A Certain Slant of Light

The great Hunger Games Watch of 2018 continues! Today we watched Catching Fire, and I'm afraid I have had some more thoughts on How to Be a Better Dictator again, because this movie (like the first) gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse into Snow's plans and GOOD GOD MAN, you are an embarrassment to dictatorship. ( More behind the cut )

Building your army of conquest was the easy part. This week, the Society for Improved Dictatorship will move on to the more delicate side of minion acquisition: how does a dictator fill his inner circle?

Here are the two most important qualities in a minion: they must be good company, and they should make good fall guys. Remember, you’re going to be spending hours every day with these men, so you ought to enjoy their company. This is far more important than their supposed competence at their jobs. That’s what they have assistants for! Your minions’ most important task is keeping you entertained.

Besides, it will make your minions delightfully insecure if they know that their assistants are the ones who are truly doing their work. It will tend to engender jealousy and dislike and nip in the bud any deplorable tendencies toward loyalty to their underlings.

Loyalty, in fact, is one of the qualities that you emphatically do not want in a minion. Real internal loyalty, rather than the showy ass-kissing kind, can be dangerous and unpredictable; you never know what undeserved wretch or stupid cause a truly loyal minion may decide to die for. They should be too terrified of you for their loyalty to ever come into question. They should be willing to throw anyone else under the bus at a moment’s notice, up to and including their wives and children.

There is a charming story about Stalin’s minion Molotov, whose beloved wife was arrested late in Stalin’s reign. He continued to set a place for her at the table when he ate dinner at home, in his bugged house, surrounded by his servants who were Stalin’s spies – but made no actual move to free her. Thus, his seeming display of defiance was actually a slavish display of terrified loyalty: although you have broken my heart, Stalin, I continue to serve you faithfully every day. Strive to instill such terror in your minions.

Machiavelli was a fool when he suggested that it is better to be feared than loved. If fear is strong enough, it creates love.

If you force enough obsequious outpourings, even people who yearn to hate you will find that you are wrapped around their hearts – as Anya von Bremzen’s would-be dissident mother discovered when Stalin died, and she realized that her dream of being an actress had died with him, because in her heart she had always yearned to perform before him.

And she had never even met Stalin! The force of your personality should make this effect even more powerful on your minions. You will be their abusive father and cruel lover (emotionally rather than physically) and they will never be free of you even decades after your death.

Now, as to your minions’ personalities, we suggest that you consult your own tastes. Every dictator is different. Get yourself an obsequious toady if that’s what you want. Do you like the spectacle of cringing cowardice? Treat yourself. We suggest you limit yourself to one or two minions of this variety, because occasionally you will need minions who have some resolution and force of character – but you can certainly have that one or two.

Indeed, a toady or a coward will be very useful to you. They are likely to be quite unpopular not only with their fellow minions, but with the populace at large. This will happen even if you allow no mention of their unpleasant qualities in your official press. Rumors get out. It is impossible to quash them entirely, so be selective. Anything less than flattering about yourself must be quashed, but your minions… well, if you need one of them to take a fall, it helps if there are already some ugly rumors floating about to prepare the populace.

And thus we arrive at the second most important quality in a minion: being a good fall guy. We don’t advise that you should dispose of your minions recklessly, mind. If your inner circle is in a constant state of flux, it makes you look out of control. That will make your populace nervous. They want to know that you are steering the ship of state with a strong and steady hand.

But occasionally, a military defeat, an overly enthusiastic purge, or a misjudged policy will cause such unrest that it must be blamed on someone, and that’s what your minions are for.

A few helpful notes about finding good fall guys. We’ve already mentioned a few personality characteristics to look for: cowards and toadies are generally unpopular and easily destroyed. Boring technocrats fall into much the same category. Do you have a minion who likes to corner people at parties and drone on about agricultural statistics? That’s your man if there’s a famine. No one will weep for him.

People with visible deformities also make good fall guys. Any issue that distorts the face, like goiters or elephantiasis, will prime your populace with distrust. Humans flinch from ugliness. Exploit this base instinct.

