When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
My review of Christakis' book, in case you're curious: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2851365787
The fact that it's a coin flip is the key aspect of the message Golding wanted to impart. It's chilling, and unsurprising, that reality bears it out.
At any rate there were quite a few more kids than 6 in the book, so pointing at this incident and saying 'see, it would work out' is just silly.
The way the conversations I've had tend to go is ever more contrived scenarios. Eventually it gets to spaceships carrying sperm and eggs to be raised cultureless by robots. You need to avoid scenarios like these, where the boys know about raising chickens, praying and stuff. lol As if a parentless, cultureless person is more human than the rest of us... more indicative of "true" human nature.
Once we set to answering a question, it seems very hard to question the question.
In reality villages will be built, laws written and religions made up.
Villages appear long before defensive fortifications in the record, in many cases. Pure reason is not very good at forming predictive theories about history, as a general rule.
There are many possible reasons for villages, and cultural reasons are a very big determinant of how people live. So are economic reasons. Many of us live in big cities now, and it's generally less safe.
Foraging sucks less than subsistence farming. However farmers are able to put a lot more people into given land area and so farming villages won out.
A village has a lot of land to defend and not many people to do it. The local town or city sized group will just pitch up with many more men and overrun you. All whilst having enough people left for defence. And they are likely to have more access to heavy weapons that can blow your house up from a distance.
Look at human history: lots of villages and religions, also lots of raping and pillaging.
Philosophy of this period (also Locke, Marx, etc) tended to speculate about the past using reason, rather than empirically. A lot of their ideas have been passed down to us.
Hobbes' saw life in the "natural" state "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." Eventually government arises, using its monopoly of violence to end day-to-day violence, cheating and such.
I don't think the original writers are compelling anymore, but they are hard to shake entirely. Memes die hard.
In any case, I think the reality of people at all times is that cooperation is a fundamental. There are no societies without cooperation, some form of solidarity, love, etc. We could have never survived without it. Violence is also common in history, but we don't need it to survive. We also know that primates, dogs and other creatures have demonstrably empathetic behaviours, a sense of fairness and such.
As I implied at the start, I think the mistake is literal fundamentalism. Human behaviour can't be logically derived from a fundamental nature.
That always seemed out of whack for me. If you change the environment, the individual changes too.
That's just a different individual, calling it more "true" or "pure" seems like asking "how much is 1 + apple?" (where Apple is an actual apple, not a variable).
The whole premise is fundamentally wrong. How I am right now is not false nor unnatural.
Exactly. There have never been culturaless, parentless people. If there were/are, then that is simply a terrible circumstance and terrible results will probably occur.
I recommend "Raised by Wolves".
The best evidence to me is how those "lost in woods, found years later" kids have developed: mostly mimicking other animals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child). It's even hard to change that later on.
[0] https://singalmindedconvos.fireside.fm/7 I use the RSS feed but that's the link to the exact episode
High effort reviews are common on Goodreads, why? Because it's a community about passionate readers and probably those who write the very detailed reviews have enjoyed reading some other reviews and want to contribute back to the community. I think it's the same reason as people contributes to wikipedia: for the sake of sharing knowledge
It is an odd question on the internet where people regularly and normally put a lot of effort into reviews, blog posts, discussion forums comments and so on.
That coupled with question about affiliation probably makes people interpret is as not questions out of curiosity, but rather as sleazy way to introduce doubt on the author motivation.
My immediate reaction to your post was that maybe we could learn something about what causes societies to collapse, and learn something?
Interesting overview
There's a lot of details in the details, though, you might want to read the whole thing! :)
That didn't age well.
So, it's sort of a best case scenario of 'a group of boys forming a society on a deserted island'.
EDIT: Another commenter posted an audio interview with one of the survivors, highly recommended: https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018746636
But to be fair, six Tongan boys were probably far hardier and well equipped than the typical British schoolboy of that time would have been. It seems they thought nothing of stealing a fishing boat and heading to sea, and they most likely had abundant life skills already - they basically relocated from life on one pacific island to another.
So a great story but I don't know how much can be extrapolated from it about human behaviour in general.
Given that this really happened, a lot.
Lord of the Flies came out of the fantasy of an English superintendent. Yet, it has permeated our culture as a cautionary tale about human behavior. It is 100% fiction.
I’d like to recommend Humankind by Rutger Bregman - a wonderful book dismantling the toxic narratives we have about ourselves.
