I always thought there weren't enough boys in Lord of the Flies for the social dynamics, but still it is supposed to be more than 6, enough to break into two groups of the size in this example..
You're implying Golding based it on experience on how unsupervised children really behave, but in fact he made it all up. Now (well, 60 years ago) that he has been debunked, we should accept the evidence, not invent arbitrary reasons why it doesn't apply. Especially since the boys in question were "Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa."
You're implying Golding based it on experience on how unsupervised children really behave, but in fact he made it all up.
William Golding was my father's English teacher at school (prior to publication of Lord of the Flies). According to my father, when people talked to Golding at the time, it wasn't based on real children but it definitely was based on what he believed children would be capable of.
Well, the Tongan boys provide the only empirical data on how unsupervised children behave on a desert island.
Everything else written about the idea is speculation, from The Coral Island to The CHildren's Island to Lord of the Flies.
But Golding did observe behavior in a boarding school, and while the Tongan boys did also go to boarding school, they also were being raised in Tongan culture, and that culture, including its behavioral norms, was what helped them survive on a desert island.
Strange how proving the book utterly false has not dimmed its literary reputation even a little, nor caused a resurgence of the "unrealistic" Coral Island that Golding set out to disprove and displace [1]. In fact being proven false has not been acknowledged at all by the literary world, which show how much respect that world deserves.
[1] Golding thought that the book was unrealistic and asked his wife whether it would be a good idea if he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies#Background
It’s famous for being an allegory isn’t it? Isn’t this like saying Animal Farm remains popular even though we’ve proven that animals don’t actually self organize like in the book?
Partly. But again, in the author's own words, he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave". Even his motivation was that Coral Island was "unrealistic". You'd think that would earn the book at least a little asterisk. Meanwhile Animal Farm is obviously intended to be allegorical by using animals as protagonists.
While I disagree, one could argue that Lord of the Flies deserves to be so highly regarded despite being so wrong about children. But can one really argue that, when a highly regarded and extremely well known work, that is ostensibly about children, gets shown to be completely factually wrong on children, the appropriate amount of self-reflection for the literary world, that had heaped (and continues to heap) so much praise on it, is zero?
> gets shown to be completely factually wrong on children
I'm not sure I understand this. Who/what has shown Golding's classic novel to be "completely factually wrong"? How did you establish this? Is there a reference you could steer me towards?
I'd really be interested in exploring the background of where this idea comes from-- my curiosity piqued: Is Lord Of The Flies a misrepresentation of childhood savagery? Is there no such thing? What is it that you are contending here, and where did you get this idea?
Animal Farm is more like a thin metaphor over actual events. Most of the animals in it can be mapped to historical figures or groups of people from the 1917 revolution.
Lord of the Flies is "philosophical fiction" that is trying to make a point about human nature. That point has been shown to be overly pessimistic.
If you're suggesting that humans can't be that terrible, I recommend that you do not open this link (It is a link to a BBC article but I feel compelled to give a trigger warning since it is genuinely that disturbing): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45942652 History is rife with similar examples; those who still believe there is any inherent goodness in human nature should acquaint themselves with them.
Golding is right on the money. Humans are merely animals and will behave no better than animals given the right circumstances.
No, he's suggesting that children usually aren't that terrible. That a real scenario of ~50 unsupervised children (or adults), 99 out of 100 times, wouldn't play out that way. That something is possible does not mean it is the norm, and only those that can't grasp numbers (such as English majors) think otherwise. With such significant caveats, can one really say that the novel is about human nature in general?
You are pulling equally fictitious numbers out of your hat to defend your comfortable worldview, without even the benefit of extensive exposure to children as a schoolmaster, so how is your argument on any better level than Golding's?
> You are pulling equally fictitious numbers out of your hat
Am I? Ignoring the natural experiment the Guardian article retells, how often do self-supervised human societies descend into savagery or war among themselves? How often when they are smaller than 100 members (Lord of Flies is about a group of 50)?
Even without the <100 member criterion, only the most violent outliers of human societies reach a 1% yearly violent death rate [1]. So my "fictitious numbers out of my hat to defend my comfortable worldview" are actually the worst humanity is capable of (the average for the 20th century, with all the world wars, was 0.06%). Yet I'm not getting a Nobel prize despite being closer to the truth. I guess that's why he got it in literature, not a scientific field.
I first read this book when I was about the same age as the main characters. I saw the movie not long after that. I was deeply moved (disturbed) by the drama and the outcome of the fictional story. Even though the story did not arrive at a happy ending where a hero emerges both victorious and virtuous, even though the negative outcomes (for characters I cared about) were personally distressing to me, my main takeaway was a new sense of a harsh reality, a terrible truth that was being presented to me, which accurately reflected my actual contemporaneous experiences in the real world, in my life.
