AN ENDANGERED SPECIES (WIZARDING WORLD) WIZARDING SOCIETY & 'DARK LORD' VOLDEMORT

The most noticeably difference in wizarding society is that everyone over the age of 17 is legally armed. This means that there is a completely different power dynamic between the powers-that-be and the common populace. The pragmatic reason why modern muggle governments can retain power is because they control quantitatively and qualitatively superior firepower compared with the population as whole. Fear of force is often the well-disguised motivation that keeps societies civilised. When large sections of the population become well-armed enough to challenge the government controlled military or paramilitary organisations: civil war and anarchy inevitably breaks out.

The Ministry of Magic is not the equivalent of the British government. It does not have a superiorly equipped military and the populace it nominally controls is sometimes better armed and less constrained than the Ministry itself. The reason the Ministry of Magic exists and does manage to exert some control over the wizarding population is due to an external source of fear: fear of being discovered by the muggle world.

The wizarding world has effectively lived under a state of emergency ever since total wizarding seclusion was introduced in the 17th century. In fact the Ministry of Magic’s main purpose is not to govern the wizarding Britain, so much as to prevent anarchy and the exposure of magic because wizarding society is always tittering on the edge of civil war.

If we must draw paralells to our own world: Wizarding Britain is not unlike the late middle ages where a comparatively large proportion of the population was well armed enough for local feudal lords to raise their own armies and personally control these armies. This leads to civil war as demonstrated by the Wars of the Roses.

The only real way to exert some control over the situation is to “disarm” the population through education (or lack of education). This is why the Ministry has a very keen interest in trying to prevent the teaching of aggressive or defensive magic like DADA or duelling because it in effect makes the populace better armed against the ministry.

The Ministry takes its mandate of preventing anarchy very serious. It metes out swift and brutal punishment dispensed to all who are deemed “guilty” regardless of the severity of their crime. Take Hagrid’s imprisonment in Chamber of Secrets for example. He was locked away in Azkaban for possibly being linked to the opening of the Chamber of Secrets because he was blamed for it the first time around. Stan Shunpike was imprisoned for claiming to know inside information about Death Eaters, when he was notorious for saying ridiculous things. The galling thing is that their punishment is exactly the same as that meted out to people who have actually committed grievous crimes.

This is not a society that values justice, or even the individual lives of the populace. This is a society imprisoned by its own fear of exposure and will use any means necessary to prevent this from happening.

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The wizarding world is a society plagued by both disease and war.

What makes the wizarding world so prone to violent uprisings?

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In modern developed societies: non-accidental death in civilians is the lowest it has ever been in human history because modern developed societies are inherently much more stable than the wizarding world and have stronger, better organized central governments.

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Unfortunately, Voldemort isn't anything like his predecessors: fear, chaos and death were an ends in themselves for him. He had no qualms about targeting the “untouchable” pureblood “nobility” who didn’t join him, which is why Sirius’ father put so much effort into fortifying 12 Grimmauld Place. The wizarding world did not understand Voldemort's motives, and the seemingly indiscriminate acts of terror are what made Voldemort the most feared Dark Lord in a century.

PUREBLOOD SUPREMACY In order to understand pureblood supremacy and the reason behind this ideology, we have to explore its history.

Although Rowling doesn’t give us a detailed history of Magic, there is one particular seismic event in wizarding history that changed both the muggle and magical world. I am referring to wizarding seclusion in the 17th century. Where once wizard and muggle lived side by side and functioned together as part of one society, seclusion imposed a compulsory cultural ghetto for wizards.

Before cultural ghettoization, mixed marriage between wizards and muggles must have been common. Being a wizard/witch was not seen as a defining characteristic but rather a useful individual talent (like having a good singing voice). With the active participation of wizards in muggle society, prejudice against muggles would not have gain widespread favour simply because the familial and economic ties between wizards and muggles were so strong.

The Act of wizarding seclusion not only forcibly severed these ties; it also directly made muggles and muggleborns a very rational threat to the newly formed Magical society. Muggles have always outnumbered wizards and we can see from the paranoia displayed in the books that wizarding society has always maintained a siege mentality. In this context the prejudiced rhetoric of muggles being lower than dirt starts to sound less like supremacy and more like poorly disguised fear.

There is no question that seclusion provided the impetus for the pureblood supremacy movement to become accepted ideology in a significant part of the wizarding world. The pureblood supremacy movement which advocate shaving as little contact with muggles (and by extension muggleborns) as possible is both rational and pragmatic for the post-seclusion wizarding world.

But where did the original ideas behind pureblood supremacy come from?

Why do purebloods think that they are superior to muggleborns even though they both have magic?

The most likely answer is in magical genetics.

This does not make Muggleborns any less magically powerful, but it does mean that when two Muggleborns have children - statistically nearly half of the offspring will turn out to be non-magical.

In contrast to muggleborns, pureblood wizards in the modern day are more likely to have double sets of magical alleles due to their generations of magical ancestors. Thus there must be many purebloods with the genetic combination AABB. If both parents have AABB – there is no chance that they can produce a squib.

Besides even if an enterprising muggle-born wanted to introduce modern muggle medicine, they would meet the resistance of the wizarding establishment. Most wizards, tacitly or otherwise, consider themselves to be superior to muggles. Accepting that muggle medicine can solve problems that magic cannot would be an impossible pill to swallow.

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