Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tier3r | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: How much of these novels are imaginative paranoia driven by cynical consumers? The closest similar incident - the Tongan castaways (granted they were aged 13 - 19 instead of 6 - 12) had the boys create a more or less exemplary society. They worked in teams, hunted and fish, created instruments to sing songs - no where even close to what happened in the novel.

View on HN

Tongan castaways numbered only six boys. I think social dynamics get very interesting in larger numbers and with mixed genders.

For consideration, look at the utopian rat experiments.[1] As resources become scarce and competition increase - the likelihood that a social structure will collapse increases. While humans are not rats, this has been seen over and over again in primate colonies. There are parallels in modern day ghettos around the world.

This has implications for social media; as the number of people coming into contact with each other increase -- the more polarized we become online.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

Humans do great in groups until they get bigger than the size of a larger hunter-gatherer tribe, say more than a few dozen individuals. Basically, the point at which it becomes impossible for everyone to know everyone else, and you need to replace informal, personal organisation with formalised and impersonal structures.

Humans are not rats, but nor do we really behave like other primates. We have evolved to co-operate socially and we do it very, very well, including (and perhaps especially) in resource-constrained environments. And we even engage in self-domestication to weed out individuals who attempt to dominate or cheat in such situations.

But the problem with modern society is it throws all of that evolved ability out of the window. We are attempting to learn how to co-exist and thrive while living in cities of millions of strangers, while living lifestyles their bear no relation at all to traditional human life. In a way, it's a miracle that we do as well as we do.

For others who hadn't heard of the Tongan Castaways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways - I need to find 10 mins today to watch the documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHO_RlJxnVI

The novel was a dark satire of other contemporary novels.

In those, "civilized" white kids basically brought modernity to the natives after getting shipwrecked in what was essentially colonialist propaganda.

So it's a bit like The Boys surviving in history and Marvel being lost from memory and people thinking that superheroes are violent psychopaths.

I hadn't heard that explanation for the novel before, but it makes me think of how Blazing Saddles has already become a bit de-contextualized from what preceded it: A constant TV. show storm--possibly worse than superhero movies today--depicting the "Wild West" as a wholesome and family-friendly place where society was kinda-great for everyone. (Largely due to the television industry regulations and internal standards.)

The movie, in contrast, showed an imperfect Wild West where there was injustice, government corruption, blatant racism, vice, all-round stupidity, etc. It wasn't just transgressive shock value for its own sake.

Yes, here in Canada, we had the 'Residential Schools scandal', the impetus was to educate aboriginal children up to 14 or 16 with de-facto prisons run by cadres of religious zealots, (in the male buildings) who often became predatory homosexuals with a captive student body. In the female buildings there was a huge amount of whipping. These kids were murdered and the bodies buried in significant numbers and when the truth was exposed litigation bankrupted almost all on Canadian soil. They went to a policy of small band schools for each reservation with indigenous educators for the most part with a core of Teacher's School graduates to administer. Seems to have worked. The populace left organised religion in droves, and most churches went broke and the land sold. In Quebec the entire structure almost collapsed and if were not for $$ from Rome - it would have. Seminaries attracted no students = no priests, they even air dropped priests from Haiti - this did not go well in rural Quebec. I long for the holy grail = all religion gone and forgotten

And now nobody cares anymore about the context. Today colonisation is alive and well by those exclaiming to be humiliated and colonized in the past. skin color is out of the picture, its just power asymmetry due to history and tech. So all that remains is a parabel about societal decay.

Yes, maturation brings more sentience. Young kids are often primal and greedy. Sentience starts in a few at about 5 and come to all by ~~10, but I recall a young thug who was pushed into high school at 18 by some rule that over 18 he could not remain. He was a greedy powerful semi-bully and was eventually institutionalised, his IQ was very low and he could not read and had only a few words, he must have been a severe problem among the kids he was placed with. This was in 1952-3, I think he would be better dealt with these days?

A thought this has always bothered me: people tell you to read fiction to "learn about the human condition". But, well, it's fiction - people make it up, and (2) whatever insights you imagine might be gleaned are tempered through a very specific lens: that of fiction authors.

It's hardly a representative cross-section of society.

Having been on the receiving end of actual real-life bullying from 90% of my peers (the other 10% being bystanders) through high school because I was younger (among other things), I can tell you that Lord of the Flies is in some ways depicting the kids as less cruel than real kids are.

Yes, when I was in school each hall and each stair landing was attended by a teacher/monitor so gross physical bullying was limited. These days we have an unruly mob very under supervised. I am sure the frequent gun confrontations we see in the news are caused by bullying and the bullied resort to guns as the only way to get relief from the bullies!

I am sure the frequent gun confrontations we see in the news are caused by bullying and the bullied resort to guns as the only way to get relief from the bullies!

Why? Bullied kids aren't murderers. Psychopaths are murderers.

I've read numerous accounts from people who were in high school when Columbine happened. The media latched onto this narrative that the perpetrators had been bullied. This resulted in schools around the country tormenting already-bullied kids by encouraging their peers to out them, then subjecting them to clumsy interventions by undertrained school psychologists.

Anyway, I think it's dangerous to spread the myth that bullied kids lash out with violence. Has it happened? Sure. Is it common? No.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com