choose the future!
Lord of the Flies — William Golding, 1954
Lord of the Flies is about a group of British school boys marooned on an isolated Pacific island. The book follows the development of the society they create on the island, and examines the way that human nature shapes that society.
The world is engaged in an atomic war, and for an unstated reason the boys (in school uniform) are being transported across the pacific when the aeroplane in which they are travelling is shot down, leaving them marooned on a remote Pacific island where they must fend for themselves.
The boys attempt to establish a social structure that will allow them to survive and be rescued. Initially they do well at this (unrealistically well, I think) selecting a leader from two candidates each of which exhibit leadership qualities, and determining that their priority needs are to find food, build shelters, and facilitate their rescue.
The two candidates for leadership come to represent 'good' (egalitarianism, responsibility, foresight) and 'evil' (authoritarianism, selfishness, self-indulgence); although the characters are not black-and-white metaphors, each have failings and strengths. Initially the two boys work well together under the elected leadership of the 'good' character for the good of the group.
As children from a modern western society, the boys have many fears brought about by their unusual circumstances. They all, but especially the youngest, have terrible nightmares and some suffer increasing mental aberrations. The rising fear brings some of them to believe that a semi-supernatural beast exists on the island. Some of the older and more reasoning boys deny this but the fearful and weakened minds find proofs, where there are none, that the beast exists.
Initially the fully imagined beast is from the sea because it can be reasoned that the island is too small to support a large beast on the land. External circumstances provide solid (but misinterpreted) evidence that the beast lives on the island, on top of the central mountain, so all of the boys come to believe that the beast exists.
While the boys can easily forage plenty of food, the 'evil' character is determined to put the group's resources into hunting the pigs that live on the island, as much for the process of hunting as for the meat that is obtained. This causes a crisis in the use of the human resources of the group, and a leadership challenge is mounted. Initially the boys remain loyal to the 'good' character and the evil character exiles himself, but progressively they are attracted to him by the seeming advantages that are offered, while rejecting the reasoned discipline and organised work required by the 'good' character.
The 'evil' character uses the fear of the beast to cement his autocratic power by believing, and having the others believe, that the beast can be appeased by sacrifices from the hunting. As the number of boys that he controls becomes greater his power increases and the boys' society progressively devolves from egalitarian and democratic to autocratic and punitive.
The story is an interesting and believable account of how a group of naive humans naturally develop from a relatively civilised society of enlightenment to a proto-religion, complete with a top-heavy hierarchal power structure, rituals, sacrifices, and even human sacrifice.
The story has a rather 'Hollywood' ending, with impossibly convenient timing that leaves the horrible conclusion hanging, with plenty of plot and theme development potential left. However, if the story were to have continued it could only have led to increasingly terrible occurrences without further enlightening it's theme, becoming a mere wallow in horror, as so many modern horror stories are. I have little doubt that if the story had been allowed to develop further the 'evil' character would have declared that his autocratic rule was supported by the beast, and that he ruled in the name of the beast.
William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in 1954, when the world was engaged in the Cold War, and the story appears to have a broadly contemporary setting. Although the story hardly touches on the contemporary society — the broader setting is only hinted at in a few remarks made by the characters, and in a few peripheral but important incidents — Golding goes to the trouble of making it clear that this is not exactly his own world by introducing the unusual aircraft in which the boys arrive at the island, an aircraft with a separable "passenger tube" that is dropped on the island as the pilot attempts to fly the rest of the aircraft away, but is shot down.
It's interesting to note that the true clinical madness of the boys, revealed by hearing voices or lapses into a catatonic state, are only experienced by the 'good' characters; the 'evil' characters are psychotic but otherwise remain mentally capable. Perhaps the author is saying that being psychotic protects you from madness, at least under extreme circumstances.
There are no girls in this story. This may simply be because of the author's cultural context; when he wrote the book in 1954 most international travel was still by ship; to fly was prohibitively expensive; so, by implication these boys were from well-off families that were perhaps likely to send their children to single-sex boarding school. However, it may be because including girls would have greatly increased the complexities of the story and forced the author to deal with a greater range of themes that would have made the story too complex and unfocussed.
So, why is Lord of the Rings reviewed here on choose the future!? What does it have to do with the themes of choose the future!?
If we, humanity, choose not to resolve the issues that we face, or we fail to resolve these issues, the environment we live in is likely to fail, and our world economy and society is likely to collapse. Even if we do resolve the issues that we face, the current depleted state of Earth is still likely to result in ecological and social collapse. Lord of the Flies gives us William Golding’s take on what a collapsed society may look like, and how it may devolve.