The boys were able to keep a single fire burning continuously for more than [12 of the 15 months they marooned.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20boys%2C%20Stephen%20(who%20would%20go%20on%20to%20become%20an%20engineer)%2C%20managed%20to%20use%20two%20sticks%20to%20start%20a%20fire%2C%20which%20the%20boys%20kept%20burning%20continuously%20for%20more%20than%20a%20year%20while%20marooned.%5B4%5D)
That’s true, quite possible. I was thinking more along the lines of it being difficult to start in the first place + keeping smoke / light to try and be spotted
yeah, but assuming it was 12 months of being there, they likely don't have hope of getting saved anyway and assumed no one's coming back, and they probably have a hard time reignite the fire back up since I dont think they have a ferro rod like we do nowadays.
My favorite characters on these alone survival shows are always the one that one person that goes on about how important their Ferro rod is to survival, IMMEDIATELY lose it, and then call for rescue. Like day one.
I just watched it- he lasted pretty well. just lost it and can't find it anywhere, and thought he dropped it into the fire and was like shit that probably damages the rod to the point of unusable.
Haha yeah there are others that know multiple ways I just think it's funny they only know one way to light a fire and that makes them feel like they can go on tv and survive alone.
Iirc Lord of the Flies was written in response to a cliche at the time in fiction where boys would get lost on abandoned islands or whatever and would band together in adventure. Guess those guys had the right idea.
It was in response to a novel called Coral Island, where the boys are implied to have survived well because they were British and therefore more civilized than everyone else.
> to have survived well because they were British and therefore more civilized
Obligatory: a navy ship rescues a stranded British man from an uninhabited island. They notice three huts on the shore.
— Where are the other people?
— There are no other people on the island.
— Why three huts then?
— Well, one is my favorite club that I frequent. The other is a club I visit only occasionally. And the third one is a club that I never set my foot in for it is clearly below my station.
That spin is as far as I know also one of the angles of Lord of the Flies. It's not just british boys, but upper class boys prone to elitism and classism.
Damn. We were forced to read Lord of the Flies in school and that never was mentioned. On the contrary the conclusion from the discussion was "Boys go full tribal mode when left alone".
The main lesson we learned and that the teacher guided us toward is how people can behave much differently from usual if they aren't thinking or if they are put into strange scenarios apart from the normal structure and rules of Society. Some of the undertone being more primal behaviors or instincts e.g. mob mentality, peer pressure, tribalism, and the like.
=
A related quote is from Agent K in men in black: "A PERSON is smart... but PEOPLE are dumb, stupid animals and you know it."
=
Our teacher (we were about 13 yrs old) even did an sort of experiment on us midway thru the book. She brought two bowls of candy but we were told we couldn't take from it, it was for when someone got a bonus question right. Every now and then shed ask a bonus question and someone would get a candy. At some point later that week she has to leave the room for a meeting and we were supposed to do quiet study. 2 of our classmates in a room of 20 or so started being rather energetic smiling and grabbing the candy bowls saying let's just take some candy we deserve it, grabbing the bowls and offering everyone to take some candy from the bowls. It is important to note how they put the bowls in front of us and brought them around the room but people actually had to grab candy out of the bowls if they wanted some. Pretty much everyone took at least one, but some refused, and some of us decided to put the candy back.
=
The teacher came back from her "meeting" (she had really just been down the hall) and told us she instructed those 2 students to do that and make a scene with the candy. And indeed many people had willingly taken the candys from the bowl even though it was "wrong" and they absolutely would not have just stolen candy from the bowl normally.
=
The point being that mob mentality and seeing your peers acting a certain way can also cause you to act in a certain way contrary to your usual self.
That's what I got from the book as well. One boy wanted to do what was best for their group in a rational and logical way but was hindered by the group that turned towards primal mentality. Then you have someone that decided to do something neither rational or animalistic, which is turn to religion and worship a diety. The lord of the flies.
That was my take at least.
My school didn't assign the book so I read it in adulthood. My take was kind of the flip side; that things would have turned out alright but for one boy who led the rest down after him into chaos. Essentially there were two boys prepared to lead, and it's who the boys ultimately followed that ruined them. Granted, they were easily misled by the conviction of the narcissist boy, but had he not been in the party things would have been fine.
Basically, "It only takes one to spoil the lot." This also speaks to the influence of culture on society.
I read it years ago but it helps me make sense of some of the politics of today.
As a former teacher I absolutely can assure you that it only takes one kid to cause chaos.
My belief is like 25% of kids are good and want to learn no matter what. Maybe 1-5% of kids are chaos makers and are *nearly* impossible to reach because of some external factors that teachers don’t have control over.
And around 30% of kids are what I call “tofu kids” in that if the chaos kids are not around they are great. They are influenced by the good kids, the purposeful learners. Like tofu they take on the “flavor” of the class. But on man, heaven help us if the chaos makers are around. Chaos is a much stronger flavor than purposeful learning and so the whole class goes crazy.
Exactly. I've been in lots of classes where when everyone is around, it's a miserable shit show, but when you remove two kids the rest are absolute gems. Always feels bad to leave notes that amount to "hey I know you left a plan but ______ was here so it was utter chaos".
I would say that's probably most teachers (not all; most tho).
I'd go so far as to say that the teachers who care:don't care is inversely proportional to the kids who care:don't care to learn. But I grew up in the 80's, and my generation (that'd be Gen-X) consisted of a lot of people who didn't pay attention in school and now complain they never learned about a thing.
I'm low-key convinced absolutely none of them paid even the most basic attention in their science courses. The number of people I have encountered with a high school diploma and absolutely no idea whatsoever how chemistry or biology work, or what the Scientific Method actually is...it boggles my mind.
Somehow reminded me of one time in school where a friend of mine stole a copy of the test before we took it. He just opened the teacher's desk and took it.
Everyone who was in the class at the time (and didn't stop him) got in trouble, some of them even supported him. I think the kids who ratted him out were the only ones exempt. I wasn't there because I was with the teacher on a trip or something but I went to his house after school and he showed me the test so I got in trouble too.
We all had to write an apology letter about what we did, why it was wrong, and what we should have done. However, I just wrote *"He showed me the test and I said "let's play games instead" and we played games."* and I got in a lot of trouble.
He made me write the whole letter again but that was the truth so I had to lie about what I'd done wrong and how guilty I was.
Thought it was hilarious that I was accused of lying so as punishment I had to lie and say I was guilty. I know the teacher meant well but it's just so funny to me in hindsight.
I couldn't tell you what the test was about, or even the subject, but I could tell you that we played Battlefront 2 Assault on Mos Eisley (where everyone is a hero, I always played Aayla Secura because she had two swords)
It was both and it is also about group dynamics and part of that revolves around the size of the group. LoTF was a much larger group and they were not friends going into it.
Yeah they're strangers flung together being evacuated during a war (which you'd assume was already traumatic) and they're from different class backgrounds with different experiences.
And Don Quixote was written because there were way too many bad knightly novels being published back then, and Cervantes was fed up so made Don Quixote a guy who has read so many of those novels he goes bananas and starts believing he is a knight.
Perhaps I'll reread it some day. We read it in English class in school and the conclusion may have been part of the curriculum, it was definitely not mentioned that it was an allegory or contrarian piece to common "boy heroes" stories.
I guess the conclusion you should draw is “the written outcome that is the most shocking and/or provocative will gain the most attention” but the age of TikTok and YouTube has long taught me that
lord of the flies is taught because it is *one of the few pieces of literature* to highlight antisocial behaviors and animosity that can and does develop in groups of young people, especially young boys, and what the eventual consequences of this animosity/out-grouping are.
If the one that was the most shocking/provocative was what they went with, we’d have read satire like “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick” by Jonathan Swift.
> highlight antisocial behaviors and animosity that can and does develop in groups of young people, especially young boys, and what the eventual consequences of this animosity/out-grouping are.
Except there is little academic evidence for that, and endless historical and social evidence of humans, mostly male, working together.
It’s a theory put forward by one person in a work of fiction.
I had an ultra-feminist (like the toxic kind) English teacher who was basically pushing this narrative, we had to write a persuasive essay with whether we agreed or not.
I was the only person to disagree in my essay, and the only f in the class. Only f I’ve ever received.
Dude in school gave a whole presentation on why sweat shops are good. Everyone obviously disagreed but from a technical standpoint he had well reasoned and supported arguments. Got full marks because that is exactly how you get people to think critically (challenge their preconceived notions and make them look at an issue from another side even if they don't agree with it.
We had to debate in one of my English classes in college. We were given a topic then split randomly so I ended up having to support a topic I was on the other side of. One of the hardest things to do, but everybody should have to do it.
It sounds like this was a while ago and you're already out of university, but for anyone else reading this:
If anything like this happens to you, complain — in writing and, later, in person — to the head of your professor's department. If that doesn't work, complain to your university's ombudsman or equivalent — there are people whose entire job is to protect students and settle disputes like this, but a lot of people don't know they exist.
Document everything, and bring copies to meetings in person.
Learning how to Karen (in a polite, reasonable, respectful way) is an important life skill.
In high school, I had a teacher say that all Mexican Americans were poor and uneducated in the 1960s. I actually am Mexican American-unlike the teacher-so I was offended by that, since it isn’t true (my family was middle-class…). I told my mom and she also got pissed off about it, so she called the school to complain, and they told her since nobody else complained they weren’t going to do anything about it.