However, we recognize that in this one instance you may share this weakness with your populace, and may not wish to look at a minion with a pendulous goiter every day. In that case, ethnic minorities may prove an attractive choice. The populace may warm to them despite their origin, but their ingrained mistrust will remain underneath – and that mistrust will flare swiftly with the aid of a well-prepared newspaper campaign when you need to blame that minion for something.

Also, ethnic minorities and deformed people make excellent employees. They know that you’ve given them an opportunity that they might never have gotten anywhere else, and they will generally be suitably grateful, or at least suitably hard-working.

If you can find a minion who is a deformed ethnic minority and also a sexual deviant of some variety, congratulations! That’s a hat trick. Make him the head of your secret police, wink indulgently at his bizarre sexual habits, and then throw him under the bus when your purges get out of hand.

A note about sexual deviancy: always remember that humans are censorious hypocrites in the end. Any sex that is not marital heterosexual intercourse in the missionary position is potentially deviant if you need it to be. It may be ideal for a minion to have drug-fueled homosexual orgies, but a collection of women’s stockings can take someone down in a pinch.

If you find that you yourself are an ethnic minority or deformed, fear not. Stalin was a pockmarked Georgian with a withered arm, but he nonetheless rose to become the Soviet Union’s unchallenged dictator. You have total control of the media. (And if you don’t, why the hell not?) Force them to present you in a flattering light.

And if you find yourself suffering from any lingering qualms of conscience about betraying your minions like this… Remember, it is their job to support you, and that means sacrificing themselves if it’s in your best interests. They ought to be proud to provide this glorious service to your empire! And you ought to remember that conscience is nothing but a set of chains for lesser mortals. You’re above all that. Nothing moves you but the exigencies of power.

To the illustrious President Snow:

What dictator has time for books? This is the most frequent complaint that we at the SfID hear when we send out our reading list. It’s true that dictatorship leaves little time for leisure - heavy is the head that wears the crown! - but even the busiest dictator needs to carve out some quality alone time for reflection and self-improvement. And what could be a more fruitful topic for reflection than the theory and practice of dictatorship?

One note of caution: don’t read too many memoirs or other works actually written by dictators themselves. Many of them have the obvious drawback of being written by deposed leaders, like Nikita Khrushchev, who are clearly poor role models. But even those written by dictators at the peak of their powers are suspect: they’re writing to burnish their own images, not to give a nitty-gritty how-to guide to other budding dictators. Why help the competition?

Fortunately, however, there are plenty of students of human nature who have provided reams of helpful work. Anything with a title like “cult brainwashing” or “emotional abuse” is likely to be full of wonderful tips. They tend to be couched in terms that suggest that they aim to help their readers foil such strategies, not make use of them, but any clever dictator can figure out how to turn their advice to his own ends.

If, however, you don’t want to suffer through the headache-inducing task of doubling advice back on itself, there’s always C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. Told as a series of letters from a demon to his apprentice, a novice in the ways of tempting humans, this book is a must-read for any dictator - for temptation is one of the pillars of any long-running dictatorship. If you want people to work their hearts out for you, then you can’t just give them something to fear; you need to offer them something they want.

Now of course base bribery has its place. The loyal should be rewarded with good food, fancy cars, trips abroad, etc. But Lewis’s chief insight for the dictator is that the strongest and most binding temptation is that of self-righteousness, particularly when it is paired with an ideological commitment to judge oneself not by one’s actions, but by the intended effects of those actions. Minions can forgive themselves any atrocity if they believe they performed it in the name of some far-future utopia - especially if someone in authority tells them so. (Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority is also a key text here. Humans are beautifully receptive to the blandishments of authority figures.)

Solzhenitsyn makes a similar point when he discusses ideology in The Gulag Archipelago, but the SfID realizes that three thousand pages is too much reading to heap on any dictator’s head. The early sections about the secret police, however, are well worth a look. They point out the heartening fact that a totally incompetent secret police force is just as terrifying than a competent one - and perhaps even more so, because the randomness of their arrests fills the populace with superstitious dread.

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is similarly a godsend to any dictator with staffing problems. We can’t count the number of dictators who have come to us despondent over their difficulty in finding good minions. We invariably find that their standards are too high: they want active malice, mustache-twirling, the whole shebang from their rank and file.

