Doctor Frederick Arocratus -- District 6

If one lived in another time, they would say that the good Doctor looks rather like Sigmund Freud, and indeed, he resembles him to the point where more spiritual people would claim he is some sort of reincarnation. His beard is well-formed and white as snow, and his head is balding as though it is autumn and it time for a tree to shed its leaves. The Good doctor is a Tall Six feet or so, and he is fed well by his benefactors in the Institute. His spectacles is the trait which sets him apart from Freud, and when he is seen not wearing them, he is generally furious.

The Clothes of the good Doctor is almost always a suit, except when he is running out of bed to scream at one of the poor bastards that did some inane thing to set him off, in which case he is wearing humorous pyjamas, his Mother’s last gift to him. He thinks they are subpar, but they will do, regardless of how ‘absurdly stereotypical and boring’ his mother is. His brown eyes show a fury unmatched by anyone in District 6, a sort of mad determination to get his will. When angry, his face gets red, his beard gets unkempt, and there is nothing coming out of his mouth but yelling.

As for the voice of the good Doctor, he is almost completely a man of a Bass voice. In his earlier life he tried singing at his School, but it did not work out for him. A loud, booming voice, it would make a man duck into cover if they were to hear it. In a different world he would have been an excellent Prussian drill officer, but instead he leads an institute of scientists united by their complete terror of him. His accent is one of very, very slight German descent, but the subtleties are but a whisper of a world long since gone. One could not recognize it unless he listened very carefully to his tone; his ‘The’ and ‘is’ are just a tad off from the usual accent of Panem.

The Doctor has a rather strange scar on his thumb; it runs down it to his Palm, guiding along the path that a scalpel once accidentally took when he was a bit less of an adept at brain surgery. The incision was fairly deep, but it has healed, though it cut into the nerves and leaves his thumb on his right hand looking rather awkward. He cannot move it very well, and when he can, the movement is slow and choppy, since the nerve endings have been damaged.

When one asks a colleague of the Good Doctor to explain the Doctor in one word, they will freeze up, and they will go pale. After guaranteeing their safety, they will carefully whisper a single word, making sure even the lab implements do not hear them, for it seems all of it has ears. Once they have completed the process of making sure he is not within a two mile radius, they will say ‘difficult’.

Difficult, eccentric, a storm bent on the furthering of science at the cost of the mental sanity of both his patients and his staff that is what the Good Doctor is. However, those words are an unfair understatement to the Doctor; he takes pride in the fact that he has managed to force more the fifty of his colleagues to resign from their spot or do some sort of ridiculous stunt to fire themselves, although often he is more than willing to do it for them.

To address the Doctor’s different personality traits, one must use his favorite psychological school, that of Psychoanalysis. We will look at the traits of Frederick one by one in order to analyze what makes him tick and to provide an excellent case study for the psychological effect that a mad boss can have on his or her subordinates. Let us begin first with that always illustrious of traits, stubbornness, of which the Good Doctor has no shortage of.

It is easier for us to think of his traits as a series of absurd hyperbolic analogies, which will allow us to emphasize just how difficult Dr. Arocratus really is. This may seem quite childlike to some of you, but only a child can truly emphasize in such a way that you can picture it, since otherwise, you will be completely dumbfounded by the extent of the Doctor’s Stubbornness. He is as stubborn as a lemming, as proud as a warrior who will go down with a last stand, not whimpering to the enemy. He has never given in to any scholarly consensus, nor has he allowed the papers of his rivals to worry him in any way. The Good Doctor will simply stay up that night, working on his typewriter as if a gun was held to his head, and create a counter-paper to them. In this way he has become unrivaled within the field of psychology and sociology. By tiring all of his opponents and not admitting that he is wrong in any way.

The second quality which the Good Doctor exhibits in an exaggerated fashion not normal for most human beings is a distinct lack of empathy for any other human being. In this way he has managed to make major strides within the realms of psychology, sociology, and neurology, at the expense of many people who have suffered at his hands, and often he feels better for it. Much like the ethnics-deficient scientists of old, he feels that morality is an absurd human construct that should not hamper him in his work with the mind. The consequence of this is that he will not stop at the screams of his patient being torn apart by multiple different gripping devices. No, he must see the psychological effect of pain of dislocation and how it will affect the patient in some way.

This does not merely stop at his patients; then he could be called a stereotypical researcher in District six, for it seems that when the angels distributed empathy among the peoples of the earth, they had a lunch break and missed district 6’s population. His attitude, however, extends to his personal life and to his colleagues. He is an insatiable, furious man, unable to understand that others do not think the way that he does and that they will not be able to complete the absurdly difficult tasks he has set up for him. His first marriage ended this way, as well as countless apprenticeships and internships.

