How to Die?

A perilous stack of books on my nightstand reminded me that I’ve got some important reading to do, specifically the works of Octavia E. Butler. I often hear people enter her writing through Kindred or Dawn but I’ve long been drawn to the description of Parable of the Sower, Butler’s 1993 dystopian sci-fi novel set in the far distant future of the mid 2020s. From a narrative standpoint, my first novel shares much in common with Parable insofar as the main characters are motivated survivors fighting to stay alive in a violent, cruel world. But the more time I spent considering Butler’s novel, the more it struck that my own work, and indeed much of my day-to-day brain space, is occupied by an unfortunately un-fantastical question: what do you do when your government is trying to kill you? 

To address this question, I’m going to once again lean on Foucault. I’ve spent a couple essays here macerating on Discipline and Punish, but this time, I’ll refer to The History of Sexuality. I also find it worthwhile to bring in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, as a counterpoint to Butler’s possibly peri-apocalyptic Parable. First, the recap. Mild spoilers ahead.

Parable of the Sower follows Lauren Oya Olamina, a teenager living with her family in a gated community on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Usually, the term “gated community” evokes a scene of rich, well-to-do families walling themselves off from society’s more “undesirable” elements. In this case, however, the community is more like a fortress with tall walls and armed community watches. LA devolved into a wasteland of thieves, drug abuse, rampant sexual assault, heinous violence, and casual murder. The rich live in enclaves surrounded by gun-toting guards and waited on by servants (read: slaves). Lauren’s family is luckier than most: with sturdy walls and cooperative neighbors, they eke out a life of normalcy in a sea of brutality. But this all comes to a fiery end when raiders raze the neighborhood, killing most of its residents. Escaping with a go-bag holding her meager belongings, Lauren wanders the rough highways with her fellow survivors, toward northern California, Oregon, Washington, Canada, anywhere they can find land, water, and work. Much of the book is spent on the road, fighting for survival among looters, raiders, rapists, cannibals, and drugged-out wackos obsessed with setting fires. 

There are two important things to know about Lauren. First, she has what’s called “hyperempathy,” or sometimes “sharing,” an ability (gift? curse?) that lets her feel the pleasure and pain of others. Given the setting description above, you can guess that Lauren experiences a lot more pain than pleasure. Every raider she shoots, every rapist she stabs, she suffers right alongside them, their pain flooding her mind, sometimes knocking her unconscious. 

Perhaps due to this ability, or the fact that her father served as a Baptist minister, Lauren develops her own religion: Earthseed. In Earthseed, god is not a robed man with a long beard living in the sky. Instead, god is change. Each chapter begins with a poem--a psalm--describing the tenets of Earthseed. Earthseed’s destiny, “is to take root among the stars,” implying humanity’s spread into the cosmos (p. 77). There’s a great deal one could say about Earthseed, but that’s not necessarily the focus of this essay so perhaps I’ll leave that topic aside until I finish the second book in the Parable series.

What I do want to talk about is the ways in which the state intervenes in the lives of its inhabitants. And here is where Foucault steps in. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes a relatively recent paradigm shift in a government’s relationship to its citizen-subjects. In Antiquity, there was a chief, king, emperor, pharaoh, etc., in short, a sovereign, the one that holds, “the power of life and death” (p. 135). By digging deeper into the logic inherent in that phrase, the king (through the king’s law) possessed the power to condemn to death the criminal whose crime offended sovereignty. Additionally, should another kingdom attack, the king had the right to raise an army to defend their royal personage, “to expose [the subject’s] life” to the possibility of death, but not demanding their immediate death as through an execution (p. 135). Foucault reframes this supposed power over life and death, stating the sovereign has, “the right to take life or let live” [emphasis the author’s] (p. 136).

For a whole host of reasons outlined in The History of Sexuality, the modern sovereign’s (e.g. presidents, prime ministers, general secretaries) role is not to dish out death, but that of life-maker-in-chief: “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” [emphasis the author’s] (p. 138). Modern governments exist to make more people, to grow populations, or to prevent certain subgroups within the general population from reproducing. Governments develop health programs that study disease and birth/death rates, contributing where needed to support a burgeoning population. Massive vaccine drives during a pandemic also come to mind. For some reason.

Disallowing life, too, became common. This might be through direct methods like forced sterilizations of indigenous populations or women of color in the United States or of Uyghur women in China’s concentration camps. Or this might occur through indirect methods, say cutting social services to certain sections of the population to lower life expectancies or failing to provide adequate vaccine doses to certain groups in times of a pandemic. 

Now, one can say that presidents and prime ministers wage wars all the time, or that there are state-sponsored executions. But it’s important to note that this is patently not to defend the head-of-state’s personal well-being or to redress some supposed wrong done to them. Instead, wars are fought on behalf of the survival of a nation or a people. War now risks the death of a few to safeguard the reproductive capacities of the many, i.e. the nation: “Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign . . . they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone . . . massacres have become vital” (p. 137). 

Turning now to Parable, the US government is still an extant, functional entity in this dystopian, slow-pocalypse. Early on, there’s a national election for president, the position eventually falling to Christopher Morpeth Donner. He ran on a platform of abolishing the nascent space program, what Lauren’s father calls, “a criminal waste of time and money” (p. 20). Additionally, Donner wanted to “put people back to work,” and change the laws to, “suspend ‘overly restrictive’ minimum wage, environmental, and worker protection laws” (p. 28). Donner plans to gut workers’ rights, leaving them--and the environment--at the mercy of powerful corporations.