True story: when I was nine years old, I was sent, for the first time in my life, to a place known in the midwest US as "summer camp". Most of the other kids there were older than me. I learned that canoes are very hard to get into. I learned that ponds had horseflies and mosquitoes and leeches. I learned that once I'd climbed the tower of the high-dive my legs would turn to jelly and I would struggle to make it to the end and jump off anyway.
In a weird twist from home, someone had stashed into my suitcase a large can of spray deodorant. I was only nine; did I stink already? I had no idea why I had it, but it was a great toy that I put to use immediately. Run up to a boy, spray some deodorant into their face, run away, cackling.
I delighted in this trick often enough that I soon had an angry mob chasing me-- up and down the trails of the camp, many older boys clamoring for my scalp, revenge. Eventually, I ran out of road and was cornered, as a significant crowd formed an intimidating semi-circle around me, closing in.
Kids were still cursing me as they rubbed sting from their eyes. The atmosphere was ugly. It got quiet. I'd really messed up. I felt fear, real like the highdive.
Just when I thought I'd had it, one boy stepped forward and turned and faced the crowd: he actually held out a hand like a traffic cop. To this day, I don't know what compelled him to put himself between me and all those older, bigger boys. He wasn't that much older than me. But he talked them down, got them to let go of their justified displeasure with me. One of the older boys snatched the can of deodorant out of my hand. A lot of fingers were wagged in my face. But nobody hurt me. Nobody stuck me with a stick like a pig.
I never saw the hero again. I've never used deodorant since.
We are exposed to a lot of fairy tales when we are young. Some of them are Grimm, but many are illusory misrepresentations of a fantasy world that the adults in our lives wish they could provide for us.
Buried beneath the surface is the always unspoken reality, which often entails a trail through a wilderness to a gingerbread house on a gumdrop mountain where a witch is waiting to boil us alive.
Lord Of The Flies is grim but true. On the playground, in small groups, when the adults are absent, children become a hierarchy of peer pressure and social eruptions, like spots on the face of a Head Boy at whatever English prep school. The savagery is there, the power struggles, the bully and the rebel, the shrinking violets and the blooming idiots, they're all real, and they often have a life-long after-affect on the lives of those who came together, on that day, when that happened.
> Lord of the Flies is "philosophical fiction" that is trying to make a point about human nature. That point has been shown to be overly pessimistic.
I don't know who you cite as an authority here-- has been shown to be? By whom? 'Overly pessimistic' in situ, I await illumination...
I don't see Lord Of The Flies as overly pessimistic. I think it is a masterpiece of literature, providing insightful and frightful expressive splashes of sound, fury and color; allegorical visions of what childhood really is like for modern and post-modern Western civilization. Highly recommended.
I think you're misconstruing the point of Lord of the Flies. It is not a children's book, and most of it's commentary can be generalized to adults. We see the exact same outcome in the highest echelons of politics, business and academia alike.
> In fact being proven false has not been acknowledged at all by the literary world
You are aware that the book is a novel right? That means it's pretty much all made up. Sometimes novels pull from reality (real people, places, events, etc.), but they are always made up (fictional) stories. So of course it's been proven false, it never happened because it was fiction.
Did you also know that there was never a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man attack on NYC? Shocking!
Worse still, the war also revealed an alarming side of his own character – a ‘viciousness’ and ‘cruelty’ of which he had, until then, been only dimly aware. He realised that, beneath the veneer of middle-class civility, he had the same instincts as the Nazis. And it wouldn’t take much for them to break the surface, either.
I once heard a talk by someone involved in microfinance/impact investing in poor countries. Through her work she met many people at all levels of government in the places she worked.
One thing that stuck with me was her comment that while everyone is capable of greatness and kindness, they also have the capability of becoming a "monster."
She cited the experience of one of her Rwandan contacts, who later became the Minister of Justice and was one of the senior government officials responsible for driving the genocide of hundreds of thousands of members of the Tutsi minority in the mid-1990s.
As I get older, I'm realizing that there's no such thing as 'human nature.' It's a broad spectrum. My view is that poor and average people are alright but as you get closer to power, people become increasingly corrupt and evil. Relationships become more calculated and transactional to the point that they become unpleasant; though apparently some people either don't feel this effect or maybe their hunger for power is so strong that it overrides those feelings... Or maybe it's a bit of both. In any case, by the time you get really close to power, all moderately normal people have been filtered out; both voluntarily and also because non-psychopaths generally struggle to fit in.