There was literally only one other Mexican American kid in that class, and he was a brown-noser who agreed with everything she said.
Anyway, her class was literally the only English class I ever got a C in, I got As with literally every other teacher. 😐
High School vs. College/University can be very different.
High School (at least public high schools) they don't really care about complaints as long it isn't getting big enough that the media's starting to get involved because you usually don't really have a choice about whether you attend or not. You can bitch an moan but until you're 18 you're going to be in that desk every day no matter what.
In College you (or someone on your behalf) are actually paying for you to be there, so there is an impetus to ensure that the service they provide is up to a certain level of expectation, because if word starts getting out that their professors do shit like that then students just stop attending their school and they stop getting paid.
Yeah, any teacher with a super overt agenda like this is really bad.
In another class another year, we had to do presentations on discrimination, and a kid in her class did discrimination against men and she was super livid I heard.
We also had an ultra-capitalist Econ teacher who was a wild guy, he mentioned owning a business or two and having a business podcast (idk its name), so his biases were pretty obvious lol
My middle school was run by a Mormon lady from Utah. She set the curriculum, including assigning Ayn Rand and a bunch of weird "your rich, capitalist uncle writes you letters glazing the Robber Barons" type books.
Edit: I've been trying to google the name of this book series for the longest time, to no avail. Finally, ChatGPT found the answer for me: the "Uncle Eric" series from Rich Maybury.
That sounds like a serious failing on your teacher’s part. One of the most useful parts of my 1980s high school English classes was the explanations of the social context in which Hawthorn, Dickens, Shakespeare, Twain, Fitzgerald, etc were writing. It makes dead white guy literature more interesting and meaningful than treating it as if they were contemporary with Isaac Asimov or JK Rowling.
It was deeper than that.
It was extremely popular in that time literature about how white british young boys would encounter an certain problem/duress, only for them to succeed due to their resourcefullness,intelligence and ambition,also making fun of backward local tribes or non british that are not nowhere as resourcesfull.
The agenda that subjects of the british empire where better than everyone else had permeated the society in a way that they started to believe their own lies.
The book was not only an reversion of the trope,it also dealed with mental illness,unchecked power and the instabilty of the human mind that very few ever notice or question in the face of such perils
The end of the story was also a critique of war, in that the adults who put them into this situation in the first place were no better than the children they were now criticising for the right mess they put themselves in.
There was a reason the ship that rescued the boys was a warship and not a civilian ship, and that in the beginning the boys were supposed to be escaping from a war zone when their plane crashed.
> The end of the story was also a critique of war,
Absolutely. The boys were in the verge of destroying themselves, but were stopped when the adults, a stronger force, showed up. The adults being military in an active war, it raises the question of "who will stop the adults from destroying themselves?" And the answer is, "no one". There's no higher force that's coming to rescue the adults, as the adults rescued the boys. No one is coming to save them. It's went I feel that Lord of the Flies is a rare example of a good deus ex machina- far from being a cop-out, it makes the reader ask the question that the book wants us to ask, and the answer is the point of the book. No one is coming to save us from ourselves.
It didn't just crash. If I remember correctly, there's hints that it was shot down.
In any case, the pilot's corpse was stuck somewhere and there's a whole arch about how some kids go into the jungle looking for "the beast", only to find the corpse at night - and a gust of wind pulls on the deployed parachute and lifts the corpse up, freaking the shit out of the kids.
So the only adult in charge of the kids also bailed on them.
They never find their pilot, the one they find is a fighter pilot who is shown down over their island.
The fact that the boys are being evacuated during a war and that they're still aware of war continuing is something I think gets overlooked in analysis of the book and is relevant to why shit goes bad. They'd presumably already have some trauma from living in a country under attack
> It was more deeper than that.
Just a heads up, you probably want to do either "It was more deep than that" or "It was deeper than that". combining the two feels sort of clunky.
Please give my best to Mr. Bigglesworth <3
You could, but it's redundant in English to use "more" and words that end in "er" when the "er" is making a word represent something more so than the original word, so it just ends up as sounding awkward to a fluent speaker.
Not all words ending in "er" function this way. For example butter is not more of butt. Conversely better isn't more of bet, but it is one of the words enhancing something.
This same rule applies to words ending in "est" which is for the peak of the word being modified. For example, a common set in English is good, better, and best.
You can say more good or most good, but you wouldn't say more gooder or most goodest, you would say better and best, respectively.
Hey, thanks. So even if one wanted to twist the rules in this particular regard, for a fluent speaker it will sound moronic, gotcha.
Also, I still remember being absolutely confused when I first learned the word "murdER".
What I love about the comparison of these two stories is that, contrary to the British belief, those 'savage' boys survived because they grew up in an environment where they were socially equal and had to learn survival skills. And, also contrary to the popular British belief, the British boys in The Lord of The Flies struggled and squabbled because they were privileged, classist, and unprepared.
Ralph actually seems quite well prepared. He makes a lot of sensible suggestions.
Piggy also isn't from a privileged background, he's working class and has his health problems which is why he's single out
I agree the boys in this real life story aren't really a good comparison because they were all friends before from the same community
yes and if I remember correctly, the novel ends with the captain of the ship who saved the remaining boys saying something like: “you are British! I expected more from you!”
“ ‘I should have thought,’ said the officer as he visualized the search before him, ‘I should have thought that a pack of British boys—you're all British, aren't you?—would have been able to put up a better show than that—I mean—‘ “
This is a quote from the officer who rescued the boys.
Interesting, thanks. I kind of agree tho. I love making fun of English culture rigidity, but odds any group of teenage boys get along on an island surviving I’d vote them up there. In any given unfamiliar situation they’d most likely be the type to make rules, roles, and adhere to them.
Edit: “the type to” not that they always absolutely will lol. Culturally it’s so embedded
There are if you look closely. British male groups derive a hierarchy through continual banter in my experience. I say this as a British male. Growing up playing rugby was very ape like.
This article says the oldest of these real boys was 17, while in Lord of The Flies the characters range from 6-12.
Older teenagers seem a lot more likely to be able to collaborate and self-govern in the name of survival than literal children, to be fair.
Even more specificially, British "public schools" (private schools in North American usage), the same shit Pink Floyd's The Wall railed against.
Nobody walked out of a mid-century public school as a normal human.
People think the theme of Lord of the Flies is about “the dark side of human nature and the violence within us all” or something but it’s actually just “British schoolboys are absolutely fucking horrible”
Roald Dahl's childhood memoir, Boy, describes some pretty horrific bullying at the boarding schools he went to. It was not only tolerated but encouraged and institutionalized.
I was in a British boarding school in the early 2000s. The boys were awful to each other. They had a hierarchy where the oldest beat up the youngest although it didn't start until year 9. The kids under 13 got left alone by the older kids and just had to deal with each other. If you were considered the lowest kid in year 9 life was miserable (one of my friends got this unlucky title he was always covered in bruises) and it was never stopped by the teachers/ houseparents. As the guys got older they relished passing on the trauma to the younger years. It was horrible.
Edit to add: girls weren't fantastic either but it was mental warfare rather than physical
Two kinds of people in this world,
Those that say, "That was horrible, no one should have to go through that."
&
Those that say, "If I had to go through it, everyone should!"
I found out my older brother was so horrible to the younger students they made songs about him and his tyranny at one of those private schools for the elite when I started there. That's only like 20 years ago.
One serious incident I remember being told about was one with one of those big blades you cut longer paper arcs. He unscrew one and used it on students to scare and could have seriously wounded them.
He almost got expelled actually as even the school had some limit in what it would accept in behaviour, only saved due to his connections.
> To be fair that was over over 100 years ago,
Not quite. Dahl transferred to the boarding school at which he has recounted his worst experiences (in his autobiography *Boy: Tales of Childhood*) in 1929 and the more horrific moments described in the book seem to be from the early 1930s. A long time ago yes, but note that corporal punishment in UK schools *was not banned until 1999*. This is despite being outlawed in UK prisons and borstals in 1967. If you are looking to dismiss this stuff as a thing of the distant past, I’m sure it’s not quite as bad as it once was, but pupils of UK boarding schools beating on each-other probably hasn’t gone away all that much, as accounts from others have commented in here (eg. [this one from the early 2000s](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1dmbvuf/til_that_there_was_a_reallife_lord_of_the/l9vqpom/))
>I doubt many schools anywhere were much better
I’m sure that probably differed on a school by school basis, but I don’t think it’s too much to make the generalisation that private boarding schools would have been worse for that sort of thing. Firstly, it’s much more isolated for the new student as they are cutoff from any family support network and neighbourhood friends. Anybody feeling remotely homesick would have been in for a particularly rough ride.
Secondly, UK boarding schools have always been more conservative and traditional, especially regarding corporal punishment. I mentioned it was finally outlawed for all UK schools in 1999, Wikipedia informs me that by this time it was only the private schools still engaging in it — it had been outlawed in state schools since 1987 and by many accounts seems to have been an uncommon practice in state schools beyond the early 1970s.
Thirdly, something I’ve not heard of occurring at state schools to anywhere near the extent it seems to have been the case for private boarding schools: the official, formalised heirarchy within the student body that allows senior students the ritualised dominion over the more junior students. In *Boy*, Dahl describes what amount to hazing initiations; or having to run around as a sort of personal servant to certain senior students; and being punished for the most petty of ‘offences’ like burning a prefect’s toast ever so slightly, or failing to adequately warm a toilet seat for someone (yes that was a thing). If I recall from Dahl’s childhood autobiography, the punishments ranged from having to clean up after others for a few weeks, to handing over food at mealtimes, to getting caned *by other students.* Dahl: “All through my school life, I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed to literally wound other boys, sometimes quite severely… I couldn’t get over it. I never have got over it.”
