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