The psychopaths in power want to remove the moral element because it makes things unpredictable for them. They prefer everything to be kept stable and under control through blackmail and other forms of coercive leverage.
Something else I've found is that, as you get closer to power, people become much 'nicer' (superficially) but they are definitely more evil in reality if you look at their actions. It's like they make up for their evil deeds by being extra nice to people in person. Nowadays, when I meet people who are too friendly with their words, I immediately feel skeptical; I don't trust them.
> "My view is that poor and average people are alright..."
My preferred counterexample is the actions of soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army invading various Asian countries in the years leading up to WW2 and during it, perfectly ordinary people conscripted to the military behaving in absolutely savage ways to a civilian population. There is a reason the Japanese are still despised by their neighbors, though it has become more muted over the years. It is also a large enough sample (~4 million in occupied territories from a casual search) that it cannot be handwaved away as being some kind of isolated aberration.
I wrote this just a few days ago here and it applies here too nicely:
"Pre-conventional level is the narcissist me-me-me level, that seems to dominate the geopolitics and tech.
Conventional is most of us as the sheep. This level follows the loudest crowd that right now is the pre-conventional.
Post-conventional is the few that can do standalone thinking and morals.
Most conventionals can though understand the difference between and also the outcome we're headed to with the pre-conventional human gods, but we need to build the normalcy for the post-conventional ones together and make it structural.
My hunch is that first step could be to start the discussion on what is excessive on personal level. Consumption, wealth, political power.
Something like Mamdani or Polanski have showed, only more blunt. The majority of people are waking up that the current trajectory means the end of the world and extinction after the short period of accelerationist-dystopian hellscape."
It’s interesting to compare Lord of the Flies with a real life example of children being marooned on an island: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
I always thought there weren't enough boys in Lord of the Flies for the social dynamics, but still it is supposed to be more than 6, enough to break into two groups of the size in this example..
Who could have guessed that growing up in a Polynesian culture is a better preparation for such a thing than going to an English boarding school..
You're implying Golding based it on experience on how unsupervised children really behave, but in fact he made it all up. Now (well, 60 years ago) that he has been debunked, we should accept the evidence, not invent arbitrary reasons why it doesn't apply. Especially since the boys in question were "Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa."
You're implying Golding based it on experience on how unsupervised children really behave, but in fact he made it all up.
William Golding was my father's English teacher at school (prior to publication of Lord of the Flies). According to my father, when people talked to Golding at the time, it wasn't based on real children but it definitely was based on what he believed children would be capable of.
> [...] but it definitely was based on what he believed children would be capable of.
Also Known As "[...] but in fact he made it all up."
Well, the Tongan boys provide the only empirical data on how unsupervised children behave on a desert island.
Everything else written about the idea is speculation, from The Coral Island to The CHildren's Island to Lord of the Flies.
But Golding did observe behavior in a boarding school, and while the Tongan boys did also go to boarding school, they also were being raised in Tongan culture, and that culture, including its behavioral norms, was what helped them survive on a desert island.
Strange how proving the book utterly false has not dimmed its literary reputation even a little, nor caused a resurgence of the "unrealistic" Coral Island that Golding set out to disprove and displace [1]. In fact being proven false has not been acknowledged at all by the literary world, which show how much respect that world deserves.
[1] Golding thought that the book was unrealistic and asked his wife whether it would be a good idea if he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies#Background
It’s famous for being an allegory isn’t it? Isn’t this like saying Animal Farm remains popular even though we’ve proven that animals don’t actually self organize like in the book?
Partly. But again, in the author's own words, he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave". Even his motivation was that Coral Island was "unrealistic". You'd think that would earn the book at least a little asterisk. Meanwhile Animal Farm is obviously intended to be allegorical by using animals as protagonists.
While I disagree, one could argue that Lord of the Flies deserves to be so highly regarded despite being so wrong about children. But can one really argue that, when a highly regarded and extremely well known work, that is ostensibly about children, gets shown to be completely factually wrong on children, the appropriate amount of self-reflection for the literary world, that had heaped (and continues to heap) so much praise on it, is zero?
> gets shown to be completely factually wrong on children
I'm not sure I understand this. Who/what has shown Golding's classic novel to be "completely factually wrong"? How did you establish this? Is there a reference you could steer me towards?
I'd really be interested in exploring the background of where this idea comes from-- my curiosity piqued: Is Lord Of The Flies a misrepresentation of childhood savagery? Is there no such thing? What is it that you are contending here, and where did you get this idea?
TIA!
Animal Farm is more like a thin metaphor over actual events. Most of the animals in it can be mapped to historical figures or groups of people from the 1917 revolution.
