The Lord of the Flies: when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months | Hacker News Reader

The Lord of the Flies: when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

theguardian.com

96 pointstosh11 comments

> This story [school boys stranded on Island] never happened. An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 – his novel Lord of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more than 30 languages and hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century. In hindsight, the secret to the book’s success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?

> Media historians even credit [Golding] as being the unwitting originator of one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality TV. “I read and reread Lord of the Flies ,” divulged the creator of hit series Survivor in an interview.

Fascinating insights. Basically it's just a projection of our fears, but the consequences of this are far-reaching to this day.

Apparently a projection of Golding's feelings:

>I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.

Yes, but books become well-known because they describe the general undercurrent of a cultural mood in a certain era, what Carl Jung called the 'collective unconscious'. Many people identify with the writing of an author because it helps them put words to their thoughts and feelings.

Golding didn't become an alcoholic or become depressed in a vacuum, he was embedded in a social context. I don't believe humans are islands.

My interpretation of "The Lord of the Flies" didn't have anything to do with islands or shipwrecks. The purpose of the novel was to demonstrate the raw cruelty that teenagers in a group, such as the ones you or I went to high school with. The author was trying to show up what a stupid, cruel system we'd set up for ourselves and how senselessly mean we were to one another.

But by setting it on a shipwreck, the implied explanation for the cruelty is "teenagers are innately evil", rather than "the social arrangement we create with high school is evil" or "those who don't work hard at social skills will come to regret it".

People in the '60s believed a lot of false blank-slate claims about regular people being capable of evil behavior in the right situations, from Stanley Milgram to Kitty Genovese to Arendt's "banality of evil". None of those claims were true, and "Lord of the Flies" doesn't describe normal human social behavior either.

https://nypost.com/2014/02/16/book-reveals-real-story-behind...

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/10/13/social-psychology-textb...

https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-21/edition-1/quest...

Confusing the fact that some experiments were exposed as unrepresentative with the idea that their conclusions were false.

Not many replication crisis results have come out with "Oh, the headline experiment turned out to be unreplicable, but fortunately all the other ones derived from it were rock solid and it was just a quirk." In many cases those experiments are the only underpinning for their conclusions, because ethics boards won't let us try them any more.

> "People in the '60s believed a lot of false blank-slate claims about regular people being capable of evil behavior in the right situations"

Were the atrocities perpetrated by Germany and Japan on civilians in WWII not done by regular people?

Not according to my third link:

> Even in the most brutal of circumstances, people did not have to kill and only some chose to do so. So, far from simply ‘finding themselves’ in inhumane situations or inhumane groups, the murderers actively committed themselves to such groups. They actively created inhumane situations and placed themselves at their epicentre. This was true even of concentration camp regimes:

> > Individuals demonstrated commitment by acting, on their own initiative, with greater brutality than their orders called for. Thus excess did not spring from mechanical obedience. On the contrary; its matrix was a group structure where it was expected that members exceed the limits of normal violence. (Sofsky, 1993, p.228)

> In short, the true horror of Eichmann and his like is not that their actions were blind. On the contrary, it is that they saw clearly what they did, and believed it to be the right thing to do.

Would the same apply to the Imperial Japanese Army in the Nanjing incident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Massacre) or across the rest of Asia? The IJA's acts was so widespread across its conquered territories that it's unlikely that the same reasoning can be applied to them; the total death toll caused by them was nearly triple that of the Holocaust and was not neatly confined to being perpetrated by the staff of concentration camps.

Eloquently put, yes I agree, and I’m sure that’s why the book was (is?) on syllabuses for such a long duration.

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