Flawed, full of lies.

[Wowbagger]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

Fantastic story of a real-life "Lord of the Flies" in which everything turned out very different. Quite life-affirming really.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Yes, but I don't think it says anything necessarily truer about human nature than Lord of the Flies, or come to that any other real shipwreck event. Enormous cultural differences between Tonga and Europe.

[bludger]

LOTF has enormously colonialist overtones when you think about it. The idea that without a civilised authority people devolve to "savagery" and need an authority to keep them in line.

Makes you wonder about who really benefits from the message of the book tbh.

[mrcharly-YHT]

It is an uplifting story, but doesn't contradict LotF.

The tongan boys were all friends, all of a similar nature (they stole a fishing boat together).

LotF takes a mixed bunch of schoolchildren, with all the existing tensions that exist in that sort of group. Then dumps them without supervision.

Anyone who doesn't think that will result in extreme behaviour has never been on the receiving end of bullying at school.

I think Adrian Mitchell said it well in this poem, Back in the Playground Blues

I dreamed I was back in the playground, I was about four feet high
Yes I dreamed I was back in the playground, standing about four feet high
Well the playground was three miles long and the playground was five miles wide

It was broken black tarmac with a high wire fence all around
Broken black dusty tarmac with a high fence running all around
And it had a special name to it, they called it The Killing Ground

Got a mother and a father they're one thousand years away
The rulers of the Killing Ground are coming out to play
Everybody thinking: ‘Who they going to play with today?’

      Well you get it for being Jewish
      And you get it for being black
      You get it for being chicken
      And you get it for fighting back
      You get it for being big and fat
      Get it for being small
      Oh those who get it get it and get it
      For any damn thing at all

Sometimes they take a beetle, tear off its six legs one by one
Beetle on its black back, rocking in the lunchtime sun
But a beetle can’t beg for mercy, a beetle’s not half the fun

I heard a deep voice talking, it had that iceberg sound
‘It prepares them for Life’ - but I have never found
Any place in my life worse than The Killing Ground.

[Nuncio]

LOTF has enormously colonialist overtones when you think about it. The idea that without a civilised authority people devolve to "savagery" and need an authority to keep them in line.

Makes you wonder about who really benefits from the message of the book tbh.

Except that the boys were being evacuated from some sort of nuclear(?) war, suggesting that the veneer of civilization is equally thin for first-world 'grown-ups'.