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.
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.
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.
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.