This is not to say that our negativity is justified! Only that Bregman seems to have as persistent a bias to positivity as other writers have to negativity.
[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-human...
Usually I'm all for doing exactly that, but this book is not about hard scientific proof for some fancy new theory. It's about an idea, the idea that humans are good by default. To be taken seriously as an idea, it only needs as much proof as the idea it's rejecting, which is that humans are a razor thin layer of civility over evil, savage animals.
It's about debunking that as much as it is about proposing an alternative. I think Bregman is perfectly happy to leave the hard science for the scientists. If readers agree that his idea is at least as plausible as the one he's up against, he's done pretty well. And to my reading, even this review agrees with that.
Your forgetting about culture shock. White boys who know nothing of hunting and gathering aren't going to fare well compared to Tongan boys who studied the school or hard knocks first hand. It's like dropping a black bear in the Arctic and guffawing that it can't adapt like the polar bear! They're not equipped for the situation appropriately.
People are trusting. We know this. People want to work together. People want to survive. The simple fact that we are here today is evidence of that. Hunter gatherers, trusting an outsider showing them dropping seeds in the group produces crops. And now we have iPhones. All because baseline humans are "selfishly selfless." We learned that delaying gratification of the Id can provide greater rewards. That's why we aren't still animals fighting over berries with grizzley bears...
That is an amazing amount of assumption to draw out of the simple fact that they were Tongan.
They weren't run by man children.
My parents lost members of their families to genocide. The people who planned it were not stupid. Ruthless yes, calculating and callous and cruel yes. But not stupid, and it's both amusing and highly frustrating to see people who've mostly never had to confront these things pretend that it's just the work of "man-children" (because gods forbid that we contend with the idea that the intellectualism and intelligence we place on pedestals might ever be morally bankrupt).
It's interesting though that you are nitpicking about "distasteful" vs "morally abhorrent" (and will probably do the same about "unpleasant") while calling my point pedantry.
I'm comfortable describing the reasons for the Great War as "dumb". Your mileage may vary.
Any piece of fiction should be considered on its own for whether its characters are plausible and consistent.
But it's the exception not the norm in human behaviour.
Remove all of this.. what happens.. humans will eventually go back to primal instincts
Humans are social creatures, but not social with the entire world.
The modern view is that most likely hunter-gatherer societies, which didn't have fixed lands and had no general reason to be territorial, had little warfare. It is only with agricultural societies, where competition for land becomes a factor, that we start finding evidence of warfare, as far as I understand.
What's interesting it's that researchers that lived with the Yanomami and other Amazonian peoples noted that most inter tribal conflicts weren't about competition for food sources-that was rather plenty- but instead for women. In polygamous societies, high status males acquired many wives and young males frequently kidnapped neighboring tribe's women which sparked constant retaliatory raids.
One would think that a schoolmaster would have excellent insight into the behavior of children and young adults.
In any case, a quick look at the commonness of bullying (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicides_that_have_bee...) should quickly persuade anyone that Lord of the Flies, despite being fiction, is not all that unrealistic.
I mean, we're here aren't we? We are alive, because of the will, intellect, and energy of those who came before us. Survival is essential to living things, so why expect that humans will degenerate to their worst in the absence of civilization rather than come together and make the best of it?
I believe “human ingenuity and spirit” is not add odds with “our worst”.
Our most ingenious/sophisticated technology often works for its human wielder against their fellow humans.
Picture you're on a beach, and behind you is a shirtless man with a machete. How you feel is completely dependent on where you are in the world. In LA, you'd run for cover. In south east Asia, it's Tuesday.
I learned a lot from my travels, to back the adage about traveling and learning. I remember being in a small fishing village and someone caught a large fish. I don't even remember what it was now, but the fisherman was so excited to catch this big valuable fish he shared it with everyone, even me the foreigner he'd never see again. Made me think about how selfish we as Americans can be. We already have a good life, and still look for ways to get ahead of everyone else. Yet a person with nothing is happy to share what little they'd found.
Story aside, I agree that the experience would vary wildly by country, or at least upbringing.
I mean even though we consume the same media, I still strongly dislike many aspects of American culture.
The fact of the matter is that Nazism, WWII and the holocaust did happen and many people in 1954 was looking for some kind of explanation and understanding of how Europe could descend into barbarianism. Whether the book is insightful in its association between totalitarianism and tribalism and primitive religion is a different question.
