From False to Collective Consciousness:

Respective Marxian and Durkheimian Reading of Parable of the Sower

Parable of the Sower is a science fiction written by Octavia Butler. The story started in the year of 2024 when the hyper-growth of industrialization has turned America into a nation suffering from environmental degradation and economic crisis. Citizens fought over water while the newly elected president suspended all laws around environmental protection, minimum wage, and worker protections in the hope of boosting the economy. The protagonist, Lauren, is an African American young girl living in an impoverished neighborhood in Robledo, 20 miles away from Los Angeles. Lauren suffers from Hyperempathy Syndrome, a condition that makes her feel the pain of others as if it were her own. The syndrome is not a purely mental one. Before her first period, Lauren would bleed along with those who she saw bleeding. As a sharer, Lauren is especially vulnerable to the hazard environment because any visible injuries could easily disable or kill her. While Lauren is the daughter of a minister, she did not find herself identifying with her father’s Christianity. In this mist of this nationwide crisis, Lauren created and believed in her own religion—the God of Change. She was skeptical about the villagers’ belief that the presidential election would bring things back to normal. Failing to convince her father the urgency of change, Lauren prepared herself an emergency bag which later proved to be helpful. She named her own religion Earthseed with the metaphor that plants spread their seeds everywhere in the same way Lauren visualized the community could one day settled down in a place far away.

Keith, Lauren’s brother, joined a gang of criminals after a fight with the family and was tortured to death for stealing. Lauren’s father was presumed to be dead after going missing one day after work. Lauren planned on leaving the community to go further north for occupational opportunities. But the plan was never carried out. On one early morning of July, 2027, the neighborhood was attacked and every house was burned down. Prepared with the emergency pack, Lauren went back to the destroyed neighborhood to collect a few more things for her family only to find the corpses of known people. She was joined by Zahra (the youngest wife of a villager) and Harry (Lauren’s childhood friend) in an old garage who told her that her stepmother and two younger brothers were both killed. Devastated by grief, the three of them decided to start their journey of refuge together for a better chance of survival.

Armed with weapons, Zahra and Lauren were suspicious of all travelers on the road. Harry accused them of being cold-blooded but Zahra pointed out that life was no longer the same as it used to be in the neighborhood. Lauren explained her Hyperempathy Syndrome to her companions after having to kill an intruder to end her own pain. The revelation caused discomfort and uneasiness in the group but the three of them managed to move on. They were later joined by a multiracial family. The traveling group began to expand. Lauren shared with the newcomers not only her supplies but also Earthseed verses. The husband of the family Travis resonated with Lauren’s belief. The resonation made Lauren eager to build a community for which she started looking on the road for others who might join the group. Jill and Allie Gilchrist, two girls forced by their fathers into prostitution joined. Bankole, a 57-year-old African American doctor joined.

Lauren reflected on her growing attraction to Bankole. Despite mild skepticism, the doctor respected Lauren’s belief and her attempt to create a new religion. The mutual attraction led the doctor to propose and invite the protagonist to live with him on a land he and his sister occupied near Cape Mendocino. Lauren expressed her interest in building the first Earthseed Community and told the doctor about her hyperempathy. Instead of being discouraged by Lauren’s medical condition, Bankole agreed to help build the community. The group began moving towards Cape Mendocino. The journey there was filled with gunfights and injuries. The group lost Jill but was joined by a group of four sharers. The big group arrived at Bankole’s sister’s land only to find five corpses. Seeking police help, Bankole received nothing but a waste of money. The group decided to settle down on this new land which would be sustained by farming. After a service to mourn the death, the community gave their new place a name called Acorn.

The book demonstrated the inevitable downfall of a capitalistic society envisioned by Karl Marx when the heavy industrialization made the rich capitalists richer and further impoverished the workers. The workers lost their jobs, their food security and even drinking water. No law was passed to protect the poor and there was nothing left in these modern proletariats’ life but revolution. The first half of the book demonstrated Lauren’s attempt to shatter the community’s false consciousness, the belief that as one prays and waits, someone in power would alter things in a positive manner for the mass. Although in the book, Lauren seemed to imply that this man of power is the Christian God at several scenes of her father’s preach, it is possible that she might be critiquing something more secular yet restrained by the lack of proper language. With irony, Lauren once compared god as a big kid playing with his toys (Butler 2019, 16), who didn’t care about the death of 700 workers or 7 villagers. Lauren was also one of the first to question the effectiveness of presidential decisions and described the presidential candidate Donner as “nothing” and “no substance” (56). The analogy of God being one man who cares more about the intrinsic interests of himself rather than the mass working-class seems to correlate well with the description of the capitalistic ruling class according to Marx. The symbolized non-substantial ruling class also mirrors the community’s idealization of the god. The poor villagers took on the consciousness of the ruling class, waiting faithfully and obediently for things to change for the better. No uprise, no protest, and the only violence was directed towards members of the fellow community who were slightly richer. Lauren’s mission was to point out the falseness of this consciousness.