Lord of the Flies is "philosophical fiction" that is trying to make a point about human nature. That point has been shown to be overly pessimistic.
If you're suggesting that humans can't be that terrible, I recommend that you do not open this link (It is a link to a BBC article but I feel compelled to give a trigger warning since it is genuinely that disturbing): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45942652 History is rife with similar examples; those who still believe there is any inherent goodness in human nature should acquaint themselves with them.
Golding is right on the money. Humans are merely animals and will behave no better than animals given the right circumstances.
> suggesting that humans can't be that terrible
No, he's suggesting that children usually aren't that terrible. That a real scenario of ~50 unsupervised children (or adults), 99 out of 100 times, wouldn't play out that way. That something is possible does not mean it is the norm, and only those that can't grasp numbers (such as English majors) think otherwise. With such significant caveats, can one really say that the novel is about human nature in general?
You are pulling equally fictitious numbers out of your hat to defend your comfortable worldview, without even the benefit of extensive exposure to children as a schoolmaster, so how is your argument on any better level than Golding's?
> You are pulling equally fictitious numbers out of your hat
Am I? Ignoring the natural experiment the Guardian article retells, how often do self-supervised human societies descend into savagery or war among themselves? How often when they are smaller than 100 members (Lord of Flies is about a group of 50)?
Even without the <100 member criterion, only the most violent outliers of human societies reach a 1% yearly violent death rate [1]. So my "fictitious numbers out of my hat to defend my comfortable worldview" are actually the worst humanity is capable of (the average for the 20th century, with all the world wars, was 0.06%). Yet I'm not getting a Nobel prize despite being closer to the truth. I guess that's why he got it in literature, not a scientific field.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...
I first read this book when I was about the same age as the main characters. I saw the movie not long after that. I was deeply moved (disturbed) by the drama and the outcome of the fictional story. Even though the story did not arrive at a happy ending where a hero emerges both victorious and virtuous, even though the negative outcomes (for characters I cared about) were personally distressing to me, my main takeaway was a new sense of a harsh reality, a terrible truth that was being presented to me, which accurately reflected my actual contemporaneous experiences in the real world, in my life.
True story: when I was nine years old, I was sent, for the first time in my life, to a place known in the midwest US as "summer camp". Most of the other kids there were older than me. I learned that canoes are very hard to get into. I learned that ponds had horseflies and mosquitoes and leeches. I learned that once I'd climbed the tower of the high-dive my legs would turn to jelly and I would struggle to make it to the end and jump off anyway.
In a weird twist from home, someone had stashed into my suitcase a large can of spray deodorant. I was only nine; did I stink already? I had no idea why I had it, but it was a great toy that I put to use immediately. Run up to a boy, spray some deodorant into their face, run away, cackling.
I delighted in this trick often enough that I soon had an angry mob chasing me-- up and down the trails of the camp, many older boys clamoring for my scalp, revenge. Eventually, I ran out of road and was cornered, as a significant crowd formed an intimidating semi-circle around me, closing in.
Kids were still cursing me as they rubbed sting from their eyes. The atmosphere was ugly. It got quiet. I'd really messed up. I felt fear, real like the highdive.
Just when I thought I'd had it, one boy stepped forward and turned and faced the crowd: he actually held out a hand like a traffic cop. To this day, I don't know what compelled him to put himself between me and all those older, bigger boys. He wasn't that much older than me. But he talked them down, got them to let go of their justified displeasure with me. One of the older boys snatched the can of deodorant out of my hand. A lot of fingers were wagged in my face. But nobody hurt me. Nobody stuck me with a stick like a pig.
I never saw the hero again. I've never used deodorant since.
We are exposed to a lot of fairy tales when we are young. Some of them are Grimm, but many are illusory misrepresentations of a fantasy world that the adults in our lives wish they could provide for us.
Buried beneath the surface is the always unspoken reality, which often entails a trail through a wilderness to a gingerbread house on a gumdrop mountain where a witch is waiting to boil us alive.
Lord Of The Flies is grim but true. On the playground, in small groups, when the adults are absent, children become a hierarchy of peer pressure and social eruptions, like spots on the face of a Head Boy at whatever English prep school. The savagery is there, the power struggles, the bully and the rebel, the shrinking violets and the blooming idiots, they're all real, and they often have a life-long after-affect on the lives of those who came together, on that day, when that happened.
> Lord of the Flies is "philosophical fiction" that is trying to make a point about human nature. That point has been shown to be overly pessimistic.
I don't know who you cite as an authority here-- has been shown to be? By whom? 'Overly pessimistic' in situ, I await illumination...
