“Lord of the Flies” is a fictional novel which you may or may not have heard of, or even read. I’m sure it varies by region and changes over time – but when I was in grade school we had to read this book no less than *5* times for different classes, then discuss, analyze, and write papers about it. We also watched the movie adaptation 2-3 times and had similar discussions..
For those who haven’t had the misfortune of reading it – the basic synopsis is that an entire class of young teenage children on some sort of poorly defined class trip gets marooned on a deserted island without any surviving adult supervision. Over the span of a week or 2, they devolve from supposedly well behaved, civilized children to tribes of vicious cannibal savages torturing their classmates to death and laughing about it… Then they get saved and presumably reintegrate into society with no future issues.
It is, in short, a fairly shallow and ridiculous shock tale that takes the ridiculous position that regular people can turn into absolute monsters at the drop of a hat, then go back on with their lives like nothing ever happened. It doesn’t warn against this behaviour, merely states it as fact and explores the logical consequences, unrealistic as they may be.
Or so I thought..
Because, in every class that went over this story.. I found that I was the only person who didn’t take it as a natural course of events that these children would immediately give up on any form of rationality or cooperation and embrace their inner sadistic evil tendencies. The shock of this was heightened by the fact that I myself somewhat resembled the primary victim of the tale, who was singled out to be tortured the most before being thrown off a cliff to his death – and received nothing but laughter and derision from either the characters in the book, or my classmates and teachers discussing the book. Indeed many of them expressed wishes that he had endured additional torture, and it was almost universally agreed that he deserved his fate just for being perceived as a nerdy, weak outsider to the tribal group.
I still believe the book itself is pitifully shallow and has no true message. Nonetheless it drew out a side of my classmates and teachers I had not expected to see, and in that way it shocked me to my core and had a profound impact upon me. I do not credit this book exclusively for my general distrust of humanity and lack of faith in the inherent goodness of others.. But it was certainly one of the first big stepping stones off the path of blissfully blind trust in my fellow man.
I still don’t think things would play out quite that drastically in a real emergency situation.. But if I’m ever stranded on a desert island with you – don’t take it personally that I’m going to leave you to your own devices and get as far away from the rest of you as possible to survive on my own. Don’t follow after me, I truly don’t know what I might do in the midst of (potentially justified) paranoia in such a situation.
I’m still not sure why this was such a vitally important lesson to cover over and over as a core part of my education…