LIKE a great many of you, part of my high school curriculum included reading “Lord of the Flies,” which turned out to be one of the best and one of the worst things that ever happened to me. Captivated by the story itself, I eagerly devoured page after page until the tragic end, but my relationship with the book did not stop there.
“Lord of the Flies” is one of those stories that raises so many big questions that you meditate on it long after the book is closed. This column is not a book report, it is about a group of islanders who became stranded far from home and what they teach us about human nature.
For those of you who have never read the book, “Lord of the Flies” is a story about a group of pre-pubescent boys whose plane crashes in an unfamiliar place. None of the adults survive the wreck so the boys must figure out how to survive by their own wits. Freed from the confines of civilization and any parental control, the darkest parts of human nature take over.
The boys segregate into gangs led by alpha males and soon they begin competing with one another. Items are designated as valuable and possession of those items leads to conflict, violence, and finally murder. Soon after the death of a key character, a search party arrives to rescue the boys and tries to make sense of their descent into savagery.
The main message of the story is clear: human nature is basically bad once the layers of civility are stripped away. We behave because society both inculcates it in us and demands it from us. But freed from social constraints, take away accountability, and we devolve into brutality just as surely as the boys in the story.
There was another group of boys, real ones this time. In 1965, six young men, ages thirteen through nineteen, ran away from a boarding school in Tonga. They stole a sailboat and cruised off without much of a plan, got caught in a severe storm, and were blown 200 miles away. As their disabled vessel disintegrated, they spotted an island and swam to it.
These six Tongan boys got organized, explored the island, made use of a long-abandoned settlement in the interior, and lived well for fifteen months before being rescued. When finally spotted, the boys were in good spirits, healthy and content. The man who rescued them was so impressed that he hired them to work for his fish and lobster business.
At first glance, the fact that the boys ran away from school and stole a boat may lead us to think this story supports the claim of “Lord of the Flies,” that human nature is bad. But consider how the boys acted once on the island, how they responded to the crisis of being marooned, and we begin to see that they prove the counterpoint. Freed from the shackles of civilization, when no one was around to tell them how to behave or what was expected of them, they cooperated and prospered.
The similarities between the two tales are enough to make us wonder which one is closer to the truth. The question of whether human nature is good or bad has burdened us for all of history. What are people like when stripped of all civilization, all moral restraint, all accountability?
Dr. BC Cook taught history for 30 years and is a director and Pacific historian at Sealark Exploration (sealarkexploration.org). He currently lives in Hawaii.
