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."
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.
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..
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
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?
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?
> gets shown to be completely factually wrong on children
I'm not sure I understand this. Who/what has shown Golding's classic novel to be "completely factually wrong"? How did you establish this? Is there a reference you could steer me towards?
I'd really be interested in exploring the background of where this idea comes from-- my curiosity piqued: Is Lord Of The Flies a misrepresentation of childhood savagery? Is there no such thing? What is it that you are contending here, and where did you get this idea?
Animal Farm is more like a thin metaphor over actual events. Most of the animals in it can be mapped to historical figures or groups of people from the 1917 revolution.
Lord of the Flies is "philosophical fiction" that is trying to make a point about human nature. That point has been shown to be overly pessimistic.
> In fact being proven false has not been acknowledged at all by the literary world
You are aware that the book is a novel right? That means it's pretty much all made up. Sometimes novels pull from reality (real people, places, events, etc.), but they are always made up (fictional) stories. So of course it's been proven false, it never happened because it was fiction.
Did you also know that there was never a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man attack on NYC? Shocking!
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.
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.
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."
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-...
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..
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."
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.
> [...] 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."
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..
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
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?
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?
> gets shown to be completely factually wrong on children
I'm not sure I understand this. Who/what has shown Golding's classic novel to be "completely factually wrong"? How did you establish this? Is there a reference you could steer me towards?
I'd really be interested in exploring the background of where this idea comes from-- my curiosity piqued: Is Lord Of The Flies a misrepresentation of childhood savagery? Is there no such thing? What is it that you are contending here, and where did you get this idea?
TIA!
Animal Farm is more like a thin metaphor over actual events. Most of the animals in it can be mapped to historical figures or groups of people from the 1917 revolution.
Lord of the Flies is "philosophical fiction" that is trying to make a point about human nature. That point has been shown to be overly pessimistic.
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).
> In fact being proven false has not been acknowledged at all by the literary world
You are aware that the book is a novel right? That means it's pretty much all made up. Sometimes novels pull from reality (real people, places, events, etc.), but they are always made up (fictional) stories. So of course it's been proven false, it never happened because it was fiction.
Did you also know that there was never a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man attack on NYC? Shocking!
A fictional novel purporting to shed light on real human nature. In that respect it has been shown to be, at a minimum, significantly mistaken.
> “Proving the book false”
It’s a novel, it has nothing to prove. It’s a deeply philosophical book.
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.
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...
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.
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."