But Eichmann in Jerusalem has good news! It turns out that you don’t need any of that. In fact, the best minions are absolutely average types. You want utterly unimaginative nose-to-the-grindstone company man types, the kind who join every organization that comes their way but never lead anything. These people are a dime a dozen. Their consciences may flinch at the first atrocities they’re ordered to carry out, but in most cases their consciences will be too weak to exert any control over their actual behavior - and after the first atrocity is hurdled, habit is a great salve.

In any case, you can turn that flinching of conscience to your own advantage. Focus on your minions’ heroism in overcoming their inner scruples to commit atrocities for the greater good. They still have nightmares about the bloodshed they caused! How heroic they are, overcoming their inner suffering to continue fighting the good fight! Their feelings about their actions are far more important than the actions in themselves.

However, when you’re filling key staffing positions, it’s best to get someone a little more colorful. Stalin liked to hire non-Russians to head his secret police, crescendoing with N. I. Yezhov, a bisexual Jewish dwarf, whose status as a triple outsider made him the perfect scapegoat when Stalin wanted to distance himself from the mass arrests. Find yourself a hunchbacked albino with a foot fetish to place in a highly visible role in your regime. You’ll thank yourself later.

Yours,
The Society for Improved Dictatorship

To the illustrious President Snow:

It is with some pain that we find ourselves forced to broach this topic. We had hoped that as the course continued you would realize the necessity of coming clean to us, but alas, we have reached the point where we can prevaricate no longer, and still you have not confessed, so we are forced to say: we know that you lied to us about District 13.

We confess ourselves baffled, President Snow. Not baffled that you lied to us - any good dictator lies - but baffled that you told this particular lie, not only to us, but to your people as well. District 13 could be so very useful to you, President Snow!

Oh, sure, we know you think they’re useful to you now - a warning to your other districts what will happen if they rebel. Nuked out of existence, like District 13! But this is simply one more example of your wrong-headed attitude toward fear. You subscribe - forgive us for our bluntness - to the one-dimensional cod-Machiavellian belief that it is better to be feared than loved.

Well, maybe. But what’s best of all, President Snow, is for your subjects to love and fear you in equal measure, as if you were an overbearing father who nonetheless occasionally doles out a few crumbs of love. They may cower from you when they’ve done something wrong, but when there are enemies at the gate, nonetheless they’ll run to you for protection.

But to protect your people from outside enemies, you need to have some outside enemies in the first place, and District 13 seems to be your only option. But what an option it is! District 13 is a truly top-notch enemy, President Snow, exactly the kind of rival we would have designed for you if someone had given us the chance.

They are weaker than you - always a plus in an enemy - but nonetheless truly terrifying because of their nuclear capacity. Simply mentioning the threats of nuclear annihilation they have leveled against Panem ought to be enough to bring your terrified subjects in line.

We realize these threats are the reason why you haven’t told your people of District 13’s existence, but frankly, those threats are clearly a bluff and we’re embarrassed that you haven’t had the guts to call it. District 13 is small, resource-poor, and all in all much more easily wiped off the map than sprawling Panem. It is not going to risk its own annihilation just because you tell your people of its continued existence.

And they make such a delightful contrast to Panem! No need to exaggerate imaginary differences between your two nations: District 13’s militarized, highly mechanized society could hardly be a greater contrast to free-wheeling, fun-loving, Games-running Panem. They’re Sparta to Panem’s Athens - and a starving Sparta at that. They’re stodgy gray East Berlin to Panem’s decadent West. We bet some of them are just dying to defect.

Think of the intelligence coup you’ll score when they do! You just have to make defection a bit easier for them, and step one is simply admitting they exist.

This Cold War metaphor gives us another thought: spies! What better way to keep your people in line than a good spy scare? And it will be especially easy to whip one up because District 13 still has so much in common with the rest of Panem. They look like you, speak like you, could be sneaking among you even as we speak, soaking up information, looking for weak points, pretending to be your friends and neighbors and all the while plotting your destruction.

You might want your spy agency to look into this for real - quietly, of course. Spy scares are good for social control but poor at flushing out actual spies.

