Timothy Spearman writes

There is a Hindu treatise from antiquity called The Athushastra. As a treatise on the maintenance and sustainability of princely rule, it recounts how the aristocratic caste maintains its social position by creating levels of government. The royal bloods at the top maintain their position by fomenting conflict between the lower tiers of government. Society, meanwhile, are broken into factions so that internal squabbling prevents them from posing any threat to the ruling elite. Internal contention among the lower castes serves the agenda of the ruling elite, who seek to divide and conquer. 

Nothing much has changed in five thousand years. The film “Divergent” depicts the modern version of divide and rule – the UN Agenda 21 version – in which the masses are herded into different factions: Amity, Erudite, Dauntless, Candor and Abnegation. We saw a similar scenario in “The Hunger Games”, where people were herded into different Districts, where they can be routinely culled and slaughtered with media blackouts preventing the other Districts from knowing the full extent of the neighboring genocide and are made oblivious to the fact that they are next. With FEMA camps possibly coming to a neighborhood near you, the Agenda 21 sustainable development culls should be kept just as effectively under wraps. 

The film shows how a person’s psychological profile is determined through testing, a technically more advanced version of the career questionnaires we were given in high school. The citizen is then conditioned to expend his youthful energy serving his own compartmentalized faction, where he is conditioned into a life, not of servitude but futility. In fact, virtues such as passion, ambition, courage and drive are encouraged within the system, but expended harmlessly without effect since the energy is contained and compartmentalized within each faction, with no collateral impact. In essence, each faction is designed to undermine the ambitions of the other, serving as a necessary check and balance in a political system designed to prevent any one faction from gaining ascendancy over the other. 

A test is administered to decide where one best belongs, which faction one is best suited to. Of course, the debutante may, at some risk to self, select a faction of preference, but once chosen, there is no going back. Initiates who fail to join a faction, are relegated to the “ghetto” to become “factionless” outcasts, living in poverty and forced to endure physical hardships, similar to “the prols” in Orwell’s "1984". In one deeply disturbing scene, all the members of the faction “Dauntless” are issued tracking devices similar to RFID microchips. They are issued as a symbol of belonging. Any faction member refusing the chip would be viewed as a renegade and would be either killed or forced into exile. 

Those in positions of governance, like the Erudite faction, learn that certain test subjects are anomalies. They are “divergent”, meaning they do not fit into any of the defined factions due to their divergent and individualistic thinking patterns. They cannot be assigned a faction because they think for themselves. These “divergents”, once exposed, are hunted down and killed. 

Interestingly, Kate Winslet plays the role of technocrat head of Erudite. How fitting given that she is purportedly a member of the Order of the Eastern Star, named in honor of the star Sirius from whence the Fallen Angels hail. This is the same star Sirius symbolized by the White House in Washington and White Hall in London and the White Star shipping line of Titanic fame. Interesting that Kate was in "Titanic".

In the movie, the “Erudite” faction – the technocratic equivalent of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth – decides to kill all “divergents” and seize control of all other factions, a function previously performed by the faction known as “Abnegation”. The Erudites indulge in occasional culls to control demographics and prevent any uprisings. They even administer a mind control agent to keep the faction “Dauntless” servile and under their complete control as assault troops engaged in mass killings and acts of genocide. The Erudite faction sees itself as the rightful ruling class with its advanced technical knowledge similar to the Ph.D. holders composing today’s ruling elite, who devise the social engineering programs that heard us into factions.