The Institute

The Institute’s references to concentration camps reinforce its theme of dehumanization. Early on, Tim watches the trains in DuPray and thinks about people being loaded and unloaded—evoking the image of trains carrying prisoners to concentration camps. This connection is reflected in the novel’s cover art (2019), which shows Luke inside a train car made to look like his bedroom.

With its cruel and pointless medical experiments, the Institute feels like a concentration camp to Luke. The trackers in his and the other children’s ears remind him of the identification numbers tattooed on prisoners’ arms. The psychics processed through the Institute are weaponized until they die and are then incinerated, as were prisoners in many camps. When Stackhouse is looking for a way to kill Avery and company, he settles on the same chlorine gas employed by camps for mass murder.

Luke refers to Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island twice, using it as a point of comparison long before realizing its accuracy. Much like concentration camps, the island’s purpose is dehumanization. The boys on Pleasure Island are literally transformed into donkeys, while the Ward A children are left with no coherent thoughts or memories of themselves. All Institute children are slated to become beasts of burden, batteries to further fuel its machinations.

The very premise of the Institute is based on a lie—what Luke calls a bad equation that can only result in a wrong answer. The Institute’s founders originally believed that precognition (via psychic humans called precogs) could accurately predict causes of disaster—but rather than admit that this line of thinking is wrong, current leaders continue to reinforce the lie, persuading members that their work is saving the world.

Luke theorizes that the Institute’s leaders sustain the lie because they can’t bear the reality of having murdered thousands of children for nothing. In other words, they are operating under sunk cost fallacy: They invested too much resources to admit they are wrong. Luke may be correct, but it is just as likely that those in power are unwilling to relinquish their power. The same could be said of the Institute’s precogs, who apparently live lives of luxury (in contrast to the children in the novel) and have no reason to tell the truth.

In time, the lower-level staff members become true believers, aggressively defending the Institute’s lie as well. When Luke tells Dave, a relatively kinder employee who works in the tank room, that the Institute doesn’t know what it is doing, the man slaps Luke to the ground. Luke’s accusation challenges Dave’s buried fear of the children’s suffering being for nothing. The staff members believe the lie so fervently because they wish to protect themselves from the reality of their charges’ suffering. The Institute’s secretive nature hints at there being no escape for employees who wish to leave, so the lie may also help them tolerate their own entrapment.

The Institute uses lies to manipulate and control the children as well. Mrs. Sigsby and the lower-level staff members assure the children that they will eventually be sent home with all their memories of the Institute erased—a blatant lie that none of the children truly believe.