And a spy scare would be a wonderful distraction from the tiresome antics of Katniss Everdeen and her supposed lover, that Peeta fellow. Perhaps you could arrange to arrest Katniss’s friend Gale Hawthorne as a spy? He’s certainly spent enough time outside of District 12: everyone’s seen those bags of game he brought back. Little did they know that this was merely a blind to cover for his real purpose out in the wilds: meeting his spymaster from District 13!

At very least, arresting one of Katniss’s friends ought to make her take you seriously. And if you’re lucky, she’ll unwisely try to fight the arrest - not only connecting herself with a known spy, but making herself look unfaithful to Peeta in the process. We have no doubt that the people will turn on her in a heartbeat if she destroys the love story they’ve enjoyed so much.

Yours,
The Society for Improved Dictatorship

To the illustrious President Snow:

Thank you for laying out your Katniss Everdeen problem for us in your last letter. Annoying though she sounds, we see no reason for alarm; her upcoming appearances on her Hunger Games victory tour should give you ample opportunity to discredit her. Simply convince the populace that she’s tragically insane, and they may very well realize that their rebellious rumblings are unhinged as well without any more effort on your part.

Given her family history, it might be tempting to present her illness as depression, but we advise against it. Depression has some unfortunate positive folkloric connotations among the uneducated masses: artistic talent, deep emotional sensitivity, even leadership qualities, if they’ve spent too much time imbibing Abraham Lincoln biographies. At very least, the people may latch on to the idea that “She’s miserable, and we are too,” which will only strengthen their sense of identification with her.

No, if you’re going to discredit her, you’d better fake a full psychotic break. Start a whisper campaign: the girl sees things, she’s got voices in her head. For extra verisimilitude, pretend to try to stamp out the rumors: that will make them spread like wildfire.

Then all you’ll need from Miss Everdeen is bizarre behavior at a couple of public appearances, and that can be induced easily enough with drugs. Perhaps she could claw Claudius Templesmith’s face on live television? She’s got an impulsive streak that can be easily turned to your advantage here.

Oh, but for maximum impact, it ought to be Peeta’s face that she claws on camera. Think what a beautiful addition this would be to their love story! The saintly Peeta, his cheek still bleeding from her attack, cradles a weeping Katniss in his arms as she sobs out disjointed words that only make her insanity tragically obvious. Oh, we’re wiping away a tear just imagining the propaganda coup. There won’t be a dry eye in Panem when you broadcast it.

This will solve your current problem. But this is only the beginning of what greater mental health awareness can do for your reign! We urge you to commit to an extensive effort to educate your people about the dangers of Rebellious Emotive Disorder (RED). This disease has been recognized as far back as antiquity. In the antebellum American south, where RED was recognized under the name drapetomania, they considered the sovereign treatment whipping and hard labor. It wasn’t until Soviet times that RED came under the proper care of psychiatry.

Sufferers may exhibit sullenness, lethargy, a distrust of authority, an aversion to work (often coupled with the fatalistic belief that hard work will not improve their lot in life), and dissatisfaction with the current state of society. Their hallmark delusion is that it is society’s flaws, not their own defective brain chemistry, that causes their unhappiness. People who suffer from RED later in life often display a tendency toward the disorder even in early childhood, when they are drawn to legends about “heroic” outlaws and pirates. Robin Hood is an oft-mentioned favorite.

As the disease grows more severe, sufferers begin to experience suicide ideation, particularly in the form of a suicidal desire to fight the government. They may believe that going out dramatically in their paranoid fight against the government would be preferable to living a quiet, orderly life.

In the most severe cases, sufferers act on their impulses. Because RED is highly contagious, this can result not merely in lone suicidal terrorist attacks, but full-scale rebellion.

RED requires prompt and extensive treatment if there is to be any hope for remission. Although some sufferers prove incurable and must be kept in permanent quarantine, many can be treated successfully and sent back to their districts to live useful lives if their illness is identified soon enough. All your subjects should be encouraged to help their friends and loved ones by telling a trusted authority figure as soon as soon as they notice signs of RED.

