3 ms·

William Golding's Island of Savagery

31 points by samclemens 10mo ago

pointbob 10mo ago
[flagged]
steve_b 10mo ago
It’s interesting to compare Lord of the Flies with a real life example of children being marooned on an island: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
- ocschwar 10mo ago
  Who could have guessed that growing up in a Polynesian culture is a better preparation for such a thing than going to an English boarding school..
  - like_any_other 10mo ago
    You're implying Golding based it on experience on how unsupervised children really behave, but in fact he made it all up. Now (well, 60 years ago) that he has been debunked, we should accept the evidence, not invent arbitrary reasons why it doesn't apply. Especially since the boys in question were "Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa."
    - onion2k 10mo ago
      You're implying Golding based it on experience on how unsupervised children really behave, but in fact he made it all up. William Golding was my father's English teacher at school (prior to publication of Lord of the Flies). According to my father, when people talked to Golding at the time, it wasn't based on real children but it definitely was based on what he believed children would be capable of.
      - DoctorOetker 10mo ago
        > [...] but it definitely was based on what he believed children would be capable of. Also Known As "[...] but in fact he made it all up."
        Andrex 10mo ago
        I take it as a morality tale that applies to all of humans generally and less an indictment of a specific age range. But I may be in the minority it seems.
        marcellus23 10mo ago
        I think that's clearly the way to interpret the novel. The idea that you could even debunk a piece of allegorical fiction is silly. It would be like trying to make a point by claiming that the tale of the scorpion and the frog was made up, or The Metamorphosis.
        bondarchuk 10mo ago
        Wow, it's almost as if we were dealing with a piece of fiction.
    - ocschwar 10mo ago
      Well, the Tongan boys provide the only empirical data on how unsupervised children behave on a desert island. Everything else written about the idea is speculation, from The Coral Island to The CHildren's Island to Lord of the Flies. But Golding did observe behavior in a boarding school, and while the Tongan boys did also go to boarding school, they also were being raised in Tongan culture, and that culture, including its behavioral norms, was what helped them survive on a desert island.
      - hermitcrab 10mo ago
        'Lord of the Flies' was written at least partly as a reaction to the overly idealist 'The Coral Island'.
    - jhbadger 10mo ago
      He certainly hasn't been "debunked" with a single counterexample, especially one from an entirely different non-Western culture. N=1 isn't a statistically significant sample in any case.
- like_any_other 10mo ago
  Strange how proving the book utterly false has not dimmed its literary reputation even a little, nor caused a resurgence of the "unrealistic" Coral Island that Golding set out to disprove and displace [1]. In fact being proven false has not been acknowledged at all by the literary world, which show how much respect that world deserves. [1] Golding thought that the book was unrealistic and asked his wife whether it would be a good idea if he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies#Background
  - andy99 10mo ago
    It’s famous for being an allegory isn’t it? Isn’t this like saying Animal Farm remains popular even though we’ve proven that animals don’t actually self organize like in the book?
    - billy99k 10mo ago
      The crazy part is that just looking at how people behave on Reddit and HN, I could easily see adults with the same outcome as Lord of the Flies. It also could be that children are mostly posting, however (since there is no age verification, it's hard to tell these days).
      - bigyabai 10mo ago
        I think you're misconstruing the point of Lord of the Flies. It is not a children's book, and most of it's commentary can be generalized to adults. We see the exact same outcome in the highest echelons of politics, business and academia alike.
    - like_any_other 10mo ago
      Partly. But again, in the author's own words, he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave". Even his motivation was that Coral Island was "unrealistic". You'd think that would earn the book at least a little asterisk. Meanwhile Animal Farm is obviously intended to be allegorical by using animals as protagonists. While I disagree, one could argue that Lord of the Flies deserves to be so highly regarded despite being so wrong about children. But can one really argue that, when a highly regarded and extremely well known work, that is ostensibly about children, gets shown to be completely factually wrong on children, the appropriate amount of self-reflection for the literary world, that had heaped (and continues to heap) so much praise on it, is zero?
- notKilgoreTrout 10mo ago
  I always thought there weren't enough boys in Lord of the Flies for the social dynamics, but still it is supposed to be more than 6, enough to break into two groups of the size in this example..
- hermitcrab 10mo ago
  Rutger Bregman’s book, 'Humankind', covers this and is worth a read.
cryptica 10mo ago
As I get older, I'm realizing that there's no such thing as 'human nature.' It's a broad spectrum. My view is that poor and average people are alright but as you get closer to power, people become increasingly corrupt and evil. Relationships become more calculated and transactional to the point that they become unpleasant; though apparently some people either don't feel this effect or maybe their hunger for power is so strong that it overrides those feelings... Or maybe it's a bit of both. In any case, by the time you get really close to power, all moderately normal people have been filtered out; both voluntarily and also because non-psychopaths generally struggle to fit in. The psychopaths in power want to remove the moral element because it makes things unpredictable for them. They prefer everything to be kept stable and under control through blackmail and other forms of coercive leverage. Something else I've found is that, as you get closer to power, people become much 'nicer' (superficially) but they are definitely more evil in reality if you look at their actions. It's like they make up for their evil deeds by being extra nice to people in person. Nowadays, when I meet people who are too friendly with their words, I immediately feel skeptical; I don't trust them.
- shrubby 10mo ago
  Spectrum of moral development mostly IMO. I wrote this just a few days ago here and it applies here too nicely: "Pre-conventional level is the narcissist me-me-me level, that seems to dominate the geopolitics and tech. Conventional is most of us as the sheep. This level follows the loudest crowd that right now is the pre-conventional. Post-conventional is the few that can do standalone thinking and morals. Most conventionals can though understand the difference between and also the outcome we're headed to with the pre-conventional human gods, but we need to build the normalcy for the post-conventional ones together and make it structural. My hunch is that first step could be to start the discussion on what is excessive on personal level. Consumption, wealth, political power. Something like Mamdani or Polanski have showed, only more blunt. The majority of people are waking up that the current trajectory means the end of the world and extinction after the short period of accelerationist-dystopian hellscape."
- ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
  > "My view is that poor and average people are alright..." My preferred counterexample is the actions of soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army invading various Asian countries in the years leading up to WW2 and during it, perfectly ordinary people conscripted to the military behaving in absolutely savage ways to a civilian population. There is a reason the Japanese are still despised by their neighbors, though it has become more muted over the years. It is also a large enough sample (~4 million in occupied territories from a casual search) that it cannot be handwaved away as being some kind of isolated aberration.
fallinditch 10mo ago
The Inheritors by William Golding is the novel that lodged itself in my subconscious more deeply than any other book. It fostered a curiosity in me about the nature of humanity, and a lingering awareness that history is written by the survivors. Innocence is often extinguished not by evil intent, but by efficiency.
ilamont 10mo ago
Worse still, the war also revealed an alarming side of his own character – a ‘viciousness’ and ‘cruelty’ of which he had, until then, been only dimly aware. He realised that, beneath the veneer of middle-class civility, he had the same instincts as the Nazis. And it wouldn’t take much for them to break the surface, either. I once heard a talk by someone involved in microfinance/impact investing in poor countries. Through her work she met many people at all levels of government in the places she worked. One thing that stuck with me was her comment that while everyone is capable of greatness and kindness, they also have the capability of becoming a "monster." She cited the experience of one of her Rwandan contacts, who later became the Minister of Justice and was one of the senior government officials responsible for driving the genocide of hundreds of thousands of members of the Tutsi minority in the mid-1990s. https://humanrights.ca/story/what-led-genocide-against-tutsi-rwanda https://humanrights.ca/story/what-led-genocide-against-tutsi...