Butler in the book offered a much more complicated narration about the emergence of a new consciousness as compared to the one implied by Karl Marx. Marx never explicitly used the term “false consciousness,” but he used the famous phrase “they do not know it, but they are doing it” in Capital to describe such naive consciousness (Žižek, Cynicism as a Form of Ideology, 511). Given the condition of unknowing, it’s reasonable to infer that from an early Marxist’ point of view, the false consciousness will die out as the workers lost their means of survival and became aware of the reality of their sufferings. Such formation of the new consciousness relied heavily on the workers’ identification of a common oppressor. Written in the 19th century, Marx didn’t foresee the extent to which alienation between human beings could progress. Marx lived in a time when workers, despite the deprivation of means of production, could still understand or imagine the life of luxury led by the rich. As we read in Mary Barton, there was a physical proximity between the rich and the poor so that when John Barton went out to buy a piece of bread, he could see the goods on the carriage of the wealthy lady. In contrast to that, Lauren and the young people in the fortress community barely knew anything about the outside world. The only outside they knew was the church and the only means of knowing the outside was either through books or through TV. There was no rich, only the less deprived. For them, it’s hard to imagine who to rise up against because the differences between poverty and wealth has grown so dramatically that the rich became a symbol to the impoverished. That could explain the robbery and killing happened within the fortress community. People can only protest against those who they can see and access. How could one start a fight against a concept when the enemy is in a colored box talking about things that were unheard of?

Building off the increased alienation that Marx couldn’t possibly foresee is the fear of reality coming after the destroyed false consciousness—a future with no hope, no saviors or promises. Changes require the destabilization of not only structure that was harmful but also structures that are protective. The survival bags, for instance, would have prepared the community members well in case of emergency but it also destroyed the protective fantasy of security that kept people calm. The irrational aversion of losing something miserable yet stable can be so intense that people despite knowing the necessity of a revolution would rather stay in the familiar state of poverty, hunger and violence where they can dream about a pleasant future. This is particularly salient in Lauren’s attempt to educate her friend Joanne about the acquisition of survival skills so as to prepare for the danger outside the community. Joanne, despite witnessing the robbery and the killing, was horrified by the mere thought of crossing these protective walls. Scared of losing the false stability, Joanne along with the many others, convinced themselves of their own helplessness and gained comfort by calling all sufferings temporarily. The tendency to stay in a familiar state of consciousness posed great difficulties for Lauren to move forward in her plan of forming a new belief that would guide the community to take action in this moment of urgency.

As long as the false consciousness remained, the community would not unite as a class for themselves. Lauren was not the only one to see the need for change. In fact, her father agreed with her but decided to take a much slower route of education. He was aware of people’s fear of reality and suggested Lauren to teach villagers skills without spoiling the external danger and lack of saviors (66-67). The formation of a new consciousness is so time-consuming that the community didn’t even live to see the birth of it. Marx saw the physical need of the working class that could prompt the start of revolution but he didn’t see that obstacles lay in human beings’ fondness of stability and their preferences for the path of least resistance. Butler’s portrayal of the naive consciousness is much closer to what Žižek, a Slovenian Marxist scholar, psycho-analyst explained as the enlightened false consciousness—“one knows the falsehood very well but one still does not renounce it” (Žižek, Cynicism as a Form of Ideology, 512). It’s much easier sometimes to persuade the mind to ignore the sufferings than to act on it.

It’s only when the place was completely burnt down and most believers of the old way were ruthlessly murdered did Lauren finally started to spread and practice the new consciousness—the belief that the power of change (i.e. God) lies in the individuals (i.e. Earthseed). The literal complete destruction of the system in this isolated community is thus of great symbolic value in response to Marx’s provision of false consciousness. It shows the complexity and challenges of forming a new consciousness. False as it may be, the old consciousness sometimes serves as an embodied sense of comfort to the oppressed. To replace it with a new belief, it takes the courage of both the prophet and the receivers. In the case of Robledo, the community wasn’t ready.

In the second half of the book, as Lauren started her journey north, she began building her first Earthseed community. Lauren viewed Earthseed as something “purposeful and constructive” (Butler 2019, 275) that guides individuals ahead beyond their basic needs. From the conversation she shared with Travis, one of her traveling companions, it’s known that Earthseed was created and inspired by observations of others and of the self, from everything that was available to be read, heard or seen (217). It’s a collective of wisdom derived from multiple mediums that is impossible for an individual to create on one’s own. Lauren in fact said herself that she never felt she was “ making any of this up—not the name, Earthseed, not any of it” (78). As the plot developed, Earthseed became collective on a new level for it was shared as a system of belief amongst the traveling group. Lauren’s preach generated responses, with which Earthseed was examined, questioned and refined. Earthseed is to some extent similar to what Durkheim referred to as the collective consciousness but comparatively allows more room for disobedience. I was thus curious about what accounts for the differences between the two interpretations and what if not a common shared belief that holds society together.