This dynamic is perfectly encapsulated when a company, KSF, purchases and privatizes the coastal town of Olivar (p. 119). In exchange for selling away their rights as citizens, subsumed by their new role as KSF’s labor pool, the people of Olivar receive higher walls, lethal protection, and poverty wages that bind them to KSF/Olivar. Several characters make direct references to the oppressive company towns of the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Here we see the reasoning behind the government’s role as life-maker laid bare. In Butler’s dystopia, the government decidedly does not serve its people but instead serves capitalism. By reducing worker protections, they create an army of low cost, desperate labor that will literally kill each other for a bite to eat or a warm bed. Governments don’t just foster life for life’s sake; rather, they foster life to produce an army of producers/consumers, individuals lashed to the endlessly spinning wheel of capitalism. “Bread and circuses,” Laruen’s father says of politicians, “big corporations get the bread and we get the circuses” (p. 19). The government exists only as a distraction; the real power rests with big business. 

Police, likewise, are no longer an arm of the law but of capitalism. One of Lauren’s neighbors is killed in a shootout between two gangs. The narrator notes that, “the police investigated, collected their fee, and couldn’t find a thing” (p. 19). The police force itself is privatized; people pay for protection. We’d normally call this “extortion.” Indeed, this is indicative of the police’s relationship with anyone in Lauren’s world: they take (steal?) money, do nothing, find nothing, solve nothing. The police never show-up when Lauren’s home is destroyed. The police refuse to investigate the deaths of one of the other character’s family members. The supposed sheriff’s deputies rob him of all his cash for just asking questions and send him packing. “I wonder what a badge is, other than a license to steal,” Lauren says as she considers the officials that refuse to help her friends (p. 316). Perhaps the police protect a small class of wealthy property owners, but given the constant presence of violence in Butler’s work, this must be quite a miniscule group indeed. 

The world in Butler’s Parable is one where the government and its various security functions have been reduced to the point where, by any reasonable measure, America could be considered a failed state. There is no government but the corporation. There is no law but capital. 

And that’s what got me to thinking about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. This novel requires an even shorter description. A father and son travel around an ash-covered, post-apocalyptic American wasteland, fighting thieves, cannibals, and other desperate people trying to survive in a time without hope. It’s a world so dark, the father teaches his young son how to kill himself with a revolver to prevent capture by cannibals. 

In many ways, the worlds of Parable and The Road are functionally identical. Yes, there is a functioning government in Lauren’s world, but that’s all a show. There are cannibals and murderers outside of her gated compound even before things go sideways. There is no law, only strength; the ones with the guns and the ones without. With all this in mind, I kept on coming back to the question of which world I would prefer to inhabit: the one where the government wants in chains, or the one where there’s no government, only absolute civil disorder? 

This is not a question I ask lightly, like who would win in a fight between Goku or Superman. Historically, the US government, and the European colonial powers, have sought to take life, enslaving those they could, killing much of the rest, and shunting the “lucky” ones to barren patches of arid land ill fit for human habitation. And in a more modern sense, the US sought to disallow the life of people of color both in the US and around the world in a whole host of ways. What do you do when a government--an extremely powerful political, military, ideological force--wants you to cease to exist? Is that better or worse than brutal anarchy, where there is no protection for anyone, anywhere? 

On the government’s side, there are two advantages to living in the world of Parable. If there’s a government, no matter how corrupt it is, there’s always a chance that the government might change. That sounds like an outside chance. Corrupt governments tend to be conquered from without or toppled from within, but there is a sliver of a chance that things could improve. Additionally, this government appears committed to commerce and industry. The products of modern life continue to flow: food, medicine, guns and bullets, cars, computers, etc. If a government maintains a network of producers/consumers, again, there’s a chance--albeit small--that individuals from this group might band together to enact change, perhaps by building solidarity among the less plugged-in.

Looking at The Road, it seems better to me to have your enemies split and divided (i.e. small packs of starving marauders) rather than united and industrialized (i.e. the US army). The answer to marauders is to run away or to build an armed coop/commune of one’s own. But this isn’t going to stop a national army. True, a gated community and gun-toting neighbors didn’t save Lauren’s family, but the government sure didn’t step in and help, nor did they sound at all interested in aiding similar settlements ravaged by riots, earthquakes, or drug-addled psychos that receive sexual gratification from starting fires. At best, the government is a non-entity. But at worst, and there are plenty of governments out there trying to be the absolute worst, genocidal even. And as we’ve seen time and again, a motivated government can kill people on a scale incomparable to what a roving band of starving drug addicts might do. Governments are human cooperation animated, cooperation given structure and purpose. And if this structure is put toward nefarious ends, the target of that oppression is in serious trouble.

Given the opportunity to change, it’s clear that the world of Parable offers more hope than the world of The Road. Surely, both novelists intended it to be that way. McCarthy’s ash-choked apocalypse might have meant the end of life on earth for all the reader ever finds out. But with Parable, there’s a shot. That’s certainly how Lauren and her companions see it.

But it’s important to note why there’s a shot. The answer to the problems posed in both worlds isn’t found in the government or in big business. The answer is people. People with a common cause. People banding together. People learning to develop a language of understanding and developing a path forward through cooperation. So, what do you do when the government is trying to kill you? You find your people. Test them. Don’t be too trusting. But you stand by them and hope they stand by you. We’re all we got. In the face of genocidal governments or complete social chaos, the ones we break bread with, the ones we sleep next to, those are the people we’re forced to rely on. In the words of an old friend: “before you set out on an adventure, make sure you build your party.” D&D saves lives.