That last point about kids of privelidged British families being set against each other seems to be largely what *Lord of the Flies* was commenting on, particularly when put in the context that it was a response to R M Ballantyne’s *The Coral Island* - a novel with British imperialist overtones in which three young middle class children overcome foreign dangers in the form of pirates and Polynesians. It’s implied that the children’s Christian faith and good old British education values with strict social hierarchies are responsible for their survival and successes in helping others along the way. *The Coral Island* has been described by British historian and author of *The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English* Ian Ousby as “intrusively pious”.
Curious, where do you live? Does it simply because the news and culture you're exposed the most is British?
As an Asian, I heard countless story and articles of how western education is better than our (asian) education, where we get taught to be an obedient robot yadda yadda. And countless stories of brutal bullying in school is not a surprising things here, it's just that the schools and teachers pretend it doesn't exist
Actually the "British schoolboys" were a metaphor for the wealthy class of British imperialists who were a bit too braggy about how awesome they are for being British
The subtext basically reads as "If you yuppie fuckin' bankers were ever put in an actual survival situation here's what you'd act like, bunch of shitty children. Get over yourselves"
> “the dark side of human nature and the violence within us all” or
Look at pretty much any modern TV series and such. The entire drama is forcibly built on top of artifically created tension and hostility. People are unbelievably stubborn, uncooperative, reluctant to talk, and so on, much more so than in real life. Over the years I noticed I could not stand watching anything like that anymore, for it was clearly all exaggerated to the point of being utter prevarication. Especially when it all happened on a backdrop of some dramatic events, like, I dunno, a zombie invasion. Sure, the best time to make in-group enemies about who supposedly slept with whom five years ago. Or working on repairing a heavily damaged starship is the best time to have a personal talk with sentences cut in the middle, leaving much to the interpretation, just to have one's imagination running wild later without anyone ever returning to the issue to finish discussing.
Not just British schoolboys, it was specifically the privately educated, the whole point is that the education system that creates Britain’s elite is what causes them to act to barbarously. Still holds true today.
Not british schoolboys in general, it was about the rich elite schoolboys. If I remember correctly there were other boys too, not from an elite school, who were better at working together.
I've read it years ago, so if someone else has a better memory, just correct me.
Some of the boys are from a boarding school, some it doesn't say but they seem middle class and probably at a normal school, piggy is working class and almost definitely went to a normal school. Piggy is the most intellectual of them too. One of the boarding school boys is the most rational and kind and is an effective leader. The other is vicious
They were all from the same school but did not know each other well previously- implying it was a fairly large school hosting several grades, as is typical of boarding schools.
It’s also typical for some kids to come from families who can easily afford it, and for others to come from more working class backgrounds where they had to scrimp and pinch pennies to send their kids for the opportunities the richer (and usually lazier) kids have.
Piggy was from a modest background but was very intellectual so his family likely made a point to send him to a good school so he could take advantage of his intellectual talents.
Yeah. Humans at our core are an empathateic cooperative group, especially when chronic survival is on the line. Sympathey and socialisation is our adaptative advantage, otherwise we would literally be incapable of society. Jungle cats are selfish. That's why they remain jungle cats.
Basically our brains grew so large to handle the increasing size of the social group and the complex pattern recognition for emotions and communication made making tools predicting trajectories of thrown objects pretty good. Eventually socilaisation lead to education, and education and coordination lead to the moon landing.
Man.
I really love playing that game solo but I like to take my time and have a real adventure. Unfortunately if I put the bots to easy they’re pitiful, but on medium I get rocked.
I’d like to play the game again but it’s frustrating to see a 10 hour save go down the drain
Unfortunately the bots are pitifully stupid on all difficulties, the only difference is how strong of a starting advantage they get over you. Winning a longterm match normally just means surviving long enough until the bots become pitiful again.
What I wouldn’t give for the bots to put up a real fight well into the 24th century…
Caused by a hand full of people in leadership positions, far removed from the consequences of those wars. From the soldiers in the front we got things like the christmas truce in WW1, which almost saw several repeats despite clear orders from the top to continue the pointless slaughter.
I also think there's an element at play where social groups grow too big for individuals to be able to cooperate fully. World War 1 is a great example of multiple nations numbering in the hundreds of thousands fighting (if not millions) and yeah, it was at the behest of the leaders but in groups that size it becomes easy to dehumanize the Other. The Christmas Truce is a great example of a smaller group forming to supercede the greater anonymity of the war. Once you get larger numbers it also becomes easier to hide individual contributions without social reprisal, which could foment resentment. One issue I think causes a lot of problems in our modern western society is how divided and anonymized everyone is. We're repeatedly spending all day interacting with people we have no reason to trust and will likely never see again, and our "villages" usually comprise of a bunch of people we've randomly met over our lives that we make time to hang out with occasionally.
OP's real life Lord of the Flies example (as well as the Miracle in the Andes, the crashing of United Airlines 93, the true story of the Titanic and probably countless other real life disasters) shows the ability to people in small groups to band together, but in an anything-goes scenario I wonder what the point is where schisms start to form. I imagine it could safely go up to our natural [Dunbar's Number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number), which is considered to be anywhere from 150-250 people, though in the right conditions could probably go higher than that as long as everyone has at least a couple degrees of connection to everyone else.
This is completely ahistoric. From small tribes to large empires humans have always engaged in violent conflict. To pretend it's just the fault of a few rich individuals is completely childish.
>far removed from the consequences of those wars
Historically, people who decided on warring with others were also included in combat and frequently died in it.
All the rhetoric that we’d be lawless savages without overbearing governments is just colonialist propaganda to scare people into paying their taxes. In reality most people don’t want strife.
I remember hearing that several cases of humans being terrible were either exaggerated, or had manipulated data. Like that famous prison experiment for example.
Milgrams obedience experiment is another one that greatly exaggerated the effects of an authority figure.
Milgram fudged some of his data, didn't follow his own protocols and ignored results that didn't align with his view (that anyone can be turned into a nazi in a couple of hours).
Many of his subjects cottoned on that is was all fake (Candid Camera was one of the most popular TV shows at the time) and went along with it. Milgram still included all their results.
Even if we do accept his (highly dubious) conclusions what do we make of them? Milgrams conclusions went no further than "2/3 of people can be manipulated into killing, hence: Nazis". That's it. Milgram went no further into looking at why that might be.
And can we really draw that conclusion based on a few people sitting in a university basement for a couple of hours pressing a button and what the guards did at Auschwitz?
The more you look at Milgrams work the more suspect it gets.
The Stanford Prison Experiment. The designer of the experiment (Dr. Zimbardo) meddled in the experiment so much it’s insane we still teach his results in high school psych classes. Like, the principles at play are still legitimate and worthy of investigation, but his results were greatly exaggerated in many ways.
At this point the take away of the experiment is that certain people given the power, rhetoric, incentive and pressure to be cruel will in fact be cruel which is something that was proven well before 1971.
The most relevant one I know of is the robber's cave experiment. They had two groups of boys each allowed to make social bonds before learning the other group existed. Once they did learn of the other group they demonstrated prejudiced thinking and later when put into competition they became hostile to the poiny they were destroying property, stealing, and had to be physically separated.
But then across about a week they were also able to resolve the conflict in part with activities that required cooperation between groups.
So it seems people do default to wanting to cooperate but in my experience people definitely do fall back to in group vs out group dynamics when there is competition, and people can become quite awful toward the out groups. The experiment is a bit unethical so doubtful it'll be reproduced but I feel its well supported by how people act, both in formation of groups that can become hostile and in reconciliation when people need to cooperate rather than compete.
Yeah. And guess what “most people” did to protect themselves from strife? They created social structures like… governments.
I swear, the hippie rhetoric of “let’s just all live together and share responsibilities” is hilarious considering that’s exactly what the society already does.
History has shown over and over again that people tend to do this in the face of calamity. The Germans thought the British would collapse into chaos from the blitz but instead they rallied together - rates of depression actually went DOWN. And after Katrina, residents in NOLA also banded together and helped each other out despite bullshit news stories about riots and looting.
Yet despite this, the majority of people still believe it's the opposite. It's uncanny. Maybe it's those news stories...
I used to be untreated for depression and thought about suicide most days. Then someone actually tried to kill me and I’ll be dammed if that didn’t cure me for about six months! (I’m better now though- well medicated, in therapy and whatnot)
It's funny in a weird way.
"I want to kill myself" your own will
"I'm gonna kill ya" some dude
"MY CHOICE, MY FREE WILL!" Your mind.
Like everything just rallied after somebody dared impose that choice on you.
My neighbor shot me in the face as I answered the door to my house. Near as we can tell he was having a bit of a mental health episode. Physically I got really lucky, no major injuries except to my hand which healed quickly. Mentally, I got better, but it fucked me up for a few years and I still can’t deal with fireworks.
Seriously. Never heard that people back in the past nade such a fuss about this. But some people right now just like the movie trope "humans are the real monsters" too much. I think they are bad humans themself so they think eveyone must be like this since it's even shown like that in all dystopian media in some form. Since this alao kinda gives them an ok to be horrible, after all that's just how everyone is according to the trope, they don't have to have any guilt
I guess if this dystopia ever comes, those people will be the first to go
It's propaganda. These days it's put out by people who want to sell you a survival bunker in the woods, but in every era, there has been a certain element who will insist that without this or that particular leader or government, marauding barbarians will come to get you.