Ideally, however, this kindly intervention should prove unnecessary. Once mental health awareness has really taken root, your patients will start presenting themselves for treatment as soon as they recognize symptoms of their own mental disintegration. It is so much easier to help patients who already accept their own insanity: they are far more amenable to replacing their bad thoughts (“I’m unhappy because society is so unfair; only revolution can make me happy”) with good ones (“I’m unhappy because my brain chemistry is broken; I know this must be true because only a person with a defective brain could be unhappy in a society as wonderful as the one I live in. Only submitting completely to treatment will make me happy”).

But resistance is the hallmark symptom of RED, and therefore most patients do prove resistant to treatment. The infectious nature of the disease often proves the practitioners’ friend in this regard: once RED patients fully understand that their loved ones may be infected, which would force the authorities to bring them in for treatment as well, they often become much more cooperative. The power of love is truly impressive.

However, for a serious mental health disorder like RED, one can’t depend on love alone for the solution. We urge you to consider transporting the most severe RED cases to the Capitol so they can receive top of the line treatment. The mere glimpse of the Capitol’s wealth, splendor, and vast, glittering military parades is often enough to lift the clouds of rebellion from all but the sickest of sufferers. It may be tempting to terminate treatment then, but it’s important to continue treatment to completion. Early termination often leads to relapse.

There will doubtless be some grumbling among your subjects that the regimen used to combat this disease turns patients into zombies, even heightens the risk of suicide. This is simply a sign that your subjects are deeply prejudiced against mental illness and would prefer for their mentally ill brethren to suffer indefinitely rather than receive the help they need. More education should set them straight. If it does not, their persistent grumblings may very well indicate that they themselves suffer from RED, and deserve prompt, compassionate, and comprehensive treatment.

Besides, suicide (as distinct from suicidal terrorist attacks) is far from the worst outcome in cases of RED. Better dead than RED, as they say.

And that’s another way to deal with the Katniss Everdeen problem, if worst comes to worst. If she won’t commit suicide for you, once you’ve set up convincing evidence of her instability, you can always fake it. Perhaps a double suicide with Peeta, even? He finds her dead body and kills himself in despair. There’s nothing more romantic than the excesses of young love.

Your friends,
The Society for Improved Dictatorship

To the illustrious President Snow:

Many thanks for the cake replica of the Capitol that you sent us. It’s rare for a cake to be as delicious as it is beautiful - a repulsive layer of fondant often seems to be the price for elegance - but your chef exquisitely balanced the demands of the tongue and the eye. Please relay our compliments.

We’re especially glad to have received this token of your esteem because we know our next lesson is going to be hard to swallow. And that masticatory metaphor is intentional, President Snow, because if we had to pick one thing that worries us about your reign, it’s the food situation.

We know that in our last epistle we told you to focus on abstract concepts. But frankly, President Snow, we didn’t mean you. You should keep your people stuffed full of nonsense about freedom and glory, but you yourself need to keep your eyes always on nitty-gritty reality, and the nitty-gritty reality is that starving people are hopeless people - and therefore free people, people who have lost everything and are ripe for rebellion.

You’ve surely heard the phrase “bread and circuses”? You’ve got the circuses part down, but there’s a reason the bread is listed first. It’s hard to focus on even the most spectacular bloodbath at the circus when your stomach is so empty that it’s trying to eat your spleen.

Well-fed philosophers don’t spark revolts. It’s hardly even worth repressing them; that only brings attention to their work. No, it’s hungry women in bread lines that you need to watch out for, President Snow. Heed the examples of King Louis XVI and Tsar Nicholas II. No dictator can be called successful who ends up executed by his own subjects.

It’s not a bad idea to have a pair of listening ears at every bakery. Shoppers love to indulge a good grumble, and a good listener can become an invaluable barometer of social mood. When the mumbles turn to shouts, that’s a sign that the women have had enough, and you’re done for if you don’t ship in some bread pronto.

We suspect that you’ve kept your subjects hungry on the grounds that a hungry populace will be too tired and busy scouting for food to even think about revolt. This is true as far as it goes. But when the people get too hungry - when they reach the grim conclusion that there is nothing left but to watch their children starve to death - they’ll skip right over thinking about revolt to doing it.