However, he is not deficient of empathy for the sole reason of being some sort of horrid being, oh my no. When it comes to the subject of human betterment via psychological and sociological treatment, it seems that the façade of a storm is replaced by a rather pleasant rainbow, and a man who revels in the chance to unlock the human psyche is revealed. Nevertheless, this man is but a mirage of the beast that lies underneath and it is often difficult to coax him out. We suggest crackers.

Underneath the beast and furious thing which controls Dr. Arocratus whenever he is met by someone who does not meet his qualifications (So everyone except God on a good day), is a man who is intensely curious in many ways. His lack of empathy is driven by the realization, in his personal philosophy, that human beings are not naturally empathetic beings, and that it is thus something that restricts us from true power, a restraint introduced by evolution. He wants to better all of humanity regardless of what his superiors in the capitol want. In this way he actually saves humanity, at least those subservient to the Capitol, since he uses his time to counteract any efforts of the Capitol to control the population. He has rebuffed them several times when they requested that he assist in the creation of a drug which will make a citizen more placated than they would be without it.

His main issue is that, in his belief, Panem is a horrendously unjust bureaucratic machine that in no way should represent the pinnacle of human progress and should thus not be allowed any sort of technology that could allow them to make a stride forward in human psychology or sociology. He has actively worked against them multiple times, frustrating attempts by President Snow to make him bend to his will. These rebuffs have been excused, as if there is one thing that Dr. Arocratus is reasonable about, it is the protection of his fellow countrymen from the attempts of the Capitol to siphon off their brainpower for their own twisted goal. He has therefore devised a system where he provides just enough for the Capitol to satisfy them, while working on his own pet projects.

The Good Doctor would not be complete without his many eccentricities, which he does well to cultivate, as otherwise his very life would seem to fall apart. Punctuated by strange habits and hobbies, such as his ship-in-bottle collection, to his strange superstitions (especially for a man who has denied religion the time of day) such as not opening his window until 9 AM every morning, except for Saturdays, when he opens it at 8:30 PM. If something happened that altered this schedule, he would need to open his window, spin around three times, tap his nose, and then close it again in order to ‘refresh’ the order of operations and make sure that everything is done correctly the next time.

Finally, there is the Doctor’s attitude towards life in general. He has never been very fond of logo therapy, the psychological school that believes that life is punctuated by a search for meaning, and that all suffering can be derived from lack of meaning, but he still agrees that science and the pursuit of that holy grail of psychology, manipulating the human psyche to serve one’s own needs is his bread and butter in life. He ended a marriage for it, in fact. In this way he is an optimist, and although there are only a few occasions where he is not in the lab, he is often a quite cheerful optimist when in casual conversation, though if he could, he would likely dispose of his ‘unrealistic optimism’ and change to a more subdued ‘optimistic realism’. Often he uses such terms to disguise the suffering and stress that he has throughout his life. Frustration is released against others, and is a convenient veil for one’s own issues. As a psychologist, the Good Doctor is perfectly aware of this and has taken significant steps to remedy it, such as becoming even more difficult to work with and spending his time working on the Great Experiment.

Ah yes, and he loves cigars and puzzles. He keeps a personal reserve of luxury cigars from District 11 plantations, and keeps a solitary puzzle with twelve locks with him. The puzzle is difficult to solve, and so far he has opened ten of the twelve locks. It is a strenuous activity, and many times he has felt that he should give up. But so close to victory, the ever-stubborn doctor cannot stop in his quest for further knowledge, even if it exists as some little note in a locked puzzle box.

Ah, the history of the Doctor. This is something that took a considerable amount of questioning to receive in miniscule fragments, often delivered cryptically or with much coaxing. It seemed that he was born in the central town of District 6, raised in a wealthy family. In his words, his parents worked as liars and cheats, scamming their way through society and conning the authorities considerably. They paid little attention to the poor baby they dragged around with them, but obviously they were not that great, since at the age of Two, they were caught in an act of fraud and sent to a detention center. He never heard from them again; he spent the rest of his childhood within the cold, plastered walls of a community home.

Being around the other unfortunate children and the mentally insane piqued a sort of curiosity in young Frederick. He had many bad experiences with his maid in the community home, which the kids would call the ‘she-devil’ for she hit so hard and with so little provocation. Other than that, he described with vivid imagery the enjoyment he had interacting with those that had no control with their mental faculties. They were in a different ward from him, but he stayed often with them, and befriended many of them. Though this was technically against the rules of the home, many of the doctors and psychiatrists who attempted treatment on the mentally insane patients took a liking to this little boy who showed up often and talked with them, his eyes full of excitement and interest as the ill explained their experiences to him.