31 points by samclemens 10mo ago

[flagged]

It’s interesting to compare Lord of the Flies with a real life example of children being marooned on an island: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...

ocschwar 10mo ago
Who could have guessed that growing up in a Polynesian culture is a better preparation for such a thing than going to an English boarding school..
- like_any_other 10mo ago
  You're implying Golding based it on experience on how unsupervised children really behave, but in fact he made it all up. Now (well, 60 years ago) that he has been debunked, we should accept the evidence, not invent arbitrary reasons why it doesn't apply. Especially since the boys in question were "Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa."
  - onion2k 10mo ago
    You're implying Golding based it on experience on how unsupervised children really behave, but in fact he made it all up. William Golding was my father's English teacher at school (prior to publication of Lord of the Flies). According to my father, when people talked to Golding at the time, it wasn't based on real children but it definitely was based on what he believed children would be capable of.
    - DoctorOetker 10mo ago
      > [...] but it definitely was based on what he believed children would be capable of. Also Known As "[...] but in fact he made it all up."
      - Andrex 10mo ago
        I take it as a morality tale that applies to all of humans generally and less an indictment of a specific age range. But I may be in the minority it seems.
        marcellus23 10mo ago
        I think that's clearly the way to interpret the novel. The idea that you could even debunk a piece of allegorical fiction is silly. It would be like trying to make a point by claiming that the tale of the scorpion and the frog was made up, or The Metamorphosis.
      - bondarchuk 10mo ago
        Wow, it's almost as if we were dealing with a piece of fiction.
  - ocschwar 10mo ago
    Well, the Tongan boys provide the only empirical data on how unsupervised children behave on a desert island. Everything else written about the idea is speculation, from The Coral Island to The CHildren's Island to Lord of the Flies. But Golding did observe behavior in a boarding school, and while the Tongan boys did also go to boarding school, they also were being raised in Tongan culture, and that culture, including its behavioral norms, was what helped them survive on a desert island.
    - hermitcrab 10mo ago
      'Lord of the Flies' was written at least partly as a reaction to the overly idealist 'The Coral Island'.
  - jhbadger 10mo ago
    He certainly hasn't been "debunked" with a single counterexample, especially one from an entirely different non-Western culture. N=1 isn't a statistically significant sample in any case.
like_any_other 10mo ago
Strange how proving the book utterly false has not dimmed its literary reputation even a little, nor caused a resurgence of the "unrealistic" Coral Island that Golding set out to disprove and displace [1]. In fact being proven false has not been acknowledged at all by the literary world, which show how much respect that world deserves. [1] Golding thought that the book was unrealistic and asked his wife whether it would be a good idea if he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies#Background
- andy99 10mo ago
  It’s famous for being an allegory isn’t it? Isn’t this like saying Animal Farm remains popular even though we’ve proven that animals don’t actually self organize like in the book?
  - billy99k 10mo ago
    The crazy part is that just looking at how people behave on Reddit and HN, I could easily see adults with the same outcome as Lord of the Flies. It also could be that children are mostly posting, however (since there is no age verification, it's hard to tell these days).
    - bigyabai 10mo ago
      I think you're misconstruing the point of Lord of the Flies. It is not a children's book, and most of it's commentary can be generalized to adults. We see the exact same outcome in the highest echelons of politics, business and academia alike.
  - like_any_other 10mo ago
    Partly. But again, in the author's own words, he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave". Even his motivation was that Coral Island was "unrealistic". You'd think that would earn the book at least a little asterisk. Meanwhile Animal Farm is obviously intended to be allegorical by using animals as protagonists. While I disagree, one could argue that Lord of the Flies deserves to be so highly regarded despite being so wrong about children. But can one really argue that, when a highly regarded and extremely well known work, that is ostensibly about children, gets shown to be completely factually wrong on children, the appropriate amount of self-reflection for the literary world, that had heaped (and continues to heap) so much praise on it, is zero?
notKilgoreTrout 10mo ago
I always thought there weren't enough boys in Lord of the Flies for the social dynamics, but still it is supposed to be more than 6, enough to break into two groups of the size in this example..
hermitcrab 10mo ago
Rutger Bregman’s book, 'Humankind', covers this and is worth a read.

