Divergent Thinking (22 page)

If only the Bureau had been able to evolve, to maintain the ideals of their cause without stooping to murder. If you're trying to make the world a better place, it's hard to be credible with blood on your hands. All the Bureau ends up illustrating is that genetically pure people are capable of immense destruction and oppression, too.

At least with a GD, you can estimate in what way they may or may not be destructive. The Choosing Ceremony only confirms this—you really have to be predisposed to switch from the faction you've been raised in to another faction where you don't know anyone. You'd have to truly believe you belong somewhere else.

Tobias, for instance, says he has a great capacity for cruelty; he is aggressive and enjoys hurting others. We don't know exactly
how
Tobias is damaged, so it could be argued that he learned how to be cruel from his father, Marcus (a man who is supposed to be genetically pure, by the way). It would not be insane to argue that a boy grows up to be like the man who raised him. Either way, Abnegation—home of the selfless, those with no sense of self-preservation—is no place for him. It probably wouldn't have been a place for him even if he hadn't been trying to escape his father. And think of people like Peter, who fit the Dauntless model for aggression even more (and possess the defect the Dauntless are known for—lacking compassion).

If we can agree that the factions are
not
pulled from thin air, and really do help GDs live in harmony—and as I stated earlier, Indianapolis and other failed cities are proof of this—then a GD in a faction system may be less dangerous overall.

GDs are predictable. Meanwhile, who knows what a GP will do?

IN THE OTHER CORNER: THE REBELS

Now let's look at Juanita and her band of merry rebels. Right away they get bonus points just for fighting against oppression, an oppression that perhaps GPs, in their sense of superiority, are too blind to see. But is that enough to forgive their tactics?

Fighting the good fight only goes so far when your means to an end are downright evil. We already know Nita is a practiced liar, having worked her way up the Bureau's ladder, but she's also adept at subtler manipulation. Part of the power behind the rebellion sales pitch she gives Tobias is from the Bureau's—and David's—lack of specificity about Tobias' genetic damage. When Tobias' genes are tested, he is not told how they are damaged, or what it means, or how/if it affects who he is as a human being. He's simply told that he's damaged, that he's prone to mess up. Of course he'd be more susceptible to Juanita's offer. She knows just how to come at him, too. Her opening line, when she thinks he's just vulnerable enough to be taken in: “See, I'm not really on board with being classified as ‘damaged.'”

Nita doesn't even offer up any real proof the Bureau is bad—not at first. “I can show you evidence,” she says, “but that will have to come later.” Yet Tobias is still willing to go along with the rebels' plan, resulting in the death of his friend Uriah and almost causing him to lose Tris, which is the only thing he really seems to care about.

Later, Nita shows Tris and Tobias that the Bureau supplied the serum used to control the Dauntless at the end of
Divergent
, the serum indirectly responsible for the death of Tris' parents. That's why I understand Tris immediately wanting nothing to do with the Bureau. Providing Jeanine with that serum is truly an unforgiveable act. But so is setting off explosives inside the Bureau, killing innocent people—namely Uriah, the only guy who was able to maintain a smile through all three books.

Though Nita hates what the Bureau has done to the Abnegation, she can't really argue that trying to prevent the collapse of the faction system wasn't for the greater good. The current state of the city in
Allegiant
is proof of that. Nita's words: “Evelyn is effectively a dictator, the factionless are squashing the faction members . . . Many people will die.”

Nita's argument against the Bureau really crumbles when she tells Tobias, “If we believe we're not ‘damaged,' then we're saying that everything they're doing—the experiments, the genetic alterations, all of it—is a waste of time.”

A person can't believe they're genetically damaged or not. The science is there. And by using deadly force, Juanita and the rebels are reinforcing the deeply held (though extremely bigoted) belief that genetically damaged individuals are inferior—crude humans prone to violence who caused a war that almost resulted in the destruction of everyone in America. Imagine if instead the rebels led by example and organized some kind of society on their own where GDs had a role, where peace was kept, and where they could show the Bureau that being GD doesn't mean you need to be watched like a hawk.

“For the people who live in the fringe, it seemed more appealing to opt out of society completely rather than to try to correct the problem from within,
like I intend to do
,” Nita says (emphasis mine). What Nita doesn't appear to realize is that by bombing the Bureau, she's no longer trying to change the system from within; she's become an Insurgent, attacking from the outside to destroy it. Furthermore, it's revealed the rebels weren't after the memory serum at all, but the death serum. They were prepared to kill innocents, the same way the Bureau actively participated in the deaths of innocents inside the city limits. Neither their methods nor their results were any better than the Bureau's.

Sounds like nearly equal footing to me.

WHERE DOES TRIS FIT IN?

Since Tris, Tobias, and their crew end up fighting against the Bureau, basically finishing Nita's work, I think it's safe to include them on the side of the rebels, even if they disagree with how the rebels go about things. But—and this may be a tough question because Tris
is
the hero of the story—is it really any better for her to erase the memory of the Bureau employees before they can do the same to the residents of Chicago?

Tris admits that the entire Bureau compound can't possibly know what their leaders have done, but she's willing to erase their identities anyway, the very thing she condemns the Bureau for wanting to do in Chicago. Tris says in regard to the Bureau's plan for a total reset, “It's not sacrifice if it's someone
else's
life you're giving away, it's just evil.” But then she does exactly that—sacrifice the memories of everyone at the Bureau to save the people in the city—even after Tobias tries to talk her out of it. All of those people in the compound are now simply gone.