By no means do we think that you should utterly reverse your policy and begin providing plentiful food year round. Keep the populace hungry. But don’t push them to the point of starvation. Ensure that even in their hungriest moments they always have a feast to look forward to - a feast that is, of course, provided by the bounteous generosity of the Capitol.

You know what would make the Hunger Games even better? Feasts. After seventy-five years it’s probably too late to rename the Hunger Games, but you can certainly change the associations people have with the name. No more mandatory standing in the village square, stomachs growling, staring sullenly at the screen. No! Now when people think of the Games, they’ll think of the one good time of the year when they aren’t hungry.

(We also strongly suggesting cultivating special seasonal Hunger Games dishes. For more information, please consider purchasing our expansion pack, Food as an Aid to Empire. Remember, There’s No Price Too Great for a Great Dictatorship! (™))

A supplementary feast when the victorious tribute visits each district may also be in order. An entire year between feasts is too taxing for both the human memory and the human stomach.

Here’s some next-level dictatorship for you: never mandate if you can make people do something of their own supposedly free will. Lay out vast feasts at the screenings of the Hunger Games, and the people will flock to watch. Their hungry children with demand it.

True, the viewers will be too busy chewing to notice some of the finer points of the games, but they’ll still get the highlights. Get them relaxed, let them drink a little beer (maybe a lot of beer), and their natural human propensity to root for their own and loathe their enemies will come out. Entice the people in with cakes and ale, and they won’t just be sullen bodies wishing they were somewhere else as they try not to watch the show. They’ll get engaged. They’ll get invested. They’ll become complicit.

Soon they’ll love the Games just as much as the denizens of the Capitol do - and for a far lower price tag, to boot. By all means, President Snow, let them eat cake.

Your replete friends,
The Society for Improved Dictatorship

To the illustrious President Snow:

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

This proverb is a cornerstone of our thought here at the Society for Improved Dictatorship (SfID). It may seem a bit airy-fairy to a solid, plain-speaking, boots-on-the-ground dictator like yourself, but we assure you, it has a very practical application. It means that you must ensure that your people are always aware that they have something to lose.

And we’re not just talking about their lives. The human mind is a delicate mechanism that falls into thoughts of suicide at the slightest setback. There have been sad cases among your Hunger Games victors, have there not? And after they had everything they could ever want handed to them on a silver platter, too. Fame! Adulation! Endless luxury!

But in fact, President Snow, that’s what drove them to despair. They had everything they could imagine wanting, and they were still unhappy, so they lost the one thing that a dictator must ensure his people never lose: hope.

Hope is the cheapest possible method of social control. Unlike decent living standards or a strong police presence, it requires very little initial investment. In fact, it rewards low investment. In order to hope, all people need is to believe that their children’s lives will be better than theirs. If their lives are awful in the first place, then it takes very little improvement to keep that hope burning strong.

But when even that guttering flame is gone, anarchy ensues. When just one person loses hope, they commit suicide. This is awkward in the case of a public personage like a Hunger Games victor, but basically not important. But when whole legions of people lose hope together, they bind their suicidal urges into one great mass and become a rebellious army. Once the people have decided they want to die anyway, it becomes almost impossible to repress their rebellion without killing large numbers of them and creating an inconvenient dent in the labor force.

Repressing rebellion, therefore, is a matter of applying the carrot and the stick. We’re happy to say that you’ve got the stick part down, but the carrot could use some work. (It could, for instance, use some literal carrots. But more on that next week.)

The carrot, in this case, consists of hope. A dictator should always promote hope among his people. The more he’s forced to use the stick to keep potential rebels in line, the more ardently should his speeches paint shining visions of societal harmony and future happiness. A dictator must constantly point out that the glass is half full. In fact, a dictator ought to insist that the glass is fully full at all times. What do you mean, you think some of the water’s missing? How strange that you should see it that way.

Treat the pessimism of others as a sign of encroaching insanity. If you do this right, they will start to doubt their sanity all on their own. The most effective methods of repression are the ones the people begin to apply to themselves.

In your speeches, a brighter day is always dawning. The grass is always greener on the other side of the river. New vistas of happiness are always opening before us!