The story is a "rebuttal" in the same way that it would be a rebuttal to Animal Farm to prove that pigs are not actually able to learn to walk on two legs.
Yet, the other thing is that boarding schools are notorious for bullying problem. And English boarding schools have ... particular history where older boys were allowed to beat younger boys. If we insist on making it real, that someone in charge of such school writes a book like this says less about general humanity. It says more about about how that institution was run and how he thinks they shaped the boys in their care.
And the oldest was 16, almost an adult and easily far past the age children are often taught to sail in the UK even today.
A year younger than when their rescuer originally ran away to sea at 17.
And they were clearly still a bunch of idealistic, uninformed, woefully unprepared children, not even taking a map or a compass. And bringing only fruit as victuals.
Thirty years ago I saw recording of a heated interview with William Golding about the character in the book the boys should have chosen to lead. I can't remember if it was Ralph vs Piggy however I think Golding argued that it was Simon, the Christ like mystic, who would have provided salvation for all the boys if he was followed. Simon represented altruism in the book picking hard to reach berries for the smaller boys who couldn't reach. So in real life when a group of boys who are stranded on island who have religious values, altruism like in the case of caring for the one boy with a broken leg it is like they would have chosen Simon as Golding suggested in his interview to lead.
It might not be a rebuttal to the Lord of the Flies. It is a confirmation of what Golding said about the boys and their values.
TL:DR; It turns out that in the real world, nothing like the Lord of the Flies happened; in fact the opposite happened.
Highly recommend Bregman's book, by the way, which shoots down many of the faulty foundations of what we take for granted as fact today about human nature. I believe this article is an excerpt from the book.
"The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. The squabblers would go to opposite ends of the island to cool their tempers, and, ‘After four hours or so,’ Mano later remembered, ‘we’d bring them back together. Then we'd say “Okay, now apologise.” That’s how we stayed friends.’19 Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits."
I second this. It challenged a lot of my beliefs and busted a lot of myths (Stanley Milgram, the Stanford prison experiment, etc.). I didn't agree with everything but I rarely ever do, nonetheless it was a great read. A very readable book as well, shouldn't take you longer than a week to read.
This article questions the colonial view point it was mostly reported from. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/416819/concerns-over-a-tale...
Here's an interview with one of the survivors https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018746636
And the reason the island was uninhabited. the Pacific slave trade https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/20182...
Sounds overly racist to me.
> The New Zealand Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi has weighed in on the conversation, writing on Twitter that in his opinion, "you should prioritise Polynesian (Tongan if possible!) filmmakers as to avoid cultural appropriation, misrepresentation, and to keep the Pasifika voice authentic".
> Gesa-Fatafehi agreed that if the story was made into a film, she would like to see Tongans behind, and in front of, the camera.
Well, they can do it if they want to - nothing can stop them to make a movie like this but they do not have any right to stop others to make their own interpretation (and they can dislike it and explain to everyone what is wrong with it).
I would like to see a Hollywood movie with mostly white but with at least one Asian and at least one black actors :) Ok, I am just joking about Hollywood stereotypes here.
Read “whiteness” as describing culture, and it seems more true than racist. It's your traditional Victorian English capitalist, top hat and monocle, making children work with heavy machinery and turning the sky grey. Your colonialist, beating children for speaking the language of their parents and expecting them to be grateful for it. Your Disney, selling a child-sized “tattooed Polynesian skin” costume. (Why are all my examples about children?)
I agree it could be phrased better, but I assume this is a quote from an interview? The speaker had seconds to think of a wording.
No, describing a group of people based on their race instead of a more accurate descriptor for the category you're looking to talk about is just plain old racism. Being more specific might also be, but this is guaranteed to be.
And your statement just sounds like the contemporary-palatable version of grandpa explaining that when he talks about black people, of course he doesn't mean all black people or exclusively black people.
That being said, we don't really have a good word for “originally-European (but kinda American too now) take-everything attitudes”. How would you describe this succinctly?
The people who got upset with the Maui costume strike me as the exact same type of people as the characters in the movie who got upset about the titular character's "cultural appropriation" of seafaring.
Imagine the uproar if Disney made a film about Christian culture – maybe some story about St Paul going on a quest to slay a dragon using Jesus Cant (the tongue of magic) – and then started selling tacky Body-of-Christ merch (or something), and that was the only representation of Christianity in mainstream culture. Some people would get upset, and I don't think they'd be unjustified.
