The Price of Perfection

Alicia's piece on The Giver

Perfect security. Peace. Freedom from stress, worry, and fear. No war, violence, hunger, or trauma of any kind—guaranteed. Sounds great, huh? What’s the catch, you ask? No catch! Really! Because you wouldn’t even know what you were missing.

Sameness can promise a life of perfect security—not the slightest ripple or bump in your sense of well-being—because it is a world of perfect control. Almost. Once Jonas tastes the flavor of existence before Climate, Color, and Career Control, he becomes frustrated with the lack of choice in the community, spawned by the lack of opposition. We learn through Jonas’s experience that definite peace and security are bought with a price, a price perhaps too dear. Choice must give way for Control to provide perfect order and harmony. Force eliminates Freedom, and with it, love, joy, and meaning.

The irony of the perfectly controlled, perfectly choice-less Sameness is that human beings made a deliberate choice to create it in the first place. The Giver himself explained, “‘Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness…We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with differences. We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others’” (p. 95). The people who initiated Sameness had the right to make that choice, to choose an orderly, predictable, painless life (p. 103). Their decision was legitimate, insofar as it applied to them. But as soon as the condition of Sameness passed to the second generation, choice was destroyed. As Jonas angrily declared, “‘It isn’t fair’” (p. 97). The people in Jonas’s community had no regrets about the switch to Sameness because they had no recollection of what life was like before. Did they pay a price, unknowingly, for their peace? Jonas discovered that they did—they sacrificed depth of feeling and meaning. Was it worth it?

The founders of the Sameness communities sought to abandon all differences—changes in weather, distinctions of race, rank, and economic status, even nuances in language. But somewhere along the way, they realized that they needed a perpetual container for world experiences—a Receiver of Memory—from which to draw wisdom. This need is the chink in the logic of Sameness. Any organization—or organism, for that matter—that cannot sustain itself is flawed. The society of “perfect” control could not totally control itself without outside help—wisdom from beyond its borders. This is one argument against Sameness. Another is the chemical control of human beings within the community. Physical organization of individuals into efficient and productive units is admirable, but alteration of their chemical make-up for purposes of homogenization is tyrannical. Civilization strides forward when it learns to harness natural human power and impulses, therefore maximizing their inherent potential. When society forces contrived controls on natural processes, it signs itself up for an endless war on nature. Stifling of Stirrings is an indication of a blemished Sameness. There is no triumph in a chemical coercion.

Jonas imagines the novelty of choosing the color of his tunic. “‘If everything is the same, then there aren’t any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things! A blue tunic, or a red one?’” (p. 97) Of course, Jonas knew that the color of his clothing was unimportant. But as the Giver expressed, “‘It’s the choosing that’s important’” (p. 98). In another pseudo-Utopian novel, The Alliance by Gerald Lund, one character explains, “‘Even God, with all his incredibly majestic power and infinite knowledge, chooses not to force men to be good. And the reason is clear. When man has no choice but to do good, there’s no point in calling him moral. Men cannot be good without making that choice themselves. They can be made to act in good ways, but they cannot be good’” (p. 129). Jonas learns from the memories that life without choice is life devoid of meaning and morality. Even as he witnessed the excruciating suffering of the old world, he chose freedom of choice and risk over control and safety. As Jonas came to understand the true nature of anger and sorrow, he savored the new feelings of happiness and love. The difference between negative and positive emotions is what gave them meaning.

Jonas sought, as we all do, for a middle ground—a compromise between unleashed emotion and inhuman order. Control is not intrinsically immoral. Self-control is a highly advanced application of personal choice. Control from within is much more powerful, much more sustainable, than control from without. Jonas exhibits this purer form of control even as he decides to throw off the controls of the community. He is tempted to escape without any provision for the suffering of the people he would leave behind. “‘We don’t need to care about the rest of them,’” Jonas whined (p. 156). But he had learned better. “Of course they needed to care. It was the meaning of everything (p. 157).” Jonas balanced choice and self-control to preserve meaning. Later, when he and Gabriel were on the verge of death by exposure and starvation, Jonas doubted his choice to choose. When he reflected that Gabriel would have been killed if they had stayed in the community, he concluded, “So there had not really been a choice (p. 174).” Of course there had been a choice. But Jonas is submitting to that unspoken law of humanity—when human life is on the line, the right—the only—choice is to act to save that life. Choice is not abolished, but control steps in to maintain meaning.

The leaders of the community are not sinister. They do not conspire to exploit the physical and emotional strength of the people. But they are misguided. Their solution to the ever-agonizing battle between choice and control is wrong. We can learn much from their efforts, but like Jonas, we must recognize the wrongness of the Sameness and seek instead for a different kind of control—a control from within.