One word of caution. It is always better to focus these speeches on high-flying abstract principles. Talk about freedom, justice, equality, honor, glory, truth, hope, love - any word that an idealistic young idiot would consider an appropriate final word to shout from his scaffold, in fact. These are all empty signifiers. No one has ever eaten a freedom or been hit over the head with an equality.

Be more circumspect about lying about things that have an actual concrete existence. People will nod along to promises of “glory” and never stop to think what it means precisely. But they will notice instantly if the potato crop is supposedly record-breaking and yet they can’t find a fucking French fry anywhere. No one goes to their death with the word “Potato!” on their lips.

As much as we love the Hunger Games, we do have one concern about them. You, in your plain-spoken frankness, persist in referring to them as “punishment.” Can you imagine anyone shouting “punishment” as a final word of defiance before beheading? Absolutely not.

You could ease away from “punishment” to the warmer and fuzzier “justice,” but frankly we think that still puts too much emphasis on the Hunger Games’ beginnings in a failed rebellion. You don’t want to remind people of a rebellion, even a failed one. People are sheep. Indeed, people are lemmings. If they hear about someone else walking off a cliff, nothing will please them until they’ve walked off one too.

Stop talking about that long-ago rebellion. Don’t teach it in the schools. Let the people exercise their excellent capacity for forgetfulness. The Hunger Games are not a punishment at all. They’re an expression of the Capitol’s benevolence! They’re a shining opportunity for young people to bring glory and honor to their district - and, of course, to lift themselves out of abject poverty in the process.

But don’t trumpet that last part too loudly. Focusing on plain material benefits might make people start to wonder they’re stuck in abject poverty in the first place. It ought to be good form for Hunger Games contestants to fiercely deny any interest in the mere material benefits of winning - for everyone, in fact, to consider discussion of merely material questions like poverty to be in slightly poor taste.

Keep their eyes fixed on bright and shining abstractions; feed them on meaningless words like freedom. If you claim freedom and hope as your own, what will would-be rebels use to rally their troops?

Yours ever,
The Society for Improved Dictatorship

***

asakiyume's original donation to the ACLU will cover one more installment ("Bread and Circuses," in which the SfID reminds us all of the importance of the bread part); I've got a few more in the pipeline if anyone else wants to donate ($10 to the ACLU for an installment, email me a screenshot of your receipt, etc.)

Also possible plans for the SfID's Recommended Reading List. I can't decide if including The Screwtape Letters is too meta.

To the illustrious President Snow:

Thank you for joining our correspondence course, How to Be a Better Dictator! As usual when someone buys our How to Be a Better Dictator course (Platinum Pack), we sent an observer to tour your domains, and we just wanted to let you know how impressive we find your already existing dictatorship.

Your luxurious Capitol is a stunning monument to your nation’s greatness, as well as your own modest refusal to create a cult of personality. We didn’t see a single statue of you in the place, let alone a chorus of schoolchildren singing your praises.

Your brilliant strategic thinking is also on full display in your wise decision to separate different industries between the districts, forcing each district into dependency to all the others - and, of course, to the Capitol, the hub through which all this bounty flows. Divide and conquer, President Snow! Divide and conquer.

And nowhere is your adherence to this important maxim more evident than in the crowning stroke of genius in your reign: the Hunger Games. We swooned at the beautiful marriage of ancient tradition and modern technological advances in your gorgeous update on the Roman gladiatorial games.

Given the excellence you’ve already achieved, we applaud you for deciding to sign up for our course. Although your loyal aides are doubtless to dazzled by your genius to see any room for improvement, you in your wisdom and modesty realized that even the greatest of dictators always have more to learn.

Your first lesson will arrive next week in a discreetly wrapped package, designed to obscure its true nature from the simple folk of the realm, who derive great solace for their belief in their leader’s omniscience. We look forward to working with you!

Yours ever,
The Society for Improved Dictatorship

ETA: This is the beginning of a series, building off this post, which asakiyume asked me to expand in return for her donation to the ACLU.

I'm going to try to update it every Sunday till it's done. Next week is going to be either "People Are Sheep" or "Freedom('s Just Another Word)," depending on how many sheep comparisons I come up with. (The sheep def. come out of this better than the people.)