Hacker News Reader

Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

That's a wonderful story and and an uplifting rebuttal to Lord of the Flies.

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.

View on HN

> 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.

I haven't read Humankind yet, but a recent review I have read[0] gives a mix of positives and negatives to it. A lot of the cited studies are controversial in their own right: S.L.A. Marshall's claim that only 15% of soldiers in WW2 fired their weapons is based on subjective evidence, omits mention of whether they had any opportunity to fire, and has many other flaws that have since been picked apart, for example.

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...

I read both the book and this review, and while the review makes some valid points, it also holds the book to a pretty high bar.

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.

Cultural experience matters a lot here though. If 6 boys who dealt with hard grueling hunter gatherer labor, they'd have no issue pulling themselves up by their makeshift sandals so to speak, in the jungle. Western boys who may have had at worst, had a few days of hard labor, the rest school and sports, not so much.

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...

I have no idea where you are getting the idea that six boarding school boys had "dealt with hard gruelling hunter gatherer labour" or "studied the school of hard knocks first hand".

That is an amazing amount of assumption to draw out of the simple fact that they were Tongan.

Lord of the flies was written shortly after world war 2, which also really happened... I don't take it seriously as a story of what would really happen if boys ended up on an island, but humans killing each other for dumb reasons is not the stuff of fantasy.

"Distasteful" and "dumb" are far from the same thing, and the second world war happened for the former and not the latter.

It's a distinction without a difference- one could argue a less primitive species wouldn't have found itself caught in world wars. The man-children starting world wars are paralleled by the children-children killing each other on the island.

Your ”less primitive” species would have had what reason to split the atom?

I think it's fair to say that pacifists do in fact, sometimes invent things.

Reducing the historical and contemporary reasons why humans engage in war to people being "man-children" is a level of sticking-my-head-in-the-sand that I hope to never attain. I've never understood the urge to think of people and things one morally/politically disagrees with as simply stupid, braindead or immature - but there seem to be way too many people who seem incapable of contending with the idea that humans can be intelligent and highly amoral/immoral.

I have had the privilege to visit concentration camp museums. I actually didn't have the feeling these were unintelligent savage places. It was actually trying to be orderly, efficient and exceedingly bureaucratic. These institutions were very much a part of civilization. Everything was thought through.

They weren't run by man children.

Exactly.

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).

Pointless pendatry over words doesn't move discussion forwards. I wouldn't personally use either of those words to describe Nazis, which is largely what WWII "happened for".

I'm curious about what the pointless pedantry is in drawing a distinction between "stupid" and "morally abhorrent".

Those were not the words you used, and (continuing the pointless arguments about words), "morally abhorrent" does not mean the same as distasteful, at least to most english speakers.

The (very clear, to me at least) point was that calling war "dumb" because it is unpleasant is irrational. WW2 was very clearly not the product of stupidity.

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.

World War II happened largely because the Great War happened.

I'm comfortable describing the reasons for the Great War as "dumb". Your mileage may vary.

No, but the why is. It's worthwhile being very careful taking fiction books as a depiction of how peoples minds work, because they're just plainly not - they're a depiction of how a very small subset (authors who publish books) think peoples minds work.

Smaller than that - each author's mind is unique.

Any piece of fiction should be considered on its own for whether its characters are plausible and consistent.

>humans killing each other for dumb reasons is not the stuff of fantasy.

But it's the exception not the norm in human behaviour.

It depends on whether you have social constructs in place which take priority over human behaviour.

Remove all of this.. what happens.. humans will eventually go back to primal instincts

And one primal instinct is social bonding.

Which is also the primal instinct that allows for tribalism, which is really important when the other tribe is competing for a scarce resource.

Humans are social creatures, but not social with the entire world.

Not social with the entire world yet. Give us time.

Tribalism is generally closed, but not automatically antagonistic with other tribes. In contexts where there is no forced competition, tribes rarely fight.

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.

Hunter gatherer societies fought all the time for control of hunting grounds.

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.

> "Lord of the Flies came out of the fantasy of an English superintendent."

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 second that book, it's great.

This was my thought, as well. At the risk of sounding...I don't know some 'ist' word, people are just raised differently and the world varies so much.

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.

Yup, much as the world is becoming more and more culturally homogenous thanks to freely sharing information, there's still significant differences that shouldn't be underestimated.

I mean even though we consume the same media, I still strongly dislike many aspects of American culture.

Funny you mention the machete. Last time I was in Suva in Fiji, some of the locals come into town for their evening drinks, directly I guess from cutting sugar cane in the fields, all with machetes hanging from their belts. It's a head turner all right if you're more used to people being kicked out of pubs just for wearing their jandals.

I don't think that's true. So my Dad grew up in the 50s in Southend, UK, and I wouldn't have been surprised at all to hear a story about him stealing a boat with his brothers for a joy ride.

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.

There is a lot of complaining in this thread about English teachers over-interpreting literature. But I think it is pretty clear that the question Lord of the Flies tries to answer is not "what would happen to a bunch of boys stranded on an island?" but more like "how could the holocaust happen?".

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.

The most disturbing for me is that people interpret work of fiction as if it really happened rather then one persons speculative take. Lord of flies is made up. It is not sociological study.

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.

I think it's fair to say "don't bet against human ingenuity and spirit".

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?

Those we ate to be alive are not.

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.

Maybe the issue to consider isn't human behavior but rather leadership structure of the group of boys. With the boys in real life on the island who lead and how? There were moments of disagreement and they also had a system of administering justice and resolution. Did they follow the one boy who knew most about survival? That is a very different system of government than a voting democracy. The key is that when one broke his leg the rest provided for him. This goes all the way back to Plato observing city states in Ancient Greece attempts at creating institutions for mutual survival and defense.

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.

Lord of the Flies was somewhat a rebuttal to The Coral Island. More enjoyable to read though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com