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Some people may have noticed in Let Me Fly that Katniss, Peeta, Gale, and Mrs. Everdeen seemed to have a lot of esoteric knowledge. Like how to make soap, or candles, or furniture, or preserve food, etc. Skills that aren’t as prevalent today. This was deliberate and it was also based on the books.
In Chapter One of The Hunger Games, Katniss discusses items that she trades for at the Hob as “lard or shoelaces or wool.”
Note that last one. Wool. Not cloth or thread or yarn or string. Wool. As in, the fleece from a sheep. To make wool usable, you have to wash it, card it, dye it, and spin it, not necessarily in that order.
Then, to make anything useful, you’ll need to weave or knit or crochet wool thread/yarn into clothing or whatever. It’s a process, and a time-consuming one.
In addition, tesserae are described as “a meager year’s supply of grain and oil for one person.” (The Hunger Games, Chapter One) Again, note the description. Grain. Not flour, not bread. Grain. But consider how Katniss described their bread in The Hunger Games, as “the rough bread made from the tessera grain,” (Chapter One) “our own tessera ration cooks down to an unattractive brown mush,” (Chapter Five) and “the ugly drop biscuits that are the standard fare at home.” (Chapter Seven)
To get bread, one must first have flour. To make flour, you need to grind or pound the grain until it’s essentially in powder format.
This is strenuous, time-consuming work.
In Chapter Nineteen of The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder (which was based on her real life experiences), the characters have to grind grain in a coffee grinder in order to make enough flour to sustain them. This is how it was described: “Turning the little handle around and around made the arm and shoulder ache so badly that they must take turns at the grinding.” It’s described multiple times within the book that this was an hourly constant task in order to keep their family fed. Now apply this knowledge to The Hunger Games and Panem.
For people desperate enough to risk dying to get tesserae, which is not even enough to feed someone, you aren’t going to then possibly sacrifice any of your hard-earned food to pay someone else to grind it for you. So families who end up taking out tesserae are either eating unattractive brown mush (which takes a long time to cook down without burning) or grinding the grain into flour to make a rough bread.
The interesting thing about these two tiny tidbits Collins put in her books is they show the Capitol forcing its populace to do mind-numbing exhausting busywork.
The real question is why.
Why would the Capitol want their districts to do this?
For the answer, you have to start thinking historically. A disadvantaged and desperate populace who have nothing to do tend to do this wonderful thing called rebel. You can see it going back to the Middle Ages and the various peasant revolts, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and most recently, the Arab Spring and the unrest in Ukraine.
The last thing the Capitol wants is a revolution. So what’s one way to keep your population from revolting? Keep them busy. Keep them so focused on meeting their lower order needs such as food, shelter, and water that they don’t have the time or energy to consider focusing on higher level needs, like comfort, fulfillment, and security.
According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a person will focus on the lowest level of the pyramid and is not able to focus on anything higher than that until those lower needs are met. By forcing the population to concentrate on the bottom rung, the Capitol effectively stops them from pursuing other needs, like safety and happiness.
So how does this translate back into the population knowing how to make all the things?
Well, by making it harder to receive finished or processed goods, you force your people to make them. So in order to do that, they have to learn. Likely from parents or grandparents. There’s a reason there’s a shoemaker’s daughter in town. Somebody has to know how to make shoes. They’re not mass-produced. There’s a reason that a baker actually exists. The bread doesn’t come from a factory. It comes from a family. You can bet that there’s likely a chandler, a tanner, a tailor, a cabinet-maker, a blacksmith, and various other cottage industries. Look to the past and you’ll see a strong correlation between the merchants of Twelve and the burgeoning middle class of the High Middle Ages.
In addition, poorer classes have to be jacks of all trades. They can’t afford not to be. Poverty forces people to become do-it-yourselfers. Who makes the furniture? They do. Who makes the clothes? They do. Who hunts, gardens, and preserves all of the food? They do. It’s in canon from Katniss’ meal with Cinna in Chapter Five of The Hunger Games that people in the Seam have gardens. That they have furniture. There’s no district whose industry is furniture. Seven would be the most likely, but shipping goods across the country is not cost efficient and it’s a poor use of limited transportation resources. Shipping lumber/planks though? That makes more sense since they have more uses. But someone’s still got to make the furniture and build the houses. It is unfortunately a fact of life that the poorer you are, the less likely you are to hire someone else.
But forcing the population to make everything that they need isn’t enough. Again you can see that in the various revolutions around the world. The Capitol needs to deflect hatred and anger of the masses on to someone other than themselves.
So how would they do that?
Just like today, the Capitol creates a false sense of competition and class divide to gain power. Much like sports team affiliations or shipping preferences, people in power emphasize differences to separate people into an us vs. them mentality. It’s basic psychology. In the Capitol’s case, they’ve set up two layers of competition: rivalry between the districts and between the separate classes within each district.
