I recently saw the third installment of the Hunger Games series. -I've read the books as well.
I think quite highly of this series. -It's like 1984 for a new generation, filled with extremely relevant observations and metaphors for our current situation on Earth.
I particularly found myself impressed with its depiction of how propaganda works; winning battles through Public Relations rather than daring-do. It also, (less so in the films, more so in the books), dealt head-on with the lasting psychological and physiological damage violence wreaks upon people. This series does not glorify violence or look away from its consequences.
I think it is possible to err too much on the side of caution sometimes. Truth telling, (even in the form of a not-so-speculative fiction like "Hunger Games"), is important. One could argue that posting grim news articles about our world is in fact programming us to accept the hard reality they represent. -And possibly this is true from a certain perspective, but not in an unhealthy way at all, (unless ignoring Objective Reality is healthy.)
I did some looking at what "Predictive Programming" was all about, and while there is some merit in certain aspects of the concept, I think one can throw the baby out with the bathwater.
This quote from one of those otherwise tiresome so-called skeptic websites which actually makes some sense on this particular subject, (rare, I know):
A major component of predictive programming theory is the idea that if someone sees something that they’ve seen depicted in fiction, they react to it with resigned indifference and maybe a half-hearted protest. According to this view, the mere portrayal of some social condition in fiction programs people with the idea that it is inevitable and should not be resisted.
To understand why this is implausible, consider one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time: Albert Bandura’s “Bobo Doll” experiments. In this series of studies, Bandura and his team recruited two groups of children. In one group, each child was shown a short film of an adult hitting an inflatable clown doll; in the other group, the adult in the film ignored the Bobo doll. After watching whatever film they were assigned to, each child was then put into a room with a variety of toys, including a Bobo doll. The children who had been shown the aggressive video overwhelmingly mimicked the adult and beat up the doll, while the other group left the doll alone.
What does this mean for predictive programming? It completely debunks the idea that simply portraying something will elicit the same reaction regardless of context. Watching the hero hit the Bobo doll makes us want to do the same. The children’s reaction was driven not by the simple presence of the doll, but by the adult model’s reaction to it. It’s relevant that in nearly every film which is supposedly carrying out predictive programming in aid of some dystopian future government, the dystopian society is seen as evil and resistance is seen as a moral imperative.
Consider The Hunger Games, a film about a teenage girl rebelling against the totalitarian government that rules the shattered remnants of North America with an iron fist, described by Alex Jones as “one hundred percent predictive programming.” The filmmakers try to make us sympathise with the heroine, her friends, and the downtrodden masses in their fight for freedom. The idea that this would make people less likely to resist a totalitarian government is both baseless and counterintuitive. It flies in the face of half a decade of research on social learning and how we model our own behaviour after the behaviour of others around us. If you were trying to institute an evil world government, would you really want to put it out there that people who fight against evil world governments are the heroes?
I think a more present danger of something like Hunger Games is that it puts into "virtual reality" an active resistance. Why actually fight back against oppression when it's already been done for you on screen? But I'm not convinced of that either...
Honestly, I think there is FAR more psy-ops toxicity in something like the popular adventure show, "Agent Carter" (with its laughable evil-Russian overtones) or its weird Canadian clone, "X Company". -Both of which seem hell-bent on hitting the, "Society at War!" vibe. -And "Role Model Women are classy, down-home Killers!" vibe. -Both of which are thick with their apologist rhetorical story devices used to sell everything from national mistrust, violence, torture to the general ponorization of all civilians as *good* things. That's normal TV these days.
Hunger Games, by contrast, tries to point out how media distorts perception, how war is not cool, what psychopathy looks like, and that beneath it all, the seemingly indestructible edifice of imperial power is not nearly so secure as it would like to believe itself to be, that it is in fact rotting from within.