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TL:DR; It turns out that in the real world, nothing like the Lord of the Flies happened; in fact the opposite happened.
Highly recommend Bregman's book, by the way, which shoots down many of the faulty foundations of what we take for granted as fact today about human nature. I believe this article is an excerpt from the book.
This article questions the colonial view point it was mostly reported from. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/416819/concerns-over-a-tale...
Here's an interview with one of the survivors https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018746636
And the reason the island was uninhabited. the Pacific slave trade https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/20182...
I think one of the things in the boys' favor is that they had true community. It sounds they they grew up on the same island. Were part of the same community. All went to the same Catholic school. From the mention of "Their days began and ended with song and prayer" along with the Catholic school, it also seems they were all religious. As much as we on HN like to think that logic and the rational mind is what makes p…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8ijiLqfXP0
This article is an excerpt from Chapter 2 one of his latest book. The book, Humankind, seems to be making the argument that humans are essentially trustworthy and industrious and are thus proper candidates for UBI. UBI is more or less the topic of his first book.
Here is a review of his first book, Utopia for Realists:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/13/utopia-realist...
From an interview about the book:
"OK, so basic income is all about the freedom to say no. That's a privilege for the rich right now. With a basic income, you can say no to a job you don't want to do. You can say no to a city in which you no longer want to live. You can say no to an employer who harasses you at work . . . that's what real freedom looks like."
"This is not about AI," he insists. "You go back to the 1960s, and all the economists, all the philosophers, all the sociologists said we're going to be working less and less and less and less and boredom is going to be the great challenge of the future. Didn't happen . . . mostly because we have this ideological obsession with creating new jobs."
Some other articles he has written for The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/wealth...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/12/phone-...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/07/rutger-bregman...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So a great story but I don't know how much can be extrapolated from it about human behaviour in general. Given that this really happened, a lot. Lord of the Flies came out of the fantasy of an English superintendent. Yet, it has permeated our culture as a cautionary tale about human behavior. It is 100% fiction. I’d like to recommend Humankind by Rutger Bregman - a wonderful book dismantling the toxic narratives we…
Cultural experience matters a lot here though. If 6 boys who dealt with hard grueling hunter gatherer labor, they'd have no issue pulling themselves up by their makeshift sandals so to speak, in the jungle. Western boys who may have had at worst, had a few days of hard labor, the rest school and sports, not so much. Your forgetting about culture shock. White boys who know nothing of hunting and gathering aren't going…
That is an amazing amount of assumption to draw out of the simple fact that they were Tongan.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So a great story but I don't know how much can be extrapolated from it about human behaviour in general. Given that this really happened, a lot. Lord of the Flies came out of the fantasy of an English superintendent. Yet, it has permeated our culture as a cautionary tale about human behavior. It is 100% fiction. I’d like to recommend Humankind by Rutger Bregman - a wonderful book dismantling the toxic narratives we…
Lord of the flies was written shortly after world war 2, which also really happened... I don't take it seriously as a story of what would really happen if boys ended up on an island, but humans killing each other for dumb reasons is not the stuff of fantasy.
That's a wonderful story and and an uplifting rebuttal to Lord of the Flies. But to be fair, six Tongan boys were probably far hardier and well equipped than the typical British schoolboy of that time would have been. It seems they thought nothing of stealing a fishing boat and heading to sea, and they most likely had abundant life skills already - they basically relocated from life on one pacific island to another.…
When we decide how to act, many of our decisions comes from our culture, which is the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. We don't tell stories just to learn, but to become.
One wonders how those six Tongans would have acted had they had the misfortune of reading Lord of the Flies before they went sailing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to be a voracious consumer of fiction, but somehow critical reading of Lord of the Flies knocked that out of me in sophomore high school English. I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise.
> I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's intention in a joyless analysis exercise. That was literally my entire high school honors English program. You must interpret everything, to the satisfaction of the English teacher, or else. It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved reading and made them hate boo…
I sometimes wonder if at least some portion of literary analysis is equivalent to teaching contemporary fan theories while waiting for the next episode/sequel/release.
I think the state of nature as imagined by the likes of Thomas Hobbes is more just an assumption that is more based on observations of conflicting social groups, as such it is an emergent nature. But, I think humans evolved on the basis of mutual cooperation is a better survival strategy. So I think we have this ingrained base nature that wants to work together with other humans.