The first important difference lies in Durkheim and Lauren’s assumption about human nature. Durkheim claimed that people only became moral being by living in a society with rules. Without a higher calling (i.e. a collective consciousness) prohibiting people from hurting each other for personal interests, no solidarity could be achieved. In other words, Durkheim viewed human nature as destructive, competitive and the purpose of education being the spreading of the collective consciousness and the taming of the wild. However, Lauren viewed human nature in a drastically different way. It’s interesting to note that Lauren’s followers were not all believers of Earthseed initially. Rather they started following the group for safety (Lauren possessed a gun). The primary concern of security makes conformity inevitable yet Lauren didn’t take advantage of such power. Instead, she offered her community education(e.g. Zahra) so that they would learn to interpret Earthseed critically and personally. Lauren’s collective consciousness does not involve conditioning because she viewed human nature as constructive, collaborative and crucial to changes in society. Evil as one might experience on the road is more provoked than inherent. For Durkheim, the killing and robbing inevitably indicate cruelty and were viewed as a result of the unleashed natural state of human beings. But Lauren with her hyperempathy syndrome, which is a condition of unnaturalness, had to kill to protect herself. She did not see killing as the losing of common senses but the regaining of consciousness. She was only of the greatest use when she was not crippled by other people’s injuries and pain. She ceased to kill when Bankole’s arrival brought medical care, which implies that the previous killing was forced by situational factors. That is not to say killing is forgivable, but to argue that given the complexity of societal factors, it’s hard to define human nature without considering the environment in which it’s located.

Lauren also differed considerably from Durkheim in social situatedness. As a middle class, prestigious scholar, Durkheim developed his theory to describe modern societies as they were. Unlike Marx whose manifesto was written with an urgent call of action to create a new order, Durkheim Durkheim and his successors (e.g. Parsons) attempted to reveal human nature in one grand social theory. This is not surprising given that Durkheim was trying to legitimatize sociology as part of the academy at the time and the possibility to find patterns in a seemingly chaotic sea of humanities was appealing. But the particularity of human nature could never truly be captured by one set of values or one grand theory. C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination critiqued the inapplicability of the uni-theory framework and pointed out how in many functioning societies people tend to uphold different values (Mills 2000, 25-49). A singular collective consciousness is not all that leads to social solidarity. It’s rather the interaction with the collective consciousness which might take the form of rejection, adaption, indifference and obedience that mobilizes different sections of the society. Coming from the fortress community where the conformity to one single consciousness had protected but also imprisoned its members from changes, Lauren was an outlier with a competing consciousness. If she had successfully persuaded her father to act on and respond to the existing false yet collective consciousness, the village would have survived the robbery. The destruction of the village was again, from my perspective, an important symbol haunting Lauren to continuously reflect and refine her own consciousness by taking in others’ criticism and doubts. Lauren’s interpretation of the society and her resonance with Mills are thus products of her deviant identity. Since her creation of Earthseed was a response to an existing consciousness that denied and excluded her (i.e. Joanne telling her off), it’s not uncommon for her to sympathize with those who are in the same place as she was. I, therefore, see Lauren’s hyperempathy as a metaphor for the deviants’ overlooked power in guiding the society during times of anomie. Durkheim viewed deviants as important to social reformation but only as an indication of existing problems. It’s still the ruling class that makes small alterations to the structures when behaviors of deviation were spotted. But Butler, with Lauren as her protagonist, constructed a completely opposite route of change. Harnessing her deviation in the scene when she shot the dog dead (45), Lauren overcame the fear of being abnormal and began using her differences (e.g. her sensitivity to danger, her cold judgment and knowledge of living in the wild) as tools for survival. The changes she brought were more powerful, more informed and less subtle than the Durkheimian ruling class who barely experienced half the pain the protagonist went through.

Reading Butler from both the perspective of Marx and Durkheim, whose assumptions about societal functioning and human nature displayed considerable differences from each other, I am amazed to see the relevance of their theories particularly in a catastrophic state of chaos. As a member of the working class, Lauren’s Earthseed aligned more with Marx in its directionality of changes, but agreed with Durkheim in the necessity of a high calling which produces order in societies. Lauren’s transformation of identity from an excluded, feared social outlier into the leadership of a survival community casts an important question of what revolution would look like and who would be responsible for changes in the modern age. In this ever-changing society where both Marx and Durkheim’s theories failed to foreseen its complex development, Lauren’s Earthseed might be the new sociological theory with which we could construct a brighter future.

Work Cited:

Butler, Octavia E., N. K. Jemisin. 2019. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing.

Durkheim, Èmile. “Mechanical and Organic Solidarity.” In Social Theory: The Multicultural, Global, and Classic Readings, edited by Charles Lemert, 511-513. Boulder: Westview Press, 2017.

Mills, C.Wright. 2000. The Sociological Imagination. Cary: Oxford University Press USA - OSO. Accessed April 12, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Cynicism as a Form of Ideology.” In Social Theory: The Multicultural, Global, and Classic Readings, edited by Charles Lemert, 511-513. Boulder: Westview Press, 2017.