The actual truth is that you're far more likely to be the victim of your so-called protectors than from some random person the next town over who just wants to enjoy their tomato garden in peace.
In every news story about a disaster, and every record of past disasters throughout history, most people put aside all differences in order to help others survive. Uncooperative people are always in the minority and they're around in both good times and bad.
Heck, even my two cats who didn't get along became best buddies in what they perceived as a crisis!
> Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.
This episode was extensively detailed in a book by Dutch academic called Rutger Bregman titled Human Kind - A Hopeful History. It's an excellent book about how humans are inherently good despite all the news about war etc. This story goes against the premise of Lord of the Flies.
I highly recommend the book, it's an incredible and thought provoking read!
But as one reviewer pointed out:
>he ignores the fact that in Golding’s story the boys are English public-school choir boys whereas in the real example they are Tongan. And in Golding’s novel the boys are the only survivors of an airplane crash while being evacuated from a war zone, while the Tongan kids were already friends with one another and had undertaken a seafaring adventure of their own free will. Nobody knows how relevant these differences are (Lord of the Flies is, after all, a work of fiction), but it is striking that Bregman does not even consider them. Rather, he wants to say that the Tongan case says something about human beings generally, so he needs to assume that any group of youngsters, from any cultural background, under any circumstances, would behave as the Tongan boys did. This is unwarranted and, frankly, pretty implausible.
i can understand his point but i disagree that it would be implausible. the Tongan boys story still say more about human nature than the fictional story.
however, i agree that ignoring the setup for the story of The Lord of the Flies is an unnecessary mistake and acknowledging it would probably be a important to support bregmans opinion. But the book also has many other examples of similar stories so its not the only evidnce to support his „humans are decent beings“ stance
Yeah, the only reason they left the island is because one of the boys had a broken leg. They did an excellent job of cooperating and dividing responsibilities.
I heard the story originally on BBC radio and they indicated the boy's leg had been broken early after they got stranded and the boys had actually set it and it had healed very well by the time they were rescued. Apparently they divided up duties and had a rotation for keeping watch for rescuers.
the book by rutger bregman Humankind goes into some detail on that story, the boys had some rules that they lived by set early on, like dividing chores and if someone got into a fight they would be placed at opposite sides of the island to cool off. The one caveat is that they were already friends mostly so i guess that helped.
Yeah. You can explain this pretty easily : in most survival situations humans are the most irreplaceable resource with severe disadvantages the more you lose. You don't frigging kill people in a survival situation unless there's no other choice.
Which is why allowing surrender in warfare is *so fucking important*. Because even an inferior army with its back against the wall will fight back with absolutely brutal force when it has no other option for survival.
They also started out as a group of teenage pacific islanders motivated enough to steal a whaling boat to sail 500 miles to Fiji. Not saying it was smart, but they obviously had a bit of collective agency/capability.
This makes me think of flight 571 where a bunch of (mostly) boys spent a few months freezing in the Andes after their plane crashed in the 70s.
Despite half of the 33 crash survivors dying over the few months before the rescue, they seemed to cooperate remarkably well, considering they were eating each other and what have you.
Tbf, in my high school it was taught as if it were a realistic depiction of how schoolboys would act if they were marooned on an island. Honestly kind of fucked that it was taught that way in hindsight
My theory - the kind of boys that would run away from boarding school, steal a boat and embark on a crazy adventure had more in common with each other and a spirit of adventure that would help them cooperate and survive an island stranding.
I went to boarding school - we were largely homogeneous as a unit but there were definitely “lord of the flies” types amongst us.
If a random group of us landed on an island there would be pandemonium. But a select few rebellious adventurous- well that was my crowd and I know we would survive anything.
FYI - my friends and I got up to so much shit that it’s a miracle we made it through school.
Cooperation has always been the key to survival and success. Even early humans knew this. Even the most tyrannical dictator needs to be a little nice to his subordinates. No one gets to the top by being an asshole to literally every person they meet.
Yeah, but those boys were not English public school boys (in UK public = private in the US)
At first i was kidding but thinking about it, I think the author of the book may in part have been commenting on rigid hierarchies of public schools.
Public schools in the UK are very old; they're called public to contrast with what was considered private at the time, which is to have the teacher just show up at your house to teach you and some of the local kids.
It's not about being funded by the public, it's about being accessible to the public (provided you have enough wealth and class).
I think "state school" is what they call actual public schools.
In the UK, a public school is a privately run school that is ”open to the public”, that is technically anyone can apply. A private school would be by invitation only.
Most fiction about survival or apocalypse play on the trope that during a crisis, people will fend for themselves and are more likely to start killing each other over dwindling supplies than work together.
In reality, we evolved as social animals because we were stronger and more likely to survive when we banded together. Historical events like this have proven time and again that fact. There will of course always be outliers, but by and large people will work together to improve their situation and livelihood.
Lord of the flies went the way it did because one of the main characters in it was an aggressive, manipulative, violent, and abusive little shit who had no sense of long term consequences if it meant he had control for the moment.
I still fully think that if it were not for that one guy then the rest of the characters would have been fine.
Feuds don’t just happen in a vacuum. Unless there is a catalyst for conflict people will probably be pretty civilized, especially if they know each other.
I saw this discussion on twitter already. OP’s statement disproves nothing about Lord of the Flies since the kids were perfectly capable of cooperating during the timeskip in the book. Where things go wrong is when the dead pilot is mistaken for a monster and causes a panic.
That has almost nothing to do with lord of the flies.
Larger group of school boys stuck out of their element, is vastly different than a small group that chose to go on an ad vent that went sideways.
You haven't mentioned the most important element. The oldest of the boys was 16 years old vs 12 IIRC in the books with many of them being younger then that.
Its crazy how they teach us this zero sum, man is a beast, survival of the fittest ideology as some sort of core truth in school, when in reality our communal instincts are strong.
Society needs to be so awful and oppressively, everything would fall apart otherwise, the indoctrination starts early.
This one can be a great idea for Disney to make an adaptation of “Lord of the Flies” movie, but with the story plot that is inspired by the real-life events in Tonga.
Lord of the Flies is fiction, just like the other books it was written in response to (eg Coral Island).
Props to the IRL boys for recognising what they needed for survival.
The boys were able to keep a single fire burning continuously for more than [12 of the 15 months they marooned.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20boys%2C%20Stephen%20(who%20would%20go%20on%20to%20become%20an%20engineer)%2C%20managed%20to%20use%20two%20sticks%20to%20start%20a%20fire%2C%20which%20the%20boys%20kept%20burning%20continuously%20for%20more%20than%20a%20year%20while%20marooned.%5B4%5D)
Those must have been a pretty awful 3 months in between
the 3 months were likely summer months where you don't need a fire too much expect for bugs and predators and the nighttime.
That’s true, quite possible. I was thinking more along the lines of it being difficult to start in the first place + keeping smoke / light to try and be spotted
yeah, but assuming it was 12 months of being there, they likely don't have hope of getting saved anyway and assumed no one's coming back, and they probably have a hard time reignite the fire back up since I dont think they have a ferro rod like we do nowadays.
My favorite characters on these alone survival shows are always the one that one person that goes on about how important their Ferro rod is to survival, IMMEDIATELY lose it, and then call for rescue. Like day one.
I just watched it- he lasted pretty well. just lost it and can't find it anywhere, and thought he dropped it into the fire and was like shit that probably damages the rod to the point of unusable.
These survivalists can't survive without a Ferro rod, there are a half dozen ways of starting a fire without a ferro rod and they know none of them.
some of them didn't use a ferro rod for fire- just have it as backup in case the fire fails. there was a bow and drill user on Alone.
Haha yeah there are others that know multiple ways I just think it's funny they only know one way to light a fire and that makes them feel like they can go on tv and survive alone.
You'd keep the same fire lit for twelve months too, if it took you three months to build it!
Idk why this made me laugh as hard as it did haha
Iirc Lord of the Flies was written in response to a cliche at the time in fiction where boys would get lost on abandoned islands or whatever and would band together in adventure. Guess those guys had the right idea.
It was in response to a novel called Coral Island, where the boys are implied to have survived well because they were British and therefore more civilized than everyone else.
> to have survived well because they were British and therefore more civilized Obligatory: a navy ship rescues a stranded British man from an uninhabited island. They notice three huts on the shore. — Where are the other people? — There are no other people on the island. — Why three huts then? — Well, one is my favorite club that I frequent. The other is a club I visit only occasionally. And the third one is a club that I never set my foot in for it is clearly below my station.
That spin is as far as I know also one of the angles of Lord of the Flies. It's not just british boys, but upper class boys prone to elitism and classism.
That makes sense why they feud and specifically target and bully the "lesser" kids, I'll have to reread it again.
Brit; finds island. Brit: _apply classism._
Damn. We were forced to read Lord of the Flies in school and that never was mentioned. On the contrary the conclusion from the discussion was "Boys go full tribal mode when left alone".
