by Joe Miller
West Point was one of the few colleges in the United States to hold classes on September 12, 2001.
No one covered material from the syllabus, though. Who can focus on logic proofs when you can still see the smoke rising to the south?
I remember that one of the professors in the social sciences department put together a slide with a very simple little graph. It showed that security and liberty and inversely correlated – as one goes up, the other goes down.
The slide was meant as a reminder to cadets – that overreacting to a security threat can be every bit as dangerous as underreacting.
The point is well-ground-ed in political philosophy.
Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century British political theorist, argues that in a world without government at all, everyone has perfect freedom. Unfortunately, that freedom results in a war of all against all, one where cooperation is pretty much nonexistent and where the rational thing to do is to get the other guy before he can get you.
Hobbes famously describes life in this state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
The tension between liberty and security sits at the heart of Veronica Roth’s 2022 novel, “Poster Girl.”
Roth is best known for her “Divergent” series of young adult novels, but “Poster Girl” is a work of adult dystopian fiction.
Roth introduces readers to Sonya, who as a teenager, was the face of a propaganda poster for the Delegation, a government that has since been overthrown. Sonya has spent much of the previous decade serving out a lifetime prison sentence with the Delegation officials who survived the uprising that overthrew them.
The Delegation ran a surveillance state so pervasive that Orwell’s Big Brother might look on with envy.
The entire economic system of the Delegation ran on good behavior. Every single behavior was fully commodified – citizens could receive payment for things like good posture or playing specific types of music, marrying the approved partner or giving their child a common name.
Citizens also levied fines for bad behaviors, which included things like talking too loudly in public, dressing in ways that call attention to oneself or having sex outside of marriage.
The entire system was enabled by the Insight, a small, semi-organic computer implanted into everyone’s right eye. The Insight is effectively an always on, always present smartphone paired with a camera that sees everything you see.
All that data was fed into a set of computers that calculated payments and fines in real time.
One of the behaviors forbidden by the Delegation: Having a second child without a permit. The Delegation would seize illegal second children and “rehome” them with parents unable to have biological children.
The new government has removed everyone’s Insight, destroyed all the data collected by the Delegation and (mostly) returned children to their birth parents. Only one child remains unaccounted for.
When we meet Sonya, she is offered a chance to earn her freedom. Find the missing child and return her to her birth parents, and she will be released from prison and given a new identity.
“Poster Girl” doesn’t give us any easy answers.
There’s no President Snow or Aunt Lydia to root against. The dystopian Delegation has already been overthrown. What we’re left with is a world with more freedom but also much more disorder.
Crime is up. Infrastructure is in disrepair. The new government is sometimes wise, sometimes capricious. It’s holding things together, but no one describes the new regime as thriving.
Sonya discovers that the government has lied about having removed everyone’s Insight. They in fact cannot be removed.
Moreover, the Delegation data still exists. It’s in the hands of a dissident group that wants to eliminate all technology.
In the end, Sonya uses some of the data she finds to right some wrongs—at least one of which comes at great cost to her family’s reputation. She then destroys all the data.
“Poster Girl” is about evil, but not the sort that twirls its mustache and laughs maniacally. It’s about the sort of evil that can happen when everyone is just going along because it’s easy and then find themselves inside systems that do horrible wrongs.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe such situations. The Holocaust isn’t the result of uniquely sociopathic individuals.
The Holocaust happens when enough people just do their job and follow the law without really thinking about the system of laws they are following.
For Sonya, the Delegation data is much like the One Ring from “The Lord of the Rings.” It’s simply too powerful to be used. The power will ultimately corrupt anyone who attempts to wield it, regardless of the purity of their motivations. The only stable solution is to destroy it entirely.
Defeat the bad guy and everyone lives happily ever after is a satisfying narrative arc.
It’s a lot messier when the bad guy turns out to be all of us.
