anyone else in the world.
But you didn’t have to. You chose to. Dammit, Cassia, stop trying to shift the blame.
Afterward, she realizes he didn’t tell her any more of his story, and she decides it’s because now they’re part of the same story.
But still, the question haunts me: What happened when the Officials took him away and the sun was red and low in the sky?
It’s metaphorical, Cassia.
I wonder if Cassia is being treated as saintly for quite ordinary niceness is conscious plotting on the part of the author, or unconscious bias from our society (which seems to have decided that people are in fact not normally nice so when you do something like be nice to your kid brother instead of laughing at his fear you deserve a Nobel Peace Prize or something).
“you deserve a Nobel Peace Prize or something”
See, you say that sarcastically, but of late the Nobel committee actually has given that prize out to someone for not being pure evil. Or rather, for not being George W. Bush, but that’s more or less the same thing.
George W. Bush isn’t evil. He’s a person. (And no, I’m neither a fan nor a supporter. I just don’t like puerile simplistic political propaganda.)
He’s a person who enjoys other people dying. You can exclude him from the category of evil, but mostly by defining evil as a thing people can’t be.
Well okay then, that’s fair. I just get tired of “George Bush!” popping up in discussions of good and evil, like some kind of uninvited fairy.
Also fair. For what it’s worth, it was just a joke I thought would be funny, and as much about Obama as Bush.
Well, maybe not *pure* evil, but the “more or less” should cover that.
I think what’s going on is that she’s writing Cassia the way she instinctively knows people act and how she’s observed people acting, but on a conscious level she’s going on the assumption humans are terrible, so you get everyone acting very decently but talking like it’s something special.
That kind of disconnect is really easy for some reason.
Don’t get me wrong this is getting stupid and I really wish Ky never fucking showed up, but I’m more baffled at the traveler’s dilemna. That’s the stupidest bullshit I’ve ever heard, and I’ve listened to a guy try to explain to me that it’s amazing that Ubuntu was created in my homeland (South Africa) because we apparently all live in huts and are too busy shooting each other up.
*South Africa*? Really? I’m not particularly educated about world cultures, and the first thing that springs to *my* mind when I think about South Africa is Apartheid and Nelson Mandela. That would still be a cringe-worthy thing to say about, say, the Congo, but at least it would have a basis in the dominant narrative about the country. This strikes me as on the same level as thinking that Canadians live in igloos and travel in dogsleds, but with bonus racism.
Basically, I’m pretty impressed that someone who actually lives there and knows a Hell of a lot more about it than I do thinks this tops that.
South Africa is Africa, and Africa is in the south, therefore South Africa must be extra Africa! Double the impoverished orphans and crazy warlords. It’s just logic.
I’m not going to lie, I keep this guy around because the things he says are just so “you can’t be serious” I find myself rooting for his stupidity every time. Also he’s not from South Africa, he’s American (I’ve lived in Cali since I was five)
Foolish me! D= It must be my South African brain that couldn’t understand how much sense that made until now. Thank you!
It’s probably related! The problem with the traveler’s dilemma is that it assumes winning is defined by just how much you can fuck the other person. The only reason people where they live aren’t constantly doing it is that somehow (fairies, maybe) civilization spontaneously appeared to stop people there from spending all their time shooting each other from huts. So everywhere else must still be doing that, because why wouldn’t you?
Wait, what kind of chimps? Regular ones? Bonobos?
Discovery channel always gave me the impression that regular chimps were a bunch of raging sociopaths, but maybe they are less horrible to their own ingroups? Or when they’re taken from the wild?
Chimps are a lot like us! They *can* be super scary and awful, but most of them are basically pretty decent most of the time.
But yeah, they do definitely have ingroup morality. I remember reading about experiments with signing chimps where they showed them a video of one person placing an object and then another person searching for it and asked them where the object was. If the person searching was someone they liked, they gave the correct answer. If it was someone they didn’t, they lied! (This is also why I roll my eyes at spec fic stories where the difference between neanderthals and humans is that humans can lie, which is apparently a trope.)
I guess I might be being reactionary, because I know that we do a lot of really awful things too…
But I do wonder how it reflects on them that wild male chimps (the common ones, not the bonobos) are actually quite awful in general. They often kill and cannibalize outsiders over land disputes, and they sometimes even do the same to the babies in their own community so they can have more opportunities for sex. It’s really hard to imagine them as anything but sociopaths.
I could see humans doing the same things, just on a larger and less personal scale, and more insidiously rather than upfront. It could also be that these things are being reported, but they’re not exactly common. Like there are a few asshole sociopath chimpanzees going around and killing and eating babies to get more chances to bang their hot moms, who are either getting raped, or don’t hold any sort of grudge against the guy who killed their kid.
Still, bonobos are pretty cool!
It may not be as common as you’re thinking, since I recall it took Jane Goodall ten years to see one of those vicious land disputes, and in the twenty years covered in her memoirs she only encountered one infanticidal maniac. And that was a female, oddly enough. Possibly there’s regional variation?
I’ve heard it really comes down to raising. Probably it’s best put as culture. It’s like the monkeys who abuse their kids because their mothers abused them. Calm groups teach their kids that fighting is occasional and moderate, violent ones to keep going until the opponent is in pieces.
And there’s always the issue of whether or not the fighting is their nature or because of the situation they’re in. We think of bonobos as a truly separate group, but they’re basically just chimps that lived in a place with slightly fewer dangers for a while.
That makes a lot of sense.
The thing is, most of humanity has laws and some form of government to enforce them. Chimps don’t. Compare them to how some isolated communities have acted, and we start looking more similar.
And chimps mostly eat other breeds of monkey rather than their own kind. Which is absolutely horrific (they go after the mothers with babies because they’re the easiest prey) but – we eat chimps.
Yeah. I already knew that they do prefer eating red colobus monkeys. It’s a lot easier to understand them eating other species of monkey, which they are not even that closely related to. And yeah. Some people eat chimpanzees too, and some chimpanzees eat us.
(In fact, I find this is a lot less disturbing than how grey wolves like eating coyotes so much, despite being so close genetically that they can hybridize and consistently produce healthy, fertile offspring.)
I mostly had a gut reaction to some discovery channel documentary (I think it might have been Planet Earth) where some chimpanzees went to war on a rival community, catching one of their babies, tearing it apart and then fighting over the delicious baby meat. It’s likely that this was atypical behavior, or maybe they were starving or something, but it just left a lasting impression of, “holy shit. Those chimps are fucking sociopaths”.
Well, consider what the Japanese did in Nanking.
People are always looking at things the wrong way around. We should be trying to figure out what can’t lie. There’s an awful lot of behavior we write off as instinctive that relies on deception.
Regular!
It’s actually really interesting. Chimps fail a bunch of other basic tests for cooperation. They don’t share food like we do and they don’t instinctively divide up food fairly, and they don’t communicate information freely. In general, they seem to have only a partial understanding of other creatures as independent beings with their own wants – a big thing with chimps is they’ll respond to distressed behavior but can’t link it to injury, like a bee sting or a broken arm. So, you could say they’re actually a sort of inverse sociopath – the sociopath knows but doesn’t care, the chimp cares but don’t know.
Bear in mind they’re also very stressed little monkeys, which means that they learn to be a lot nastier over time because of all the violence.
“They don’t share food like we do”
With some exceptions. One weird thing that Goodall noticed about the Gombe chimps is that they would fight over fruit, but when it came to meat, they would all gather around whoever had made the kill and politely beg for pieces, which the successful hunter would hand out at his discretion. Didn’t matter where he was on the hierarchy, he was in charge of dividing it up.