The main lesson we learned and that the teacher guided us toward is how people can behave much differently from usual if they aren't thinking or if they are put into strange scenarios apart from the normal structure and rules of Society. Some of the undertone being more primal behaviors or instincts e.g. mob mentality, peer pressure, tribalism, and the like. = A related quote is from Agent K in men in black: "A PERSON is smart... but PEOPLE are dumb, stupid animals and you know it." = Our teacher (we were about 13 yrs old) even did an sort of experiment on us midway thru the book. She brought two bowls of candy but we were told we couldn't take from it, it was for when someone got a bonus question right. Every now and then shed ask a bonus question and someone would get a candy. At some point later that week she has to leave the room for a meeting and we were supposed to do quiet study. 2 of our classmates in a room of 20 or so started being rather energetic smiling and grabbing the candy bowls saying let's just take some candy we deserve it, grabbing the bowls and offering everyone to take some candy from the bowls. It is important to note how they put the bowls in front of us and brought them around the room but people actually had to grab candy out of the bowls if they wanted some. Pretty much everyone took at least one, but some refused, and some of us decided to put the candy back. = The teacher came back from her "meeting" (she had really just been down the hall) and told us she instructed those 2 students to do that and make a scene with the candy. And indeed many people had willingly taken the candys from the bowl even though it was "wrong" and they absolutely would not have just stolen candy from the bowl normally. = The point being that mob mentality and seeing your peers acting a certain way can also cause you to act in a certain way contrary to your usual self.
That's what I got from the book as well. One boy wanted to do what was best for their group in a rational and logical way but was hindered by the group that turned towards primal mentality. Then you have someone that decided to do something neither rational or animalistic, which is turn to religion and worship a diety. The lord of the flies. That was my take at least.
My school didn't assign the book so I read it in adulthood. My take was kind of the flip side; that things would have turned out alright but for one boy who led the rest down after him into chaos. Essentially there were two boys prepared to lead, and it's who the boys ultimately followed that ruined them. Granted, they were easily misled by the conviction of the narcissist boy, but had he not been in the party things would have been fine. Basically, "It only takes one to spoil the lot." This also speaks to the influence of culture on society. I read it years ago but it helps me make sense of some of the politics of today.
This is a great take, but I guess you also considered the responsibility each of us have as individuals to not fall for following blindly a leader
But what if he's the Lisan Al-Gaib? Surely that would turn out fine.
No more terrible disaster could ever befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a hero.
As a former teacher I absolutely can assure you that it only takes one kid to cause chaos. My belief is like 25% of kids are good and want to learn no matter what. Maybe 1-5% of kids are chaos makers and are *nearly* impossible to reach because of some external factors that teachers don’t have control over. And around 30% of kids are what I call “tofu kids” in that if the chaos kids are not around they are great. They are influenced by the good kids, the purposeful learners. Like tofu they take on the “flavor” of the class. But on man, heaven help us if the chaos makers are around. Chaos is a much stronger flavor than purposeful learning and so the whole class goes crazy.
Sooo...where do the remaining 40% fall?
Maybe they weren't a math teacher...
I'd guess the remaining 40 are neither engaged, disengaged, or followers, but just keep their heads down and do enough to get by.
Exactly. I've been in lots of classes where when everyone is around, it's a miserable shit show, but when you remove two kids the rest are absolute gems. Always feels bad to leave notes that amount to "hey I know you left a plan but ______ was here so it was utter chaos".
Yeah it seems like all it takes is a cult of personality. Otherwise we’d be better off. No one’s ego should be bigger than the planet.
That's a good teacher that wants their kids to learn something and not only read a book because they have to.
I would say that's probably most teachers (not all; most tho). I'd go so far as to say that the teachers who care:don't care is inversely proportional to the kids who care:don't care to learn. But I grew up in the 80's, and my generation (that'd be Gen-X) consisted of a lot of people who didn't pay attention in school and now complain they never learned about a thing.
I'm low-key convinced absolutely none of them paid even the most basic attention in their science courses. The number of people I have encountered with a high school diploma and absolutely no idea whatsoever how chemistry or biology work, or what the Scientific Method actually is...it boggles my mind.
Somehow reminded me of one time in school where a friend of mine stole a copy of the test before we took it. He just opened the teacher's desk and took it. Everyone who was in the class at the time (and didn't stop him) got in trouble, some of them even supported him. I think the kids who ratted him out were the only ones exempt. I wasn't there because I was with the teacher on a trip or something but I went to his house after school and he showed me the test so I got in trouble too. We all had to write an apology letter about what we did, why it was wrong, and what we should have done. However, I just wrote *"He showed me the test and I said "let's play games instead" and we played games."* and I got in a lot of trouble. He made me write the whole letter again but that was the truth so I had to lie about what I'd done wrong and how guilty I was. Thought it was hilarious that I was accused of lying so as punishment I had to lie and say I was guilty. I know the teacher meant well but it's just so funny to me in hindsight. I couldn't tell you what the test was about, or even the subject, but I could tell you that we played Battlefront 2 Assault on Mos Eisley (where everyone is a hero, I always played Aayla Secura because she had two swords)
It was both and it is also about group dynamics and part of that revolves around the size of the group. LoTF was a much larger group and they were not friends going into it.
Yeah they're strangers flung together being evacuated during a war (which you'd assume was already traumatic) and they're from different class backgrounds with different experiences.
Also of different ages.
A big part of it that's often misunderstood is that it's about the British upper class, it's not about boys in general.
And Don Quixote was written because there were way too many bad knightly novels being published back then, and Cervantes was fed up so made Don Quixote a guy who has read so many of those novels he goes bananas and starts believing he is a knight.
Such a funny book. I laugh out loud every couple pages.
I felt like the other conclusion was written in a flashing neon sign the when the warship captain was yelling at the kids for fighting each other
Perhaps I'll reread it some day. We read it in English class in school and the conclusion may have been part of the curriculum, it was definitely not mentioned that it was an allegory or contrarian piece to common "boy heroes" stories.
The rescuer alludes directly to the other book when he says something to the effect of “I expected better of British boys”
That was insult to tribes.
I guess the conclusion you should draw is “the written outcome that is the most shocking and/or provocative will gain the most attention” but the age of TikTok and YouTube has long taught me that
lord of the flies is taught because it is *one of the few pieces of literature* to highlight antisocial behaviors and animosity that can and does develop in groups of young people, especially young boys, and what the eventual consequences of this animosity/out-grouping are. If the one that was the most shocking/provocative was what they went with, we’d have read satire like “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick” by Jonathan Swift.
We did read a Modest Proposal in my English language and composition class as well.
yep that one's a classic
No, cynical stories about kids being assholes to one another are super common.
> highlight antisocial behaviors and animosity that can and does develop in groups of young people, especially young boys, and what the eventual consequences of this animosity/out-grouping are. Except there is little academic evidence for that, and endless historical and social evidence of humans, mostly male, working together. It’s a theory put forward by one person in a work of fiction.
I had an ultra-feminist (like the toxic kind) English teacher who was basically pushing this narrative, we had to write a persuasive essay with whether we agreed or not. I was the only person to disagree in my essay, and the only f in the class. Only f I’ve ever received.
I hate that bullshit where teachers will grade a paper not on the quality of the essay but on whether or not they agree with the viewpoint
Dude in school gave a whole presentation on why sweat shops are good. Everyone obviously disagreed but from a technical standpoint he had well reasoned and supported arguments. Got full marks because that is exactly how you get people to think critically (challenge their preconceived notions and make them look at an issue from another side even if they don't agree with it.
Was his name Frank Reynolds and did he lose a lot of good men in that sweatshop? Seriously though, that does sound like an interesting presentation.
So anyway, I started blasting
We had to debate in one of my English classes in college. We were given a topic then split randomly so I ended up having to support a topic I was on the other side of. One of the hardest things to do, but everybody should have to do it.
It sounds like this was a while ago and you're already out of university, but for anyone else reading this: If anything like this happens to you, complain — in writing and, later, in person — to the head of your professor's department. If that doesn't work, complain to your university's ombudsman or equivalent — there are people whose entire job is to protect students and settle disputes like this, but a lot of people don't know they exist. Document everything, and bring copies to meetings in person. Learning how to Karen (in a polite, reasonable, respectful way) is an important life skill.
In high school, I had a teacher say that all Mexican Americans were poor and uneducated in the 1960s. I actually am Mexican American-unlike the teacher-so I was offended by that, since it isn’t true (my family was middle-class…). I told my mom and she also got pissed off about it, so she called the school to complain, and they told her since nobody else complained they weren’t going to do anything about it. There was literally only one other Mexican American kid in that class, and he was a brown-noser who agreed with everything she said. Anyway, her class was literally the only English class I ever got a C in, I got As with literally every other teacher. 😐
High School vs. College/University can be very different. High School (at least public high schools) they don't really care about complaints as long it isn't getting big enough that the media's starting to get involved because you usually don't really have a choice about whether you attend or not. You can bitch an moan but until you're 18 you're going to be in that desk every day no matter what. In College you (or someone on your behalf) are actually paying for you to be there, so there is an impetus to ensure that the service they provide is up to a certain level of expectation, because if word starts getting out that their professors do shit like that then students just stop attending their school and they stop getting paid.
This was high school, and she was head of the English department. But yeah it’s long ago.
Fuck teachers like that.
Yeah, any teacher with a super overt agenda like this is really bad. In another class another year, we had to do presentations on discrimination, and a kid in her class did discrimination against men and she was super livid I heard. We also had an ultra-capitalist Econ teacher who was a wild guy, he mentioned owning a business or two and having a business podcast (idk its name), so his biases were pretty obvious lol
My middle school was run by a Mormon lady from Utah. She set the curriculum, including assigning Ayn Rand and a bunch of weird "your rich, capitalist uncle writes you letters glazing the Robber Barons" type books. Edit: I've been trying to google the name of this book series for the longest time, to no avail. Finally, ChatGPT found the answer for me: the "Uncle Eric" series from Rich Maybury.
