The Hunger Games… an Inter-Cultural Reflection

 

The first book in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy was put to film was a great box-office success, but the movie “The Hunger Games” left me with mixed emotions...

While watching the movie I learned a few more things about one of our Inter-Cultural Intelligence Development tools called “The Three Colors of Worldview”.

It is obvious in “The Hunger Games” that the regime of president Snow is a totalitarian dictatorship that rules in a classical Power-Fear manner.

He knows how to control the masses and the hunger games as well as the decadent, disconnected from reality, focused on insignificant things life-style of the people in the capitol causes one to think of Rome during the times of Nero.

President Snow has an interesting exchange with Seneca, the man in charge of the games, when things run out of hand a little… The dialog is captured in the clip below:

President Snow is linking Hope and Fear and says that too much hope will destroy fear. This is SO TRUE! The reality is that too much hope will ignite a fire and in the case of the Hunger Games it eventually results in the death of President Show and district 13 becoming the victorious rulers of the nation.

What is important to notice here that too much hope is not only going to destroy fear it is also a very difficult thing to manage from an individual, corporate and national development perspective.

The simplified version of that is: “What if, I give you 100,000 USD today and you are earning only 1 USD per day at the moment?” How would this impact you? You have never had $ 100 K! It represents over 270 years of your income… You would not know what to do with it. You would not have gone through a process of deciding how to ‘make room’ for $ 100 K in your life!

This is true with many things in life but it is especially true in terms of things like “The Arab Spring” or the trilogy of “The Hunger Games”

On the flight from Dubai to London one of the cabin crew from Egypt recalled in interesting situation. A few months before the Arab Spring started in Egypt he was at a soccer match with his friends (all university students). The Arab Spring in Tunisia had overturned the government. The Egyptian cabin crew member and his friends were discussing “What if?” But he mentioned to me that he told his friends: “Even IF we were going to be successful in overthrowing the government of Mubarak, and we would oust the dictator, then what? What would we do? How would we move forward into a better future for all Egyptians?”

This is THE most important question to ask for any Power/Fear environment, may it be at home, in a religious institution, a school a society, a corporation or a country!

IF people are not allowed or are too scared to think through the consequences of their rebellion, then what? What is going to happen after they are successful? .

Even if you are ‘in charge’ of how much hope you inject into the system, you need to allow the recipients to make room for the consequences of that hope into their lives. This is true in simple things like hiking up the pocket money of your children, getting additional funding for a small/medium enterprise development project, a project to improve the lives of the laborers in your mine, to the potential overthrowing of a dictatorial government.

One of the most powerful things we teach in our Inter-Cultural Intelligence development programs is: “You are not just responsible for the release of the right message, you are also responsible for the response it triggers!”

Hope is indeed one of the most powerful antidotes to fear, but you better know what to do with it. You better have a plan of action once fear is tossed overboard and hope fuels the fires of the future.