Within District Twelve, there are two distinct classes, Merchants and Seam, with distinct physical characteristics. As Gale’s reaction to Madge in the first book indicates, there’s tension between the two classes and it’s perceived that the merchants have more power and more prestige. This tension is more pronounced on days like Reaping Day. Katniss and Gale even know this and recognize it as evidenced by the following passage from Chapter One:
“We walk toward the Seam in silence. I don’t like that Gale took a dig at Madge, but he’s right, of course. The reaping system is unfair, with the poor getting the worst of it. You become eligible for the reaping the day you turn twelve. That year, your name is entered once. At thirteen, twice. And so on and so on until you reach the age of eighteen, the final year of eligibility, when your name goes into the pool seven times. That’s true for every citizen in all twelve districts in the entire country of Panem.
But here’s the catch. Say you are poor and starving as we were. You can opt to add your name more times in exchange for tesserae. Each tessera is worth a meager year’s supply of grain and oil for one person. You may do this for each of your family members as well. So, at the age of twelve, I had my name entered four times. Once, because I had to, and three times for tesserae for grain and oil for myself, Prim, and my mother. In fact, every year I have needed to do this. And the entries are cumulative. So now, at the age of sixteen, my name will be in the reaping twenty times. Gale, who is eighteen and has been either helping or single-handedly feeding a family of five for seven years, will have his name in forty-two times. You can see why someone like Madge, who has never been at risk of needing a tessera, can set him off. The chance of her name being drawn is very slim compared to those of us who live in the Seam. Not impossible, but slim. And even though the rules were set up by the Capitol, not the districts, certainly not Madge’s family, it’s hard not to resent those who don’t have to sign up for tesserae.
Gale knows his anger at Madge is misdirected. On other days, deep in the woods, I’ve listened to him rant about how the tesserae are just another tool to cause misery in our district. A way to plant hatred between the starving workers of the Seam and those who can generally count on supper and thereby ensure we will never trust one another. ‘It’s to the Capitol’s advantage to have us divided among ourselves,’ he might say if there were no ears to hear but mine. If it wasn’t reaping day. If a girl with a gold pin and no tesserae had not made what I’m sure she thought was a harmless comment.”
This deliberate intra-district split likely translates to other districts as well. We don’t know much about the class structure in the other districts, but it stands to reason that each district has a class of merchants as well as one or more classes of workers. In fact we know of one such district from the books, District Two with its Miner and Peacekeeper classes with Merchants as a likely third class.
This divide and conquer strategy extends to Panem as a whole. The Capitol deliberately forces the districts to fight against each other in the form of the Hunger Games. Only one district can win and take home the rewards of more food and supplies, forcing the districts to compete with each other and view each other as rivals.
By the time the books start, three districts have essentially created their own industry out of winning the Hunger Games, to the point that the other nine districts look down on and dislike the Career Districts, creating even more inter-district tension.
Haymitch has to explicitly tell Katniss “You just remember who the enemy is” in Catching Fire (Chapter Eighteen) and it still takes her the entire Games to figure it out. She’s so used to thinking of the Careers or the other tributes as her enemies that she almost overlooks the Capitol.
And that’s exactly what the Capitol wants. Keep the districts focused on fighting each other, focused on fighting amongst themselves, focused on surviving, and they won’t rebel.
They hope...
The same tactic was even used by slave owners in the deep south, with house slaves versus field slaves. It’s an effective tactic, but it only can work so long as the population the elite are trying to keep down doesn’t realize who the real enemy is. Once that happens and you can get enough people to realize the same, the elite become outnumbered and a revolution takes place. Take a look at Haiti, the only country founded by slaves who overthrew their oppressors. They realized who the real enemy was and did something about it. If you don’t get enough people to make a revolution viable, many times people will run, seeking freedom elsewhere. Several countries were founded on this principle, including the United States.
The final thing the Capitol does to keep the population docile is they offer the districts hope. Hope that their children won’t get Reaped. Hope that their district will be a winning one. Hope their loved ones will marry well. When people have a little hope, they’re not willing to jeopardize what little they do have for an uncertain future. It’s a delicate act as President Snow states in the first movie. “Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective. A lot of hope is dangerous.” Too little hope and people don’t have any reason NOT to rebel. They’ve got nothing left to lose. Too much hope, and people get angry that they aren’t getting what they feel they deserve. You can see this in politics today.
So, in a very real sense, Katniss and Gale lost hope. Which is why they left. They realized who the real enemy was and also realized they didn’t have the ability to rise up and have a chance of succeeding in overt rebellion so they settled for running, risking their lives to achieve freedom. After they escaped, the only reason why our characters in Let Me Fly were able to survive, was because the Capitol had been trying to keep them from rebelling by keeping them busy.
In canon, Panem didn’t rise up until the districts were able to look past providing for their basic needs and were shown just who was keeping them powerless. Once the Capitol’s scapegoats and machinations were revealed, the population was no longer willing to stay docile. Thus the revolution began.