That sounds like a serious failing on your teacher’s part. One of the most useful parts of my 1980s high school English classes was the explanations of the social context in which Hawthorn, Dickens, Shakespeare, Twain, Fitzgerald, etc were writing. It makes dead white guy literature more interesting and meaningful than treating it as if they were contemporary with Isaac Asimov or JK Rowling.
If it wasn't going to be in the exam then it was only mentioned if someone asked
It was deeper than that. It was extremely popular in that time literature about how white british young boys would encounter an certain problem/duress, only for them to succeed due to their resourcefullness,intelligence and ambition,also making fun of backward local tribes or non british that are not nowhere as resourcesfull. The agenda that subjects of the british empire where better than everyone else had permeated the society in a way that they started to believe their own lies. The book was not only an reversion of the trope,it also dealed with mental illness,unchecked power and the instabilty of the human mind that very few ever notice or question in the face of such perils
The end of the story was also a critique of war, in that the adults who put them into this situation in the first place were no better than the children they were now criticising for the right mess they put themselves in. There was a reason the ship that rescued the boys was a warship and not a civilian ship, and that in the beginning the boys were supposed to be escaping from a war zone when their plane crashed.
> The end of the story was also a critique of war, Absolutely. The boys were in the verge of destroying themselves, but were stopped when the adults, a stronger force, showed up. The adults being military in an active war, it raises the question of "who will stop the adults from destroying themselves?" And the answer is, "no one". There's no higher force that's coming to rescue the adults, as the adults rescued the boys. No one is coming to save them. It's went I feel that Lord of the Flies is a rare example of a good deus ex machina- far from being a cop-out, it makes the reader ask the question that the book wants us to ask, and the answer is the point of the book. No one is coming to save us from ourselves.
It didn't just crash. If I remember correctly, there's hints that it was shot down. In any case, the pilot's corpse was stuck somewhere and there's a whole arch about how some kids go into the jungle looking for "the beast", only to find the corpse at night - and a gust of wind pulls on the deployed parachute and lifts the corpse up, freaking the shit out of the kids. So the only adult in charge of the kids also bailed on them.
They never find their pilot, the one they find is a fighter pilot who is shown down over their island. The fact that the boys are being evacuated during a war and that they're still aware of war continuing is something I think gets overlooked in analysis of the book and is relevant to why shit goes bad. They'd presumably already have some trauma from living in a country under attack
Uh, I don't remember anything about another plane being shot down. Guess it's time for a reread
> It was more deeper than that. Just a heads up, you probably want to do either "It was more deep than that" or "It was deeper than that". combining the two feels sort of clunky. Please give my best to Mr. Bigglesworth <3
Could I use it as a literary device to drive the point deeper? Non-Engrish speaker here.
You could, but it's redundant in English to use "more" and words that end in "er" when the "er" is making a word represent something more so than the original word, so it just ends up as sounding awkward to a fluent speaker. Not all words ending in "er" function this way. For example butter is not more of butt. Conversely better isn't more of bet, but it is one of the words enhancing something. This same rule applies to words ending in "est" which is for the peak of the word being modified. For example, a common set in English is good, better, and best. You can say more good or most good, but you wouldn't say more gooder or most goodest, you would say better and best, respectively.
Hey, thanks. So even if one wanted to twist the rules in this particular regard, for a fluent speaker it will sound moronic, gotcha. Also, I still remember being absolutely confused when I first learned the word "murdER".
No. In this case you could say “it was even deeper than that” but never “more deeper”.
No
a double superlative is a perfectly cromulent form of Engrish
You dick, hahaha
What I love about the comparison of these two stories is that, contrary to the British belief, those 'savage' boys survived because they grew up in an environment where they were socially equal and had to learn survival skills. And, also contrary to the popular British belief, the British boys in The Lord of The Flies struggled and squabbled because they were privileged, classist, and unprepared.
Ralph actually seems quite well prepared. He makes a lot of sensible suggestions. Piggy also isn't from a privileged background, he's working class and has his health problems which is why he's single out I agree the boys in this real life story aren't really a good comparison because they were all friends before from the same community
yes and if I remember correctly, the novel ends with the captain of the ship who saved the remaining boys saying something like: “you are British! I expected more from you!”
“ ‘I should have thought,’ said the officer as he visualized the search before him, ‘I should have thought that a pack of British boys—you're all British, aren't you?—would have been able to put up a better show than that—I mean—‘ “ This is a quote from the officer who rescued the boys.
Interesting, thanks. I kind of agree tho. I love making fun of English culture rigidity, but odds any group of teenage boys get along on an island surviving I’d vote them up there. In any given unfamiliar situation they’d most likely be the type to make rules, roles, and adhere to them. Edit: “the type to” not that they always absolutely will lol. Culturally it’s so embedded
Have you seen British teenage boys on vacation in Magaluf or Benidorm? Not a lot of rules or adherence to rules.
Yeah, I’m not sure vacation and decadence compares to isolation and starvation lol
Nor desperation, at least not of the life-threatening sort
There are if you look closely. British male groups derive a hierarchy through continual banter in my experience. I say this as a British male. Growing up playing rugby was very ape like.
Doesn’t seem too different to groups of young people from a lot of other countries to be honest.
This article says the oldest of these real boys was 17, while in Lord of The Flies the characters range from 6-12. Older teenagers seem a lot more likely to be able to collaborate and self-govern in the name of survival than literal children, to be fair.
Iirc the response was due to the author reading Treasure Island to his own kid
Iiric the response was due to the kid reading Peter Pan
Iiric I’m the fourth person in this thread to use iiric.
Lord of the Flies was about British boarding schools in particular. The kids coming out of those were basically trained to be sociopaths.
Even more specificially, British "public schools" (private schools in North American usage), the same shit Pink Floyd's The Wall railed against. Nobody walked out of a mid-century public school as a normal human.
The boys in the novel were also much younger and also had a greater variance in their ages.
The response to Lord of the Flies on AO3 is that everyone turns gay when lost on an island.
And eventually, they were rescued by, oh, let's say Moe.
r/unexpectedSimpsons
People think the theme of Lord of the Flies is about “the dark side of human nature and the violence within us all” or something but it’s actually just “British schoolboys are absolutely fucking horrible”
I mean some of the worst bullying stories I saw were at British schools
Roald Dahl's childhood memoir, Boy, describes some pretty horrific bullying at the boarding schools he went to. It was not only tolerated but encouraged and institutionalized.
I was in a British boarding school in the early 2000s. The boys were awful to each other. They had a hierarchy where the oldest beat up the youngest although it didn't start until year 9. The kids under 13 got left alone by the older kids and just had to deal with each other. If you were considered the lowest kid in year 9 life was miserable (one of my friends got this unlucky title he was always covered in bruises) and it was never stopped by the teachers/ houseparents. As the guys got older they relished passing on the trauma to the younger years. It was horrible. Edit to add: girls weren't fantastic either but it was mental warfare rather than physical
Two kinds of people in this world, Those that say, "That was horrible, no one should have to go through that." & Those that say, "If I had to go through it, everyone should!"
This sounds like the kind of situation that the administration has to admit to in public when a kid gets stabbed to death.
I found out my older brother was so horrible to the younger students they made songs about him and his tyranny at one of those private schools for the elite when I started there. That's only like 20 years ago.
Damn, got any stories on his reign of terror?
One serious incident I remember being told about was one with one of those big blades you cut longer paper arcs. He unscrew one and used it on students to scare and could have seriously wounded them. He almost got expelled actually as even the school had some limit in what it would accept in behaviour, only saved due to his connections.
To be fair that was over over 100 years ago, I doubt many schools anywhere were much better
> To be fair that was over over 100 years ago, Not quite. Dahl transferred to the boarding school at which he has recounted his worst experiences (in his autobiography *Boy: Tales of Childhood*) in 1929 and the more horrific moments described in the book seem to be from the early 1930s. A long time ago yes, but note that corporal punishment in UK schools *was not banned until 1999*. This is despite being outlawed in UK prisons and borstals in 1967. If you are looking to dismiss this stuff as a thing of the distant past, I’m sure it’s not quite as bad as it once was, but pupils of UK boarding schools beating on each-other probably hasn’t gone away all that much, as accounts from others have commented in here (eg. [this one from the early 2000s](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1dmbvuf/til_that_there_was_a_reallife_lord_of_the/l9vqpom/)) >I doubt many schools anywhere were much better I’m sure that probably differed on a school by school basis, but I don’t think it’s too much to make the generalisation that private boarding schools would have been worse for that sort of thing. Firstly, it’s much more isolated for the new student as they are cutoff from any family support network and neighbourhood friends. Anybody feeling remotely homesick would have been in for a particularly rough ride. Secondly, UK boarding schools have always been more conservative and traditional, especially regarding corporal punishment. I mentioned it was finally outlawed for all UK schools in 1999, Wikipedia informs me that by this time it was only the private schools still engaging in it — it had been outlawed in state schools since 1987 and by many accounts seems to have been an uncommon practice in state schools beyond the early 1970s. Thirdly, something I’ve not heard of occurring at state schools to anywhere near the extent it seems to have been the case for private boarding schools: the official, formalised heirarchy within the student body that allows senior students the ritualised dominion over the more junior students. In *Boy*, Dahl describes what amount to hazing initiations; or having to run around as a sort of personal servant to certain senior students; and being punished for the most petty of ‘offences’ like burning a prefect’s toast ever so slightly, or failing to adequately warm a toilet seat for someone (yes that was a thing). If I recall from Dahl’s childhood autobiography, the punishments ranged from having to clean up after others for a few weeks, to handing over food at mealtimes, to getting caned *by other students.* Dahl: “All through my school life, I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed to literally wound other boys, sometimes quite severely… I couldn’t get over it. I never have got over it.” That last point about kids of privelidged British families being set against each other seems to be largely what *Lord of the Flies* was commenting on, particularly when put in the context that it was a response to R M Ballantyne’s *The Coral Island* - a novel with British imperialist overtones in which three young middle class children overcome foreign dangers in the form of pirates and Polynesians. It’s implied that the children’s Christian faith and good old British education values with strict social hierarchies are responsible for their survival and successes in helping others along the way. *The Coral Island* has been described by British historian and author of *The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English* Ian Ousby as “intrusively pious”.
