Lord of the Flies: Where Mother Nature and Human Nature collide

You know that guy at the grocery store whose shopping cart hung in the exact center of the frozen food aisle, and he was so unconscious that he wouldn’t get out of your way even though you were clearly in his peripheral vision? Have you ever wondered what stopped you from grabbing the nearest bag of frozen pizza rolls and hitting him over the head with it? Your conscience? An innate sense of right and wrong? Maybe, but then again, maybe not.

In Lord of the Flies, William Golding explores the theme of our animal drives. Our society is so structured, there are so many rules and regulations, that it is difficult to perceive how we could act if our natural instincts were not so repressed and our revised behavior was not so shaped by instruction.

In his book, Golding places a group of children on an unsupervised island and lets them run wild. In fact, “wild” is exactly what they become. Their actions become brutally sadistic and they seem to lose much of what we often call our “humanity.” But would this really happen? Could a group of previously civilized individuals fall so far and so fast?

As you may learn in an AP Psychology class, we humans have something called “brain plasticity.” Aside from this meaning that your brain can be recycled (be sure to leave it in the blue bin out front when you’re done), brain plasticity implies that our minds can adapt and change to our environment and to a set of circumstances. So while you may be dealing with a group of smart, polite, and caring children, once they are caught up in a desperate situation and forced to take drastic measures to preserve their lives, they can turn into quite different creatures down the road. very short period of time.

In fact, a psychology professor named Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment in 1971 that tested a similar sort of thing, and concluded that, in fact, humanity can rapidly degenerate into lawless and insensitive beasts when placed in positions of authority in unfavorable conditions. Of course, Zimbardo ran his test on college students, and the way his subjects behaved during the experiment was not far from stripping a freshman and chaining him to the door of the dean’s office. So I guess we should take it with a grain of salt.

Golding paints a terrifying portrait of a world with no sense of morality, and hopefully none of us will ever have to experience such a thing. However, if you think about it, being stranded on an island wouldn’t be so bad. At least you’d have a good excuse to avoid doing your ACT prep.