cryptica 10mo ago

As I get older, I'm realizing that there's no such thing as 'human nature.' It's a broad spectrum. My view is that poor and average people are alright but as you get closer to power, people become increasingly corrupt and evil. Relationships become more calculated and transactional to the point that they become unpleasant; though apparently some people either don't feel this effect or maybe their hunger for power is so strong that it overrides those feelings... Or maybe it's a bit of both. In any case, by the time you get really close to power, all moderately normal people have been filtered out; both voluntarily and also because non-psychopaths generally struggle to fit in. The psychopaths in power want to remove the moral element because it makes things unpredictable for them. They prefer everything to be kept stable and under control through blackmail and other forms of coercive leverage. Something else I've found is that, as you get closer to power, people become much 'nicer' (superficially) but they are definitely more evil in reality if you look at their actions. It's like they make up for their evil deeds by being extra nice to people in person. Nowadays, when I meet people who are too friendly with their words, I immediately feel skeptical; I don't trust them.

shrubby 10mo ago
Spectrum of moral development mostly IMO. I wrote this just a few days ago here and it applies here too nicely: "Pre-conventional level is the narcissist me-me-me level, that seems to dominate the geopolitics and tech. Conventional is most of us as the sheep. This level follows the loudest crowd that right now is the pre-conventional. Post-conventional is the few that can do standalone thinking and morals. Most conventionals can though understand the difference between and also the outcome we're headed to with the pre-conventional human gods, but we need to build the normalcy for the post-conventional ones together and make it structural. My hunch is that first step could be to start the discussion on what is excessive on personal level. Consumption, wealth, political power. Something like Mamdani or Polanski have showed, only more blunt. The majority of people are waking up that the current trajectory means the end of the world and extinction after the short period of accelerationist-dystopian hellscape."
ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
> "My view is that poor and average people are alright..." My preferred counterexample is the actions of soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army invading various Asian countries in the years leading up to WW2 and during it, perfectly ordinary people conscripted to the military behaving in absolutely savage ways to a civilian population. There is a reason the Japanese are still despised by their neighbors, though it has become more muted over the years. It is also a large enough sample (~4 million in occupied territories from a casual search) that it cannot be handwaved away as being some kind of isolated aberration.

fallinditch 10mo ago

The Inheritors by William Golding is the novel that lodged itself in my subconscious more deeply than any other book. It fostered a curiosity in me about the nature of humanity, and a lingering awareness that history is written by the survivors. Innocence is often extinguished not by evil intent, but by efficiency.

ilamont 10mo ago

Worse still, the war also revealed an alarming side of his own character – a ‘viciousness’ and ‘cruelty’ of which he had, until then, been only dimly aware. He realised that, beneath the veneer of middle-class civility, he had the same instincts as the Nazis. And it wouldn’t take much for them to break the surface, either. I once heard a talk by someone involved in microfinance/impact investing in poor countries. Through her work she met many people at all levels of government in the places she worked. One thing that stuck with me was her comment that while everyone is capable of greatness and kindness, they also have the capability of becoming a "monster." She cited the experience of one of her Rwandan contacts, who later became the Minister of Justice and was one of the senior government officials responsible for driving the genocide of hundreds of thousands of members of the Tutsi minority in the mid-1990s. https://humanrights.ca/story/what-led-genocide-against-tutsi-rwanda https://humanrights.ca/story/what-led-genocide-against-tutsi...