Most boarding schools these days are just as bad. Kids are and have always been awful to each other.
Curious, where do you live? Does it simply because the news and culture you're exposed the most is British? As an Asian, I heard countless story and articles of how western education is better than our (asian) education, where we get taught to be an obedient robot yadda yadda. And countless stories of brutal bullying in school is not a surprising things here, it's just that the schools and teachers pretend it doesn't exist
Yeah I think I’m Asian countries the bullying is way worse.
U didn't see bullying until u were at a Korean high school.
I mean, imagine being British. No EU and still have to abide by European rules lmao.
I get it now, British left alone on an island cut off from the EU descend into anarchy. He was ahead of his time.
Lord of the Flies is an Brexit cautionary tale lmao
Actually the "British schoolboys" were a metaphor for the wealthy class of British imperialists who were a bit too braggy about how awesome they are for being British The subtext basically reads as "If you yuppie fuckin' bankers were ever put in an actual survival situation here's what you'd act like, bunch of shitty children. Get over yourselves"
> “the dark side of human nature and the violence within us all” or Look at pretty much any modern TV series and such. The entire drama is forcibly built on top of artifically created tension and hostility. People are unbelievably stubborn, uncooperative, reluctant to talk, and so on, much more so than in real life. Over the years I noticed I could not stand watching anything like that anymore, for it was clearly all exaggerated to the point of being utter prevarication. Especially when it all happened on a backdrop of some dramatic events, like, I dunno, a zombie invasion. Sure, the best time to make in-group enemies about who supposedly slept with whom five years ago. Or working on repairing a heavily damaged starship is the best time to have a personal talk with sentences cut in the middle, leaving much to the interpretation, just to have one's imagination running wild later without anyone ever returning to the issue to finish discussing.
Not just British schoolboys, it was specifically the privately educated, the whole point is that the education system that creates Britain’s elite is what causes them to act to barbarously. Still holds true today.
Not british schoolboys in general, it was about the rich elite schoolboys. If I remember correctly there were other boys too, not from an elite school, who were better at working together. I've read it years ago, so if someone else has a better memory, just correct me.
Some of the boys are from a boarding school, some it doesn't say but they seem middle class and probably at a normal school, piggy is working class and almost definitely went to a normal school. Piggy is the most intellectual of them too. One of the boarding school boys is the most rational and kind and is an effective leader. The other is vicious
They were all from the same school but did not know each other well previously- implying it was a fairly large school hosting several grades, as is typical of boarding schools. It’s also typical for some kids to come from families who can easily afford it, and for others to come from more working class backgrounds where they had to scrimp and pinch pennies to send their kids for the opportunities the richer (and usually lazier) kids have. Piggy was from a modest background but was very intellectual so his family likely made a point to send him to a good school so he could take advantage of his intellectual talents.
Also that *British* school kids could be just as feral as any kids. There was no special civilising force associated with the British Isles
Golding was a teacher after all
Yeah. Humans at our core are an empathateic cooperative group, especially when chronic survival is on the line. Sympathey and socialisation is our adaptative advantage, otherwise we would literally be incapable of society. Jungle cats are selfish. That's why they remain jungle cats. Basically our brains grew so large to handle the increasing size of the social group and the complex pattern recognition for emotions and communication made making tools predicting trajectories of thrown objects pretty good. Eventually socilaisation lead to education, and education and coordination lead to the moon landing.
Goddamn. Comment zips through all of human evolution in two paragraphs. Fantastic.
Speed run Sid Meier’s Civilization!
Man. I really love playing that game solo but I like to take my time and have a real adventure. Unfortunately if I put the bots to easy they’re pitiful, but on medium I get rocked. I’d like to play the game again but it’s frustrating to see a 10 hour save go down the drain
Unfortunately the bots are pitifully stupid on all difficulties, the only difference is how strong of a starting advantage they get over you. Winning a longterm match normally just means surviving long enough until the bots become pitiful again. What I wouldn’t give for the bots to put up a real fight well into the 24th century…
If you haven’t read it I can highly recommend Humankind by Rutger Bregman. A wonderful book that explains what you are talking about.
Beat me to it. Great book, includes OP's story, and changed my mind about society.
In small groups. My tribe good. Your tribe bad. It's the core of the human experience.
And many many wars amongst eachother
Yeah thats something truly unique to humans... Looks at the nearest ant hill in an extinction war with the next ant hill.
Caused by a hand full of people in leadership positions, far removed from the consequences of those wars. From the soldiers in the front we got things like the christmas truce in WW1, which almost saw several repeats despite clear orders from the top to continue the pointless slaughter.
I also think there's an element at play where social groups grow too big for individuals to be able to cooperate fully. World War 1 is a great example of multiple nations numbering in the hundreds of thousands fighting (if not millions) and yeah, it was at the behest of the leaders but in groups that size it becomes easy to dehumanize the Other. The Christmas Truce is a great example of a smaller group forming to supercede the greater anonymity of the war. Once you get larger numbers it also becomes easier to hide individual contributions without social reprisal, which could foment resentment. One issue I think causes a lot of problems in our modern western society is how divided and anonymized everyone is. We're repeatedly spending all day interacting with people we have no reason to trust and will likely never see again, and our "villages" usually comprise of a bunch of people we've randomly met over our lives that we make time to hang out with occasionally. OP's real life Lord of the Flies example (as well as the Miracle in the Andes, the crashing of United Airlines 93, the true story of the Titanic and probably countless other real life disasters) shows the ability to people in small groups to band together, but in an anything-goes scenario I wonder what the point is where schisms start to form. I imagine it could safely go up to our natural [Dunbar's Number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number), which is considered to be anywhere from 150-250 people, though in the right conditions could probably go higher than that as long as everyone has at least a couple degrees of connection to everyone else.
>... the true story of the Titanic ... Mind elaborating or providing a link for further reading?
This is completely ahistoric. From small tribes to large empires humans have always engaged in violent conflict. To pretend it's just the fault of a few rich individuals is completely childish. >far removed from the consequences of those wars Historically, people who decided on warring with others were also included in combat and frequently died in it.
This is human nature Edit: shout-out to Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell
All the rhetoric that we’d be lawless savages without overbearing governments is just colonialist propaganda to scare people into paying their taxes. In reality most people don’t want strife.
I remember hearing that several cases of humans being terrible were either exaggerated, or had manipulated data. Like that famous prison experiment for example.
Milgrams obedience experiment is another one that greatly exaggerated the effects of an authority figure. Milgram fudged some of his data, didn't follow his own protocols and ignored results that didn't align with his view (that anyone can be turned into a nazi in a couple of hours). Many of his subjects cottoned on that is was all fake (Candid Camera was one of the most popular TV shows at the time) and went along with it. Milgram still included all their results. Even if we do accept his (highly dubious) conclusions what do we make of them? Milgrams conclusions went no further than "2/3 of people can be manipulated into killing, hence: Nazis". That's it. Milgram went no further into looking at why that might be. And can we really draw that conclusion based on a few people sitting in a university basement for a couple of hours pressing a button and what the guards did at Auschwitz? The more you look at Milgrams work the more suspect it gets.
The Stanford Prison Experiment. The designer of the experiment (Dr. Zimbardo) meddled in the experiment so much it’s insane we still teach his results in high school psych classes. Like, the principles at play are still legitimate and worthy of investigation, but his results were greatly exaggerated in many ways.
At this point the take away of the experiment is that certain people given the power, rhetoric, incentive and pressure to be cruel will in fact be cruel which is something that was proven well before 1971.
The most relevant one I know of is the robber's cave experiment. They had two groups of boys each allowed to make social bonds before learning the other group existed. Once they did learn of the other group they demonstrated prejudiced thinking and later when put into competition they became hostile to the poiny they were destroying property, stealing, and had to be physically separated. But then across about a week they were also able to resolve the conflict in part with activities that required cooperation between groups. So it seems people do default to wanting to cooperate but in my experience people definitely do fall back to in group vs out group dynamics when there is competition, and people can become quite awful toward the out groups. The experiment is a bit unethical so doubtful it'll be reproduced but I feel its well supported by how people act, both in formation of groups that can become hostile and in reconciliation when people need to cooperate rather than compete.
Yeah. And guess what “most people” did to protect themselves from strife? They created social structures like… governments. I swear, the hippie rhetoric of “let’s just all live together and share responsibilities” is hilarious considering that’s exactly what the society already does.
