This is an interesting story posted by solarmorrigan about a social experiment attempted by her 10th grade teacher involving balloons and sharpened pencils. Let’s just say the experiment didn’t go as the teacher had planned, lol:
Source: solarmorrigan
(via: Buzzfeed)
Humankind, by Rutger Bregman, tells the story of what really happened when six boys were marooned on an island. It’s kinda like this. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
Yes. I love that article. Lord of the Flies is more like an example of what happens when young, overprivileged rich white boys brought up in a certain social sphere are marooned without oversight. This idea, like many others, are a social construct based in a specific microcosm and it is one of many that have been applied across the board in a manner with no evidence.
Others of the ilk are: “Stockholm Syndrome” (a thing completely made up at the time because the police, media and authorities didn’t want to listen to the woman involved, who was drawing attention to some social problems), “The Bystander Effect” because of a certain incident in NYC where no one came to assist a woman being raped and murdered when, in fact, the neighbours DID go and help, and the man was driven off not once, but twice, but the police didn’t attend, partly because she was a known member of the LGBTQI community of the day, and the experiment of “prisoners vs jailors” where the participants did not turn on the “prisoners” of their own accord, but were actively encouraged to by the psychologist involved, and the “experiment” only stopped because his wife stepped in. Then, of course, there’s the “Alpha Wolf” nonsense, since disproven by the very man who originally posited the theory.
Humans are a weird mob. The worst of us tend to rise when actively encouraged to do so, but keft to our own devices, we’re kind as often as not. So, yeah, don’t ignore the trolls. Correct them.
Therefore it could be argued that was not a “failed” social experiment. It showed that, in fact, the “mob” needs encouragement to Do Bad when previously, they’d been guided well.
Humans are inherently social creatures, and we are social by evolutionary necessity. There’s a reason that we consider people who break social patterns as aberrant and dangerous. It’s because, evolutionarily speaking, they ARE aberrant and dangerous. Back in the caveman days, one human not playing well with others could get the whole village killed.
This is why we developed empathy to such a high degree that we will even pack-bond with inanimate objects. Because keeping those social bonds intact is absolutely critical to our survival. It’s even critical to our process in relatively modern times. Look at the scientific process, which can’t flourish without building on things that came before. The famous quote from Isaac Newton sums that up nicely: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Individuals who have the disposition to take advantage are able to exploit social structures are able to do so because society has evolved faster than biology, but it’s important to remember that these traits are 1. not helpful for the species or the individual in the long run, and 2. only made possible because these tight social structures exist.
Having attended an English Independent Boarding School from 1980-84, as the token working class scholarship kid and read about the impact of boarding schools on the mentality of pupils, I can well believe The Lord of the Flies occurring in that cohort.
Tribalism and competition was actively encouraged, bullying wasn’t punished but being caught was. Anyone reporting being bullied was told to shut up. For more egregious assaults or for theft often both collective and individual punishment would be used, with those caught up in the collective punishment encouraged to seek revenge on those they thought were accountable.
I recall one time where one of the wealthier pupils reported a theft from their locker. Everyone who had a locker in that building was corralled in a classroom for detention until someone confessed to the theft, which no one ever did. The item, a calculator if memory serves, that was reported stolen turned out to be at the back of one of the owner’s drawers back in his dorm a couple of days later. He was adamant that someone else had put it there and he hadn’t just forgotten he’d put it in his drawer.
On another occasion some of the school prefects were messing about during morning assembly, laughing and joking. The headmaster, not wishing to have to discipline prefects, accused me as I was sitting near by, asking what I thought was so funny. When I responded “Nothing, sir, the laugh came from my left.”, he gave me detention.
Boys, and probably girls based on what I’ve read of girls’ boarding schools, of that cohort behave in that manner because that is how they have been trained by their schools.
The boys in LotF took MONTHS to descend to murder, not five minutes, and it only happened when they lost all hope of rescue. Teacher clearly hasn’t read the book.
The book is a metaphor for what happens when the privileged get to do whatever they want without any checks, not a literal what-if scenario. The checks could be authority figures (as in this situation) they could be from society’s moral conventions, law, military authority, religion etc. In the book new authority figures emerge, and with them a new morality.
It also has a contemporary context. The book was written by a British author during (admittedly the last years) of the British Empire, a time when the British thought themselves even more exceptional than they do now. They thought they deserved to rule because they were better than the savages. The story is saying that the British aren’t special and savagery is inherent in all of us, even going so far as to use imagery associated with ‘native savages’ of popular perception at the time. Compare the behaviour of the boys to the actions of the elites of society throughout the ages.
It was also a reaction to the weirdly widespread genre of ‘oops marooned’ stories that were popular at the time. Swiss Family Robinson is probably the best well known today, but there were plenty of others and a good amount where it’s a group of children. In most of those stories the marooned are perfectly able to set up an idyllic community and have almost no problems and everyone is pleasant and disagreements are either nonexistent or quickly settled. LotF author was looking at that genre as a whole and went “Naw, a bunch of privileged school boys? That would turn south real quick.”
((As an example, I read a story in the genre that I have no hope of finding the title of since I read it in high school. The MCs are a newlywed couple who get marooned and again have like no problem setting up a homestead using only what’s on the island and the ship before it fully scuttles. Later on in the book there is another marooning and a pirate incident and some black people are added to the mix, and these 4 or 5 black people are perfectly happy to be the couple’s effectively slaves. Like, they just naturally fall in line and complacently take orders (including arranged marriage) from this completely milktoast couple with no weapons that they absolutely outnumber. o-0
I don’t think that’s how it’d go in real life.))
Log onto any Minecraft server and notice the number of griefers, destroyers, insulters, and just plain MEAN people out there.
So much of that is the effect of anonymity (or illusion thereof) that the internet provides.
Tongan castaways, a real life Lord of the rings. Six boys marooned on an island for 15 months. They survived by cooperating. A far cry from the fictional Lord of the Rings.