Part One. What is the dehumanization process that encourages those in power (teachers, the Vigils) to become more cruel and ruthless in their imposition of power against their subjects (students)?
Example: Chapter 6: Brother Leon is bored with his life and feels the need to terrify one of the "weaker" students for his own delectation and sick sadistic pleasure.
Brother Leon uses false logic in the form of a false syllogism to accuse Bailey of cheating.
1. Bailey, why do you cheat?
2. Bailey earns straight A's.
3. A's are a sign of perfection.
4. Only God is perfect.
5. Bailey can't be God and enjoy God's perfection.
6. Therefore, Bailey is a cheater and a liar.
There is also an example of the "Brain Tie."
Sometimes it works the other way around with the students abusing the teacher.
1. The spit wad incident for the teacher with PTSD.
2. The fat teacher who got stuck in the supply closet while getting the overhead projector.
Sometimes students bully and/or demonize another student:
How does this dehumanization process happen?
One. Strip a man of all his belongings, including clothes is powerful symbolically because his complete nakedness represents complete helplessness and powerlessness to both himself and the Vigils. In prison, they guards strip the prisoners of their clothes. While not as extreme, the Vigils do take the students to their hideout where the students are rendered helpless and in a way are “naked.”
Two. The Vigils will humiliate the students, explaining that they are losers who can only redeem themselves by fulfilling the Assignments.
Three. Impose strict rules, which must be rigidly enforced to keep a sharp dividing line between the powerful and the powerless: There are rituals of “respect” that must be maintained lest the students suffer the Vigils’ wrath. We see strict, arbitrary rules in hazing rituals.
Four. The dehumanization can only occur in mutual interdependence and cooperation: a cruel symbiosis between Vigils and students. This symbiosis is also evident between teachers and students when Brother Leon plays a humiliation game on Bailey (“Why do you cheat?”) and when the students go along with it, Leon says the whole class, a bunch of passive cowards, turned into Nazi Germany.
Five. The students mean nothing in the face of the Vigils’ power. The Vigils make the students perform Assignments, which are really exercises in self-abnegation.
Six. The Vigils’ strip the students of their masculinity by the Assignments, which are a reminder of who has all the power and who must be obedient.
Seven. Disobedience to the group will lead to being shunned, ostracized, demonized, and worse. Jerry will be punished for defying the Vigils. He can only refuse the chocolates under the Vigils’ order, but not on his own.
Eight. The Vigils make the students perform tedious acts that remind the students that they are insignificant, less human and more animal.
Nine. Reinforce power by assigning arbitrary, meaningless tasks and gratuitous acts of humiliation. Look again to the Assignment in which a screwdriver is used to unscrew everything in one of the teachers’ rooms. The Goober does it without question, but then is overcome with guilt for the effect it has on the teacher who has a nervous breakdown.
Part Two. Analyze the sadistic dynamics between “captors and captives” in Chapters 5 and 6 with the Stanford Experiment. Consider the process of dehumanization.
1. Goober is less human and more like “Vigil bait.”
2. Archie prides himself on being able to “build a house next door,” come up with a quick solution for the Vigils, but he can’t find a solution to his own misery, his own personal sense that he’s lacking in humanity. He also feels a sense of “self-disgust,” especially when he’s performing an Assignment, interrogating a student.
3. The interrogating takes place in a windowless room with guards and a bare light bulb. It’s essentially a prison cell.
4. “Tell me why you’re here.” What does this establish? Who’s in charge, who’s got the power. Obedience.
5. Archie tells Goober the Assignment isn’t personal, which shows the depersonalization or dehumanization of the subject performing the Assignment.
6. The Goober passively accepts the Assignment. It is “doom,” something inescapable, no student has been able to fight against it.
7. In Chapter 6, Brother Leon takes delight in humiliating Bailey, one of his best students, by accusing him of being a cheater. The scene underscores the powerful and the powerless.
Part Three. One Way of Approaching the Essay Assignment (If I Were Writing It)
In my first page, I would write about a time I compromised my humanity by conforming to some unwritten law, like the time I fought Ron Reynolds because he had said something in PE that had insulted me. I wasn’t really mad, but punched him to “defend my honor,” then felt guilty afterwards.