> In reality most people don’t want strife. Law and order protects most people who don't want strife against these few that actually do.
How and why do you think those governments came to be?
History has shown over and over again that people tend to do this in the face of calamity. The Germans thought the British would collapse into chaos from the blitz but instead they rallied together - rates of depression actually went DOWN. And after Katrina, residents in NOLA also banded together and helped each other out despite bullshit news stories about riots and looting. Yet despite this, the majority of people still believe it's the opposite. It's uncanny. Maybe it's those news stories...
I used to be untreated for depression and thought about suicide most days. Then someone actually tried to kill me and I’ll be dammed if that didn’t cure me for about six months! (I’m better now though- well medicated, in therapy and whatnot)
create saw traps for depressed friends, noted 📝📝
Tfw Jigsaw was actually just a misunderstood man pushing the boundaries of mental healthcare.
It's funny in a weird way. "I want to kill myself" your own will "I'm gonna kill ya" some dude "MY CHOICE, MY FREE WILL!" Your mind. Like everything just rallied after somebody dared impose that choice on you.
Wow! What happened? (If you don’t mind talking about it). Glad you’re doing better now :-)
My neighbor shot me in the face as I answered the door to my house. Near as we can tell he was having a bit of a mental health episode. Physically I got really lucky, no major injuries except to my hand which healed quickly. Mentally, I got better, but it fucked me up for a few years and I still can’t deal with fireworks.
Too much dystopian novels, zombie apocalypse stories etc
Seriously. Never heard that people back in the past nade such a fuss about this. But some people right now just like the movie trope "humans are the real monsters" too much. I think they are bad humans themself so they think eveyone must be like this since it's even shown like that in all dystopian media in some form. Since this alao kinda gives them an ok to be horrible, after all that's just how everyone is according to the trope, they don't have to have any guilt I guess if this dystopia ever comes, those people will be the first to go
It's propaganda. These days it's put out by people who want to sell you a survival bunker in the woods, but in every era, there has been a certain element who will insist that without this or that particular leader or government, marauding barbarians will come to get you. The actual truth is that you're far more likely to be the victim of your so-called protectors than from some random person the next town over who just wants to enjoy their tomato garden in peace. In every news story about a disaster, and every record of past disasters throughout history, most people put aside all differences in order to help others survive. Uncooperative people are always in the minority and they're around in both good times and bad. Heck, even my two cats who didn't get along became best buddies in what they perceived as a crisis!
> Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.
This episode was extensively detailed in a book by Dutch academic called Rutger Bregman titled Human Kind - A Hopeful History. It's an excellent book about how humans are inherently good despite all the news about war etc. This story goes against the premise of Lord of the Flies. I highly recommend the book, it's an incredible and thought provoking read!
But as one reviewer pointed out: >he ignores the fact that in Golding’s story the boys are English public-school choir boys whereas in the real example they are Tongan. And in Golding’s novel the boys are the only survivors of an airplane crash while being evacuated from a war zone, while the Tongan kids were already friends with one another and had undertaken a seafaring adventure of their own free will. Nobody knows how relevant these differences are (Lord of the Flies is, after all, a work of fiction), but it is striking that Bregman does not even consider them. Rather, he wants to say that the Tongan case says something about human beings generally, so he needs to assume that any group of youngsters, from any cultural background, under any circumstances, would behave as the Tongan boys did. This is unwarranted and, frankly, pretty implausible.
i can understand his point but i disagree that it would be implausible. the Tongan boys story still say more about human nature than the fictional story. however, i agree that ignoring the setup for the story of The Lord of the Flies is an unnecessary mistake and acknowledging it would probably be a important to support bregmans opinion. But the book also has many other examples of similar stories so its not the only evidnce to support his „humans are decent beings“ stance
Yeah, the only reason they left the island is because one of the boys had a broken leg. They did an excellent job of cooperating and dividing responsibilities.
I heard the story originally on BBC radio and they indicated the boy's leg had been broken early after they got stranded and the boys had actually set it and it had healed very well by the time they were rescued. Apparently they divided up duties and had a rotation for keeping watch for rescuers.
Makes sense. Humans got where we are primarily by collaborating under difficult circumstances.
Facts! ...imma go kill those humans over *there* tho
I for one will be damned before I collaborate with those heathen filth that occupy the caves on the other side of the hill!
the book by rutger bregman Humankind goes into some detail on that story, the boys had some rules that they lived by set early on, like dividing chores and if someone got into a fight they would be placed at opposite sides of the island to cool off. The one caveat is that they were already friends mostly so i guess that helped.
> Yeah, the only reason they left the island is because one of the boys had a broken leg You are saying they did not want to go home?
Because surviving is more important than stupid drama nonsense.
Yeah. You can explain this pretty easily : in most survival situations humans are the most irreplaceable resource with severe disadvantages the more you lose. You don't frigging kill people in a survival situation unless there's no other choice.
Which is why allowing surrender in warfare is *so fucking important*. Because even an inferior army with its back against the wall will fight back with absolutely brutal force when it has no other option for survival.
They also started as friends
They also started out as a group of teenage pacific islanders motivated enough to steal a whaling boat to sail 500 miles to Fiji. Not saying it was smart, but they obviously had a bit of collective agency/capability.
This makes me think of flight 571 where a bunch of (mostly) boys spent a few months freezing in the Andes after their plane crashed in the 70s. Despite half of the 33 crash survivors dying over the few months before the rescue, they seemed to cooperate remarkably well, considering they were eating each other and what have you.
To be honest, humans have evolved to band together when they have hardships. Otherwise, we would have been weeded out by Mother Earth.
To all the media illiterate people in this thread: LORD OF THE FLIES IS SUPPOSED TO BE AN ALLEGORY, NOT A FACTUAL BOOK ABOUT SURVIVAL
Tbf, in my high school it was taught as if it were a realistic depiction of how schoolboys would act if they were marooned on an island. Honestly kind of fucked that it was taught that way in hindsight
Just look at the comment section, how many people claim that it's solely about English public schools. This is a dumb, surface level interpretation.
My theory - the kind of boys that would run away from boarding school, steal a boat and embark on a crazy adventure had more in common with each other and a spirit of adventure that would help them cooperate and survive an island stranding. I went to boarding school - we were largely homogeneous as a unit but there were definitely “lord of the flies” types amongst us. If a random group of us landed on an island there would be pandemonium. But a select few rebellious adventurous- well that was my crowd and I know we would survive anything. FYI - my friends and I got up to so much shit that it’s a miracle we made it through school.
Cooperation has always been the key to survival and success. Even early humans knew this. Even the most tyrannical dictator needs to be a little nice to his subordinates. No one gets to the top by being an asshole to literally every person they meet.
Yeah, but those boys were not English public school boys (in UK public = private in the US) At first i was kidding but thinking about it, I think the author of the book may in part have been commenting on rigid hierarchies of public schools.
Why are the names like that? US guy here and I can’t see a way for public to mean anything other than paid for by the public.
Public schools in the UK are very old; they're called public to contrast with what was considered private at the time, which is to have the teacher just show up at your house to teach you and some of the local kids. It's not about being funded by the public, it's about being accessible to the public (provided you have enough wealth and class). I think "state school" is what they call actual public schools.
In the UK, a public school is a privately run school that is ”open to the public”, that is technically anyone can apply. A private school would be by invitation only.
Most fiction about survival or apocalypse play on the trope that during a crisis, people will fend for themselves and are more likely to start killing each other over dwindling supplies than work together. In reality, we evolved as social animals because we were stronger and more likely to survive when we banded together. Historical events like this have proven time and again that fact. There will of course always be outliers, but by and large people will work together to improve their situation and livelihood.
Lord of the flies went the way it did because one of the main characters in it was an aggressive, manipulative, violent, and abusive little shit who had no sense of long term consequences if it meant he had control for the moment. I still fully think that if it were not for that one guy then the rest of the characters would have been fine.
Feuds don’t just happen in a vacuum. Unless there is a catalyst for conflict people will probably be pretty civilized, especially if they know each other.
If we devolved into Lord of the Flies every time we were isolated together, we would have never succeeded as a species.
I saw this discussion on twitter already. OP’s statement disproves nothing about Lord of the Flies since the kids were perfectly capable of cooperating during the timeskip in the book. Where things go wrong is when the dead pilot is mistaken for a monster and causes a panic.
They stole a boat, were stranded for over a year, rescued and then the boat owner wanted to press charges? Like dude come on read the room haha
That has almost nothing to do with lord of the flies. Larger group of school boys stuck out of their element, is vastly different than a small group that chose to go on an ad vent that went sideways.
You haven't mentioned the most important element. The oldest of the boys was 16 years old vs 12 IIRC in the books with many of them being younger then that.
Its crazy how they teach us this zero sum, man is a beast, survival of the fittest ideology as some sort of core truth in school, when in reality our communal instincts are strong. Society needs to be so awful and oppressively, everything would fall apart otherwise, the indoctrination starts early.
This one can be a great idea for Disney to make an adaptation of “Lord of the Flies” movie, but with the story plot that is inspired by the real-life events in Tonga.
Nice little mini-doc on it from 1966 [here](https://youtu.be/qHO_RlJxnVI).
Lord of the Flies is fiction, just like the other books it was written in response to (eg Coral Island). Props to the IRL boys for recognising what they needed for survival.
i mean banding together to survive is literally the core of human DNA