Tris argues that the Bureau doesn't want to stop the revolution in the city to save lives, but to save their experiment. Isn't that the same thing? Especially in the long term. The whole goal of the Bureau is to restore order to a semi-lawless world.

The Bureau, evolving
slightly
on a moral level, wants to reset everyone in the city in order to save lives (and, admittedly, the experiment). I say
evolving
since it wasn't that long ago they decided it was easier to wipe out the Abnegation to maintain order. But Tris sees the idea of a memory wipe as equivalent to murder. Taking away someone's identity is taking away who they are, and thus their entire life. I really can't argue with that. Then Tris readily plans to—and accomplishes—wiping the memories and identities of everyone in the Bureau. What is worse: Erasing memories in order to neutralize the brewing war inside Chicago, or erasing the memories of thousands of Bureau employees to stop the memory erasure in Chicago, and then have the war happen anyway?

Yes, Tris does an awful thing—the equivalent of mass murder, according to her—but what would've happened if she hadn't? Would the rebels have eventually succeeded with their death serum? Maybe. Would Chicago have fallen, most of its citizens victim to the internal wars and uprisings? Probably.

In this, Tris isn't so unlike the Bureau. She is willing to sacrifice for the greater good—
her
greater good. What she does is terrible, but it saves the people she loves and believes in most. Which is all she wanted. Trapped in a bad situation with no good options, she makes what she feels is the best choice, and that is all that can be expected from a real human being.

SO WHO'S WORSE?

This wouldn't be a very good smackdown if I just said there are pros and cons to both sides, but didn't pick one as the greater of two evils. While reading
Allegiant
, and while writing the beginning of this essay, I was pro-Bureau. But while I think the Bureau is on the right side of things, I can't get behind them. Probably for the same reasons that Tris couldn't: their end does not justify their means.

So I'm going to say my heart lies with the rebels' cause, but not with them specifically, terrorists that they are. I don't think the Bureau was ever going to give the GDs a chance to prove that the experiment wasn't necessary. Amar says it best: “Genes aren't everything . . . People, even genetically damaged people, make choices. That's what matters.” Yes, Amar. Yes, it does. This very idea is what the Bureau is afraid of most.

Caleb, for all his faults, holds on to this one nugget of wisdom from Natalie Prior: “She said that everyone has some evil inside them, and the first step to loving anyone is to recognize the same evil in ourselves, so we're able to forgive them.” But forgiving GDs for their part in the Purity Wars isn't something the Bureau seems capable of. GDs would never have been given a chance to rise above. And as we see, they do rise above. Chicago has a bright future at the end of
Allegiant
, even with pesky things like the need for policemen and politicians (can I get an UGH?).

At the same time, I can't ignore the Bureau's logic. I think there is something to genetic damage. In the broken world of Divergent, they've been searching for order for seven long generations. Would the Bureau really have spent all those centuries studying GDs if there wasn't something to study? What's the benefit? “Control, maybe?” Nita offers. I don't know. I want to believe there has to be some kind of onward progression—an insanely slow progression, yes—to allow an experiment like that to continue for so many years. Otherwise, wouldn't it have been shut down by the government centuries ago as an unnecessary cost? But we all know people don't like change, and for a system as ingrained as the Bureau, where people are
raised
to work there from birth . . . well, maybe they would've kept at it for seven more generations, and seven more after that.

Deep down I want to believe that the Bureau does not hate the genetically damaged as much as Nita thinks they do. They let the GDs work on their airplanes, for crying out loud! Would you let someone you thought was inferior work on your airplane? No, you would not. You'd trust that job to the most competent person you knew. So it's sad to see the Bureau not trust GDs to hold the highest positions of power in their organization. It makes no sense, and only weakens their stance.

That's one of the reasons I hate the Bureau. I wish they were better. They have the capacity to be better. After seven generations, maybe it was time to give up and simply let people
live.
If the Bureau were destroyed, and no one had seen the Edith Prior video, I think Chicago would've been just fine. Tris and Tobias would've figured out a way to neutralize Evelyn and Marcus, and their tiny little world would've chugged right along. Imperfect, not without bloodshed, and perhaps only until enough Divergents came along to render the old system obsolete, but the seeds for democracy were already there in the hearts of people like Tris Prior.

What I want to see is the story after Divergent. Can peace last? What would the next thing we found wrong with each other be? Only Veronica Roth can know.

Maybe the Bureau just reminds me too much of the current dystopia we're living in, a nation where the citizens are spied on and controlled, albeit through things like laws and the distribution of wealth rather than serums.

Perhaps once upon a time the Bureau was a necessary evil, in those precarious days after the Purity War, when America truly was teetering on the brink of total annihilation. But not anymore.

We know now that there is more than one way to handle the effects of genetic damage—the trait-based factions were one option—and it doesn't have to involve breeding humans back to genetic “perfection” over a number of generations.

Tobias, a genetically damaged boy who finds he can grow, he can change, and he can hold on to those changes because they're all that's left of the love of his life, is proof of that.

       
After pumping gas for nine years to put himself through college
,
Dan Krokos
,
now twenty-eight, dropped out to write full-time. He is currently hard at work on three separate projects: the final stop for Miranda North in the False Memory series, the next adventure for thirteen-year-old Mason Stark in The Planet Thieves series, and his first adult thriller. All of Dan's books have been optioned for film or television, and
False Memory
recently won the International Thriller Writer's Award for best Young Adult book. He enjoys riding his Harley, playing MMORPGs, and drinking coffee.