I think Moana was actually very good, and I was greatly and pleasantly surprised to see something of that quality come out of Disney. It's a captivating story that stands on its own legs without any pandering or preaching, and I see nothing wrong with how it represents Polynesian culture.
But Disney seems to think “we made a film of this” entitles them to Intellectual Property ownership of all the concepts the film covers.
As for the film thing, maybe Taika is talking about the 'camera on the shore' https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/201...
That's funny coming from a member of the colonial power famous for the heroic conquest of 300,000 km² of ocean and thousands of islands using nothing but dugout canoes.
What she really means is that it's the view of the people who came late to the party and played the game on easy mode.
https://goo.gl/maps/DRmA2F5roGeHmyKs7
And Wikipedia page:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8ijiLqfXP0
This article is an excerpt from Chapter 2 one of his latest book. The book, Humankind, seems to be making the argument that humans are essentially trustworthy and industrious and are thus proper candidates for UBI. UBI is more or less the topic of his first book.
Here is a review of his first book, Utopia for Realists:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/13/utopia-realist...
From an interview about the book:
"OK, so basic income is all about the freedom to say no. That's a privilege for the rich right now. With a basic income, you can say no to a job you don't want to do. You can say no to a city in which you no longer want to live. You can say no to an employer who harasses you at work . . . that's what real freedom looks like."
"This is not about AI," he insists. "You go back to the 1960s, and all the economists, all the philosophers, all the sociologists said we're going to be working less and less and less and less and boredom is going to be the great challenge of the future. Didn't happen . . . mostly because we have this ideological obsession with creating new jobs."
Some other articles he has written for The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/wealth...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/12/phone-...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/07/rutger-bregman...
My freshmen English teacher hated the book so much he broke district requirements and told my class he was giving everyone A's on that assignment. He asked the class to read any substitute book in its place. To this day I still consider him to be a wise teacher.
I didn't hate literature class in highschool but I think I might have liked it better if I wasn't so confused about why the various arguments and analysis seemed so tenuous to me. Fundamentally, the analysis of literature is the least productive skill we teach kids in high school, although writing is still very important.
Turns out there are great fiction books out there - took me a while to unlearn the bias.
That was literally my entire high school honors English program. You must interpret everything, to the satisfaction of the English teacher, or else.
It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved reading and made them hate books. I'm not quite sure the point of it, really. It took me a decade after high school to read a fiction book again, and this is far from uncommon among those who suffered through it alongside me.
I don't remember a thing about Red Badge of Courage except I had to extract meaning from why the grass in this particular scene was green - to symbolize new life, hope, rebirth, etc.
I sometimes wonder if at least some portion of literary analysis is equivalent to teaching contemporary fan theories while waiting for the next episode/sequel/release.
Well, I suppose soap operas existed before that, but as far as I can tell they rarely had proper narrative endings; they were designed to last as many years as possible.
Star Trek was episodic. No matter what happens in one episode, most things remained status quo for the next. There were some slow changes to the cast, but for the most part you could watch the episodes in any order.
TNG was book–ended by their dealings with Q, but that story had no closure and only took up about four or five episodes out of 7 years. There were some other stories like that as well, stories that were longer than an episode but much shorter than the show as a whole.
On the other hand, Deep Space Nine was closer to a single story with a beginning, middle, and end. There were still plenty of episodes that would still make sense if you moved them to a different season, but it was much less episodic than the previous shows.
Voyager was billed as a serial work, but was so badly written that most episodes could be moved around at will with no harm to the storyline.
Babylon 5, in contrast, gave every episode some link to the overarching plot, even if it was just hints. (Especially in the first season, when the main antagonists were still hidden and all we had were hints.)
It’s easy for episodic shows to be written at the same pace that they are filmed. With serial shows, you have to know in advance where the story is going to go even if you still write most of the dialog at the pace of filming. I didn’t watch much of Lost, but I got the impression that while it was a serial, the writers had no real plan from the start and that everything was made up as they went along. The result is that the story is incoherent. I’ve never watched any soap operas either, but I gather that they try to arrange for frequent cliffhangers and dramatic changes (making the story more serial), but that there is never a planned end to the story; they’re perpetually in the middle. The result is a work with constant churn and no resolution.
Lost definitely felt episodic and incoherent at times. I think they did plan out some arcs loosely that worked over the course of a few seasons. Some character progression and morality flip was clearly unplanned, and those arcs felt like a soap opera.
