Lord of the Lies

I've always hated Lord of the Flies. Not to say I thought it was boring or poorly written--it's enjoyable as pulp entertainment goes--I hate what it theorizes about human nature and what it stands for intellectually. It's the old myth that people are miserable brutes who need authority to keep them from acting like demons very neatly packaged and marketed toward impressionable young adults who are forced to read this morally compromising propaganda in school.

Whenever I defend anarchy as the ultimate expression of human organization (and I will sometimes add that only anarchy is in line with the Gospels, the Fire Sermon, Heraclitus' fragments, the Tao Te Ching, and other shining examples of human thought), I'm never surprised to hear someone say that without authority, the state of affairs will descend into one like Lord of the Flies. When people read things in school, they tend to believe it. How could I convince anyone that the story is founded upon a lie when they learned all about it in school from Mrs. Groby, their ultimate authority, and they even watched the movie?

People are essentially good. Evil comes as the result of authority, when one person or class wields power over another. Without authority, there will be no evil.

And finally the news has come that will forever undermine the Lord of the Flies' thesis. Sir William Golding admitted in his memoir, to be released soon, that he was an attempted rapist.

Carey quotes the memoir as partially excusing the attempted rape on the grounds that Dora was "depraved by nature" and, at 14, was "already sexy as an ape". It reveals that Golding told his wife he had been sure the girl "wanted heavy sex". She fought him off and ran away as he stood there shouting: "I'm not going to hurt you," the memoir said.

This is the esteemed author who Mrs. Groby probably exalted as a "defender of civilization", or some other such nonsense. The mind that says we need rules to defend Piggy is a demented mind.

And here's the real problem, and also the greatest argument for anarchy: someone might say, Ok, so Golding's scum, but that only proves we need rules & authority to defend the rest of us from Sir William Golding. The problem: Golding himself was that very authority. Power goes to the perverted. Listen to how he got the idea for his great defense of civilization:

A teacher, he deliberately set groups of boys against each other just to see how far they would go and if they would get violent. It was kind of like a lab experiment that turned into Lord of the Flies.

I'd known that Golding was a teacher--Mrs. Groby probably taught you the same thing. But I've taught too, and my experience has never been one of wild savages waiting for the opportunity to tear each other apart. The classes I've taught have always been mutually supportive, and people treat each other with consideration and respect. It's not because I rule with an iron fist. It's because I don't rule at all. I've always treated my students with the dignity that any human being deserves, and they have always responded in kind. There's no question of me controlling the classroom: the students are human beings and are perfectly capable of controlling themselves. You get what you give.

If you want a classroom to turn into Lord of the Flies, first you need to put an authority figure who believes in rules into the room. If he has a fancy name that begins with Sir, all the better. He'll turn those kids into savages right quick.

Because that's how he justifies his own power.