Or I'd write about the constant demonization of Tasmanian Devil.
In my second page, I’d argue that The Chocolate War is about the dehumanization that occurs from power, conformity, and blind obedience. In my body paragraphs I’d show how Jerry, Goober, Brother Leon, and Archie compromised their humanity through blind obedience and the worship of power. In the process, I’d compare these characters to the awful truths learned in the Milgram and Stanford Experiments.
In my final page, I'd write about someone who heroically performed an act of noble disobedience.
Part Six. In-Class Exercise
Write about a personal experience you had where the abuse of power resulted in the loss of someone’s humanity. You could write about a bully, a cruel teacher who humiliates students, or some authority figure. Or you could write about how you exercised power in a way that you made feel regretful and guilty afterwards. You could use this anecdote for the first page of your essay.
Example of an "A" Introduction, Transition, and Thesis
It was late in the afternoon, a couple of hours after Rich Drakos had made so much money at the Kissing Booth, that I witnessed my first piece of evidence that for all his good looks and popularity something wasn’t quite right with him. I was on my way to use the gym locker bathroom, for after school it tended to be relatively abandoned and afforded me more privacy than the bathroom by the classroom corridors, when I saw Rich and another girl outside the gym’s back door. They were unaware of me as I passed them by, which was a good thing, since they were absorbed in a marathon session of French-kissing. Seeing Rich smooch with another girl wasn’t my first clue that something was wrong with him. Rather, it was his choice of girl. It’s hard to describe her without sounding insensitive, if not a bit cruel. First let me say I don’t remember her real name. I only remember what the boys, myself included, called her—Tasmanian Devil. It was a very cruel name indeed. It captured the horror she instilled in us. She was a hulk of a girl, no smaller than our football team’s offensive linemen, with an oversized head, long, black stringy hair, a snout for a nose, and those unfortunate fleshy cheeks that seem to push against the eyes so that they are barely visible. Now what made Tasmanian Devil particularly frightening was that she was not, like the other homely girls, particularly apologetic about her unsightly appearance. Nor was she particularly smart, a claim reinforced by rumors that she took special classes for slow learners. On football Fridays when we had a home game, she was especially scary because she would show up to school wearing a pink mini skirt, white stockings, and a thick application of bright makeup. These measures did not diminish her dreadfulness. To the contrary, her “dressing up” only exacerbated her ugliness the way one might, by picking and popping a pimple, cause it to inflame.
Now for the record I need to make it clear that my sense of decency had stopped me from calling her Tasmanian Devil after seeing her sitting alone in the bleachers during a football game a few weeks before. It was raining that night and my friends and I were snugly close to each other protecting ourselves with our many umbrellas. We were full of adolescent exuberance, joking, laughing, slapping each other on the back. Twenty yards away Tasmanian Devil sat all alone, no one closer than thirty feet from her. She had no umbrella. Rain poured on her sodden hair, which clung to her wet forehead. Mascara ran down her face and reminded me of blood. But she appeared to be completely indifferent to the fact that she was getting more and more soaked. She was withdrawn into herself and there was a despondence in her expression as if she knew, in that moment, that she would be fated to a life-sentence of loneliness and ridicule.
And so you can imagine how disconcerted I was, two weeks later, to see Rich French-kissing her behind the gym. He couldn’t have been attracted to her. He had to be playing a sadistic game: First, giving her a taste of something forbidden, then denying it from her, and then watching the powerful, devastating effects of that denial.
Tasmanian Devil was submitted into a mental institution a month later during Christmas vacation. I never knew her exact diagnosis but it was rumored that she would without warning erupt into violent fits in which she would babble Rich’s name over and over while being forced into a straitjacket and being injected with a variety of anti-psychotic drugs.
This type of sadistic behavior, with no regard to the victims' long-term suffering is evident in the dark novel The Chocolate War, which focuses on the causes of dehumanization. These causes include __________, _________, __________, and _______________.
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