I’ve seen the other shows you’ve mentioned, but not Babylon 5. I had read of comparisons between it and DS9 before, and now that comparison makes more sense.
He said it was a major challenge because once the chapter is out there it’s committed, so you can’t go back and fix major plot holes that you didn’t foresee at the time.
I actually read it again 30 years later and it's a pretty good book. Terrible people in it though.
One day, for fun, I tried out saying what I thought she wanted to hear. I got a lot of praise from her that day.
Yeah, he can put it next to his membership acceptance letter from the flat earth society.
(What makes you think his teacher wasn't onto something there?)
Spanish Literature was an especially exciting class. I still think one of the greatest accomplishments of my life was writing a two page Spanish paper on a 12 line poem and only receiving marks off for grammatical mistakes. My teacher even wrote "haha" in the margins next to one of my more ridiculous explanations, but didn't say it was necessarily wrong. I used the improvisational analysis techniques I learned in those classes to entertain art student friends in college sometimes. Especially popular with free drinks in an art gallery.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen comments on r/TheHandmaidsTale along the lines of “why do people keep bringing up abortion laws here it has nothing to do with this show!” or have discussed Avenue 5 or South Park or some other satire with someone only to realize they’ve _completely_ missed the underlying message the writer(s) had made exceedingly obvious.
I remember my teacher used to talk about the “what level” and the “so what level” and he definitely went overboard in exploring the so what level but I’m also grateful I’m not blind to it. I think there are a surprising number of people who are unaware of any meaning beyond the literal words they read or hear.
This was back when you could read Huck Finn. The teacher droned on and for over a week about how it was a symbolic journey of a boys growth towards manhood, how Huck was on the metaphorical river journey of overcoming racism. I said no, I didn't think that was what the story was about. It was just a story, in a certain time, in a certain place, meant to entertain, not to enlighten. She got really mad.
So I opened up the intro to Huck Finn where Twain writes the following:
* “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”` *
I read it out loud in the class and said I didn't believe he was joking. He had foreseen the possibility of people like her arising and attempted to preempt it! I'll never forget her standing there with her mouth open and no answer.
There is deeply symbolic literature, no argument. But all of it clearly is not. And interpretation of symbolism in many cases is summoned directly from thin air. Turns out it's an entire profession!
Mark Twain went out of his way to highlight barbaric racism on rubber plantations in the Congo by writing a satirical pamphlet to try to get the word out:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62739
Even though he masterfully wove his beliefs into the underlying fabric of Huck Finn, I am sure he wished to subtly communicate important truths while spinning a really delightful tale.
You had to take that class to learn not to take everything you read at face value. As sometimes happen people decide to go the other way around and declare that texts never have any deeper meaning and that it is all just nonsense and gosh darn how can those liberal arts even exist??????
It’s a shame because it prevents you from enjoying literature at a deeper level, instead of saying that Anna Karenina is the exact same as some silly airport novel.
Have you considered that Mark Twain, a master of satire, may have intended that passage to be just that?
I think the 'will be shot' gives it away.
I don't know much about metaphoric journeys on rivers from boyhood to manhood, but there was more of a point to that story than you seem to think.
We can also learn a lot about the environment in which a writer operated, just by learning from which symbols was used to convey a message. This is one of the central points, but also perhaps the most misunderstood, of modern (and post modern) literary criticism.
Your teacher may not have been the best, but that does not mean all literary criticism is bad.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
My complaint was (and still is 30 years later) is that an entire cottage industry seems to have arisen around finding hidden meanings.
Would we do that to television today? Does the cartoon "King of the Hill" contain hidden significance and deep moral lessons? Maybe. Or maybe it's just wit mostly designed to entertain.
As the kids apparently say nowadays, por que no los dos?
I pretty much only read science fiction now, and the occasional crime thriller, although I used to be a voracious reader. I din't realize why until I read your post: high school English made me hate fiction. It's like I was playing a game of guess-the-password, and was being graded on how close my arbitrary answer matched the teacher's expectation. I hated it, and it destroyed any interest in reading "high" literature to this day :(
I think I can appreciate sci-fi books in particular because my brain knows there's no way they'd ever be taught in an English classroom, so it doesn't evoke memories of those horrible literature classes.
I still think it's stupid and trite in the way it's handled in the educational setting and completely agree it mostly a garbage way to analyze things. Once you understand the game it becomes quite brainless and formulaic in most cases.
English got worse for me in undergrad so I never reached the real experts.
