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I bought nine of these to the local MP's last summer. Mostly to emphasize the fact that all of us are not as greedy as their context might be. Not very surprisingly I only got one message from MP that had read it.
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The Bounty mutineers' settlement on an uninhabited island also comes to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty#Pitcairn
Imagine having that as your family history. There are still 50 or so descendants still living on Pitcairn today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_sexual_assault_trial_...
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.…
Picture you're on a beach, and behind you is a shirtless man with a machete. How you feel is completely dependent on where you are in the world. In LA, you'd run for cover. In south east Asia, it's Tuesday.
I learned a lot from my travels, to back the adage about traveling and learning. I remember being in a small fishing village and someone caught a large fish. I don't even remember what it was now, but the fisherman was so excited to catch this big valuable fish he shared it with everyone, even me the foreigner he'd never see again. Made me think about how selfish we as Americans can be. We already have a good life, and still look for ways to get ahead of everyone else. Yet a person with nothing is happy to share what little they'd found.
Story aside, I agree that the experience would vary wildly by country, or at least upbringing.
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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 pretty much only read science fiction now, and the occasional crime thriller, although I used to be a voracious reader. I din't realize why until I read your post: high school English made me hate fiction. It's like I was playing a game of guess-the-password, and was being graded on how close my arbitrary answer matched the teacher's expectation. I hated it, and it destroyed any interest in reading "high" literature to this day :(
I think I can appreciate sci-fi books in particular because my brain knows there's no way they'd ever be taught in an English classroom, so it doesn't evoke memories of those horrible literature classes.
The comments here make me wonder, just why did Lord of The Flies become popular in the first place? Was there a generation that thought it was a good story for illustrating human nature? Why?
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> 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 was also one of those students who loved to read going into high school only to have it beaten out of me by English teachers over-analyzing everything. But... as an adult I can definitely see and appreciate the value of it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen comments on r/TheHandmaidsTale along the lines of “why do people keep bringing up abortion laws here it has nothing to do with this show!” or have discu…
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> 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…
High school English class was like this for me too. It was usually obvious what my teacher wanted students to say but it just seemed all so contrived and I couldn’t bring myself to participate in the silliness. On my report card she once wrote, “stubbornly sticks to his opinions even when wrong”. One day, for fun, I tried out saying what I thought she wanted to hear. I got a lot of praise from her that day.
The six boys were significantly older than the Flies boys - 13 to 16.
It's not quite as simple as "it works like 'Lord of the Flies' or it doesn't". Nicholas Christakis, in his book "Blueprint", devotes a chapter to a database that he and his grad students made of shipwrecks, where the survivors lived long enough, in enough isolation, that they had to more or less put together a temporary society. There were lots of cases where they turned on each other, and lots of cases where they di…
Nice review. In a sense I find this something akin to the late David Graeber point on it’s column about bulling. How you can find data pointing towards the human society propensity for violence, and also data of human society propensity for cooperation and refusal to engage on violence even when confronted with losing their way of living, although he also raises the point when historically there has been more propens…