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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

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 6y ago
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-the-kitty-genovese-murder/ https://nypost.com/2014/02/16/book-reveals-real-story-behind... https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/10/13/social-psychology-textbooks-ignore-all-modern-criticisms-of-milgrams-obedience-experiments/ https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/10/13/social-psychology-textb... https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-21/edition-1/questioning-banality-evil?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-21/edition-1/quest...
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "People in the '60s believed a lot of false blank-slate claims about regular people being capable of evil behavior in the right situations" Were the atrocities perpetrated by Germany and Japan on civilians in WWII not done by regular people?
  - Noumenon72 6y ago
    Not according to my third link: > Even in the most brutal of circumstances, people did not have to kill and only some chose to do so. So, far from simply ‘finding themselves’ in inhumane situations or inhumane groups, the murderers actively committed themselves to such groups. They actively created inhumane situations and placed themselves at their epicentre. This was true even of concentration camp regimes: > > Individuals demonstrated commitment by acting, on their own initiative, with greater brutality than their orders called for. Thus excess did not spring from mechanical obedience. On the contrary; its matrix was a group structure where it was expected that members exceed the limits of normal violence. (Sofsky, 1993, p.228) > In short, the true horror of Eichmann and his like is not that their actions were blind. On the contrary, it is that they saw clearly what they did, and believed it to be the right thing to do.
    - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
      Would the same apply to the Imperial Japanese Army in the Nanjing incident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Massacre) or across the rest of Asia? The IJA's acts was so widespread across its conquered territories that it's unlikely that the same reasoning can be applied to them; the total death toll caused by them was nearly triple that of the Holocaust and was not neatly confined to being perpetrated by the staff of concentration camps.
- randomsearch 6y ago
  Confusing the fact that some experiments were exposed as unrepresentative with the idea that their conclusions were false.
  - Noumenon72 6y ago
    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.
randomsearch 6y ago
Eloquently put, yes I agree, and I’m sure that’s why the book was (is?) on syllabuses for such a long duration.

Noumenon72 6y ago

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-the-kitty-genovese-murder/ https://nypost.com/2014/02/16/book-reveals-real-story-behind... https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/10/13/social-psychology-textbooks-ignore-all-modern-criticisms-of-milgrams-obedience-experiments/ https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/10/13/social-psychology-textb... https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-21/edition-1/questioning-banality-evil?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-21/edition-1/quest...

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "People in the '60s believed a lot of false blank-slate claims about regular people being capable of evil behavior in the right situations" Were the atrocities perpetrated by Germany and Japan on civilians in WWII not done by regular people?
- Noumenon72 6y ago
  Not according to my third link: > Even in the most brutal of circumstances, people did not have to kill and only some chose to do so. So, far from simply ‘finding themselves’ in inhumane situations or inhumane groups, the murderers actively committed themselves to such groups. They actively created inhumane situations and placed themselves at their epicentre. This was true even of concentration camp regimes: > > Individuals demonstrated commitment by acting, on their own initiative, with greater brutality than their orders called for. Thus excess did not spring from mechanical obedience. On the contrary; its matrix was a group structure where it was expected that members exceed the limits of normal violence. (Sofsky, 1993, p.228) > In short, the true horror of Eichmann and his like is not that their actions were blind. On the contrary, it is that they saw clearly what they did, and believed it to be the right thing to do.
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    Would the same apply to the Imperial Japanese Army in the Nanjing incident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Massacre) or across the rest of Asia? The IJA's acts was so widespread across its conquered territories that it's unlikely that the same reasoning can be applied to them; the total death toll caused by them was nearly triple that of the Holocaust and was not neatly confined to being perpetrated by the staff of concentration camps.
randomsearch 6y ago
Confusing the fact that some experiments were exposed as unrepresentative with the idea that their conclusions were false.
- Noumenon72 6y ago
  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.

randomsearch 6y ago

Eloquently put, yes I agree, and I’m sure that’s why the book was (is?) on syllabuses for such a long duration.