So yes, the English teachers really are spouting nonsense, and we have proof.
Instead of privileging the author's intent, one can treat literature, or even religious text as akin to art. The reader participates in the meaning of the piece. Or you can think about how people argue over and critique movies and television shows.
English teachers are demanding "correct" interpretation that has nothing to do with what the author intended. It's bullshit, and they need to admit that. It's also squeezing very important topics out of the schedule, such as the teaching of proper grammar and other things needed for non-literary writing in a professional career.
Class: English
Book: The Lilies of the Field
Assignment: Write about what the main character (Homer) does after leaving the nuns he'd helped.
What I did: Wrote a hysterical (to me, at the time) story about how he went to South America in search of a mystical coffee with some made up Latin name which, when translated, meant "Grave-digging coffee that really stinks". I'm still proud of that line. His team of scientists (who all looked like "Billy" from The Far Side) were all killed in various ways while traversing the Amazon, all of them funny (to me, at the time). I was very, very happy with myself. Creative writing was fun.
Teacher: Rewrite it, be serious.
Me: Wrote some drivel that I hated, turned it in, got a lousy grade.
That stifled me for a long time, because it's been hard ever since to just let loose on a story. I criticize it every step of the way now. I find short form poetry (often as music lyrics) to be far simpler and just as expressive if not more so.
I hate that book.
I’m a tad surprised that humans defaulting to corporation is supposed to be news. It’s always been taught to us as rather common knowledge because it’s basically the only way a functional and stable society can evolve. But maybe it explains why so much American post-apocalyptic fiction is so silly.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/16/a-real-life-...
As much as we on HN like to think that logic and the rational mind is what makes people behave good, many times it is the subconscious ties of shared family, friendship, and faith that that help people pull together in times of crisis.
That article has some more information, and RNZ has an audio interview with one of the survivors:
> Golding is not trying to play this Rosseau-v-Hobbes game of bringing humanity back to the state of nature and see what they look like. His children are not living in a natural state: they are self conscious heirs to an entire civilization, and they realize quite early on that they live on the razor's edge of life and death. So they create rules and orders to keep their society running. A little democracy that honors natural goodness and leadership.
> A little democracy that does not last.
> And that is what people don't seem to get about this book. It isn't a parable about what happens when you taken men out of society--it is a parable about how men act in society.
The whole thread is worth reading, though it's not well preserved:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_sexual_assault_trial_...
When we decide how to act, many of our decisions comes from our culture, which is the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. We don't tell stories just to learn, but to become.
One wonders how those six Tongans would have acted had they had the misfortune of reading Lord of the Flies before they went sailing.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/experienced-seafarer-pet...
He didn't just rescue the shipwrecked kids and move on, he was treated as a hero in Tonga, the king of Tonga asked him what we wanted as a reward and he asked for fishing rights in an area he had been denied before and it was granted, he lived in Tonga for 30 years after that.
He was involved in a second shipwreck rescue of a yacht named the Sospan Fach. The member of his crew that spotted the second shipwreck was Sione Filipe Totau. Sione was one of the boys rescued from the first shipwreck.
A thoughtful counterpoint (albeit a somewhat idealistic and romantic one) to Hobbes' is found in the writings of Peter Kropotkin.
I bought nine of these to the local MP's last summer. Mostly to emphasize the fact that all of us are not as greedy as their context might be. Not very surprisingly I only got one message from MP that had read it.
The comments here make me wonder, just why did Lord of The Flies become popular in the first place? Was there a generation that thought it was a good story for illustrating human nature? Why?
From Saturday Morning, 11:45 am on 16 May 2020
Radio New Zealand
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/201...
These are not lost kids surviving islands. These are kids escaping abusive situations. They typically become homeless, get money either by small crimes or sex work. They eventually end up in prison fairly often.
Anyway, would be really cool to see a film of this story; I'm disappointed it hasn't been made yet!
> From June 1965 to September 11, 1966, six Tongan youths, Sione Fataua (17, the eldest), "Stephen" Tevita Fatai Latu (17), "David" Tevita Fifita Siolaʻa (15, the youngest), Kolo Fekitoa (17), "Mano" Sione Filipe Totau (16), and Luke Veikoso (16, later a boxing champion),[15] all natives of Haʻafeva island, were shipwrecked on ʻAta after running away from their strict Catholic boarding school, St. Andrew's College,[16] in Nukuʻalofa on Tongatapu.
Worth the read.