At school he made few friends, an introvert in the making. As mentioned before, he had a failed streak as a singer at his school, but other than that, he had very little interaction with his fellow students or teachers. His teachers often noticed that he had a certain aura of brilliance in his writing, but paid little heed to him, feeling that an attachment to children, especially those of reaping age, would bring about only mental anguish and that he could work out his intellectual skill on his own. In school he often stared for long hours at some spot in the distance, transfixed by it as many different thoughts rolled out of his head.

As many brighter children do within District 6, he specialized within the sciences, and at age 15, he decided that it was best for him to go into the Psychological career. When others have questioned his choice, he explained that it was the only way for him to truly understand the people he lived around in the community home, and so he began his studies into it. He followed the general trajectory of a prodigy, graduating from his school and moving on to a District-sponsored college, where he learnt a number of different disciplines within the realm of both practical science and social science. It was here, in college, where he began his first real interaction with the outside world. He had spent his teen years unlike many, scarcely worrying about the hunger games, knowing that the odds were not in his favor, as the announcer would like to say, disturbingly. This allowed his psyche to develop differently, and he was not as troubled as his colleagues by the psychological stress that the games would bring on a person. He was, however, very interested about the psychological effects of the hunger games on a teen. He began to watch them for unhealthy amounts of time, leading his friends to worry about his own mental health, though he assured them that nothing was wrong.

At age 19, he entered the center stage of the Panem sciences by publishing a highly controversial paper regarding the sustainability of the games and how they would affect the population of the autocracy. In it he explained the various mental processes that the games would induce in contestants and how they damaged the relationship of the district and the Capitol, something that he explained was incredibly important in a stable nation. Obviously his observations, no matter how disturbingly foreshadowing, were rebuffed, and he was kicked out of his college for his controversial views. He had marked himself by a challenge to the Capitol, and now he would distinguish himself with his stubbornness.

Before that, however, he met Joanna. Joanna was a neurobiologist at an institute in the north of District 6, working on how to influence brain patterns with tracker jacker venom. They hit it off almost immediately, as he was more charming in his earlier years, and she moved to the central city of District 6 to live with him, relishing the love that he could give her. Unfortunately, she had falsely anticipated his personality, and several years after their marriage, the relationship hit the rocks of disagreement. She wanted a child, but he would have none of it due to the probability of such a child being chosen for the games, especially as the Capitol may rig it against him as a message telling him never to question them again. The argument continued for many years until it came to a head on his 33rd birthday. Following an argument set off by the taste of the cake she had created for him, Joanna left Frederick, and he was left alone.

He realized that his career as a psychologist had been greatly burdened by the marriage, and in order to fill the emotional vacuum left by her leaving, he preoccupied himself with his work. He was more careful than he had before, and now he wrote papers that were strictly neutral about the Capitol affairs, but quite ground-breaking within the realm of psychology. In addition to challenging a number of relatively well-known theoroms, he proposed a number of new ones which allowed him to rise to the center stage of psychology. His previous black-listing was lifted, and within five years of his work, he was awarded the leadership of the Panem institute of Psychology, Sociology, and Brain Patterns, one of the larger psychological institutes in the area.

As leader of the institute, Dr. Arocratus proved himself to be an able competitor with more prestigious institutions in the Capitol. Most of his latter 30s dealt with challenging the natural supremacy of the Capitol’s institutions, a sort of payback for their rejection of his findings in regards to the hunger games. He fought tough and nail for funding of his institute, and finally managed to attract the attention of the government in the Capitol, for once. For the first time ever an institution in the sciences outside the Capitol was receiving more funding than one inside for a non-military purpose. With the financial bedrock provided to him, Dr. Arocratus went to work.

For over ten years, his main focus has been on The Great Experiment, an overarching look into the human mind and how it works using empirical evidence provided in several case studies. During this time, the Doctor became increasingly irritable, and one cannot complain against his obvious tiredness and stress, for he is contending with much greater forces not only for funding, but also to keep his job, and his life. The Capitol has realized his little game to manipulate for his own needs, and he needed to become more demanding and ruthless in order to achieve his Goals. It is a vicious cycle, but one that he must complete, for his own good, and perhaps for the good of all mankind. In this, at least, the Professor has good grounding for his goals. Now he has completed the preparations for the Great Experiment, he can finally use it as a psychological platform to perhaps unlock the greatest secrets of the mind, as has been his wish all along. The Capitol still poses a dangerous obstacle, but for now he can have respite.

And with his respite will come one of, if not the greatest psychological experiments that have ever been attempted in all of human history.

For 'The Great Experiment Plot' To be announced within the week or so.