
The Lord of the Flies: when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months - tosh
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
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siberianbear
My interpretation of "The Lord of the Flies" didn't have anything to do with
islands or shipwrecks. The purpose of the novel was to demonstrate the raw
cruelty that teenagers in a group, such as the ones you or I went to high
school with. The author was trying to show up what a stupid, cruel system we'd
set up for ourselves and how senselessly mean we were to one another.

~~~
Noumenon72
But by setting it on a shipwreck, the implied explanation for the cruelty is
"teenagers are innately evil", rather than "the social arrangement we create
with high school is evil" or "those who don't work hard at social skills will
come to regret it".

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://nypost.com/2014/02/16/book-reveals-real-story-behind-the-
kitty-genovese-murder/)

[https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/10/13/social-psychology-
textb...](https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/10/13/social-psychology-textbooks-
ignore-all-modern-criticisms-of-milgrams-obedience-experiments/)

[https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-21/edition-1/quest...](https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-21/edition-1/questioning-
banality-evil?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter)

~~~
randomsearch
Confusing the fact that some experiments were exposed as unrepresentative with
the idea that their conclusions were false.

~~~
Noumenon72
Not many replication crisis results have come out with "Oh, the headline
experiment turned out to be unreplicable, but fortunately all the other ones
derived from it were rock solid and it was just a quirk." In many cases those
experiments are the only underpinning for their conclusions, because ethics
boards won't let us try them any more.

------
bergstromm466
> This story [school boys stranded on Island] never happened. An English
> schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 – his novel Lord
> of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more
> than 30 languages and hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century. In
> hindsight, the secret to the book’s success is clear. Golding had a
> masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he
> had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was
> questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had
> Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in
> each of us?

> Media historians even credit [Golding] as being the unwitting originator of
> one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality
> TV. “I read and reread Lord of the Flies ,” divulged the creator of hit
> series Survivor in an interview.

Fascinating insights. Basically it's just a projection of our fears, but the
consequences of this are far-reaching to this day.

~~~
spac
Apparently a projection of Golding's feelings:

>I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling
disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s
view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began
delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had
been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have
always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by
nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord
of the Flies.

~~~
bergstromm466
Yes, but books become well-known because they describe the general
undercurrent of a cultural mood in a certain era, what Carl Jung called the
'collective unconscious'. Many people identify with the writing of an author
because it helps them put words to their thoughts and feelings.

Golding didn't become an alcoholic or become depressed in a vacuum, he was
embedded in a social context. I don't believe humans are islands.