I don't see Lord Of The Flies as overly pessimistic. I think it is a masterpiece of literature, providing insightful and frightful expressive splashes of sound, fury and color; allegorical visions of what childhood really is like for modern and post-modern Western civilization. Highly recommended.
> A lot of fingers were wagged in my face. But nobody hurt me. Nobody stuck me with a stick like a pig.
Never got into a fight as a kid? All that would have happened is you would have gotten punched a few times.
The crazy part is that just looking at how people behave on Reddit and HN, I could easily see adults with the same outcome as Lord of the Flies.
It also could be that children are mostly posting, however (since there is no age verification, it's hard to tell these days).
I think you're misconstruing the point of Lord of the Flies. It is not a children's book, and most of it's commentary can be generalized to adults. We see the exact same outcome in the highest echelons of politics, business and academia alike.
> In fact being proven false has not been acknowledged at all by the literary world
You are aware that the book is a novel right? That means it's pretty much all made up. Sometimes novels pull from reality (real people, places, events, etc.), but they are always made up (fictional) stories. So of course it's been proven false, it never happened because it was fiction.
Did you also know that there was never a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man attack on NYC? Shocking!
A fictional novel purporting to shed light on real human nature. In that respect it has been shown to be, at a minimum, significantly mistaken.
> “Proving the book false”
It’s a novel, it has nothing to prove. It’s a deeply philosophical book.
The Inheritors by William Golding is the novel that lodged itself in my subconscious more deeply than any other book.
It fostered a curiosity in me about the nature of humanity, and a lingering awareness that history is written by the survivors.
Innocence is often extinguished not by evil intent, but by efficiency.
Worse still, the war also revealed an alarming side of his own character – a ‘viciousness’ and ‘cruelty’ of which he had, until then, been only dimly aware. He realised that, beneath the veneer of middle-class civility, he had the same instincts as the Nazis. And it wouldn’t take much for them to break the surface, either.
I once heard a talk by someone involved in microfinance/impact investing in poor countries. Through her work she met many people at all levels of government in the places she worked.
One thing that stuck with me was her comment that while everyone is capable of greatness and kindness, they also have the capability of becoming a "monster."
She cited the experience of one of her Rwandan contacts, who later became the Minister of Justice and was one of the senior government officials responsible for driving the genocide of hundreds of thousands of members of the Tutsi minority in the mid-1990s.
https://humanrights.ca/story/what-led-genocide-against-tutsi...
[flagged]
As I get older, I'm realizing that there's no such thing as 'human nature.' It's a broad spectrum. My view is that poor and average people are alright but as you get closer to power, people become increasingly corrupt and evil. Relationships become more calculated and transactional to the point that they become unpleasant; though apparently some people either don't feel this effect or maybe their hunger for power is so strong that it overrides those feelings... Or maybe it's a bit of both. In any case, by the time you get really close to power, all moderately normal people have been filtered out; both voluntarily and also because non-psychopaths generally struggle to fit in.
The psychopaths in power want to remove the moral element because it makes things unpredictable for them. They prefer everything to be kept stable and under control through blackmail and other forms of coercive leverage.
Something else I've found is that, as you get closer to power, people become much 'nicer' (superficially) but they are definitely more evil in reality if you look at their actions. It's like they make up for their evil deeds by being extra nice to people in person. Nowadays, when I meet people who are too friendly with their words, I immediately feel skeptical; I don't trust them.
> "My view is that poor and average people are alright..."
My preferred counterexample is the actions of soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army invading various Asian countries in the years leading up to WW2 and during it, perfectly ordinary people conscripted to the military behaving in absolutely savage ways to a civilian population. There is a reason the Japanese are still despised by their neighbors, though it has become more muted over the years. It is also a large enough sample (~4 million in occupied territories from a casual search) that it cannot be handwaved away as being some kind of isolated aberration.
Spectrum of moral development mostly IMO.
I wrote this just a few days ago here and it applies here too nicely:
"Pre-conventional level is the narcissist me-me-me level, that seems to dominate the geopolitics and tech.
Conventional is most of us as the sheep. This level follows the loudest crowd that right now is the pre-conventional.
Post-conventional is the few that can do standalone thinking and morals.
Most conventionals can though understand the difference between and also the outcome we're headed to with the pre-conventional human gods, but we need to build the normalcy for the post-conventional ones together and make it structural.
My hunch is that first step could be to start the discussion on what is excessive on personal level. Consumption, wealth, political power.
Something like Mamdani or Polanski have showed, only more blunt. The majority of people are waking up that the current trajectory means the end of the world and extinction after the short period of accelerationist-dystopian hellscape."