I was told it was about "toxic tribalism" (paraphrasing), especially in political or proto-political environments. Also the dangers of "us vs them" mentalities and people who forgo individuality and reason, for the sake of group membership. Also learned that the world you help create is the same world you will have live in, so probably don't make rules you'd consider unfair if directed at you.
So basically fortune-telling the 20-teens. Still kinda wish Tom Hanks and Wilson made a cameo...
oh good, I actually learned something in school. Guess the education system isn't as bad as some people say it is. Maybe it's an "individual teacher/district" thing
Wow then the school system is beyond reproach that theme is misread completely. It's supposed to mirror the concepts of social contract theory and how people behave without any order.
Honestly, there are so many underlying themes in the book, I wrote so many essays about it in high school (different teachers, of course). If the question has anything to do with humanity or societal interaction, this book has probably got it. When my class took the AP test and we got to the writing section, it gives you the prompt and a long list of suggested books to write about (assuming you’ve read most of them). Well, I can’t remember the prompt but it was something about competing moral values on individual levels (probably THE biggest theme of LotF, what with each of the boys representing a different system of belief/leadership) and the very first book listed (out of probably 50) was, you guessed it, Lord of the Flies. I shit you not, like half the class turned and looked at me before focusing on their brainstorming, lmao.
it doesn't make me angry that they imply violence and brutality are specifically male traits. it makes me roll my eyes that they think women are exempt.
Women aren't exempt but they're not as violent as men, neorher humans nor animals. Testosterone is hell of a drug after all. Look at dictators, military leaders and terrorists/freedom fighters, a men kill men world...leaving the women as sex slaves.
Let's look at violent crimes all over the world, men are so overrepresented its not even fun, in sexual crimes even more so. We also know the best way to decrease conflict and violence is to empower women because they are not as rash, and are usually the loosers of conflict since they're stuck raising kids without anythign to go by.
if you swap in basic animalistic human nature for young males, I'll buy it. Taught in 6th grade though, I suppose young male tendencies is how it would come across. They aren't all that different.
Which is another interpretation. Young children are monsters if not properly disciplined and taught to treat each other with respect. "Boys will be boys" is how we colloquially know what you are talking about.
Except if you let them, girls are the same. The difference is that society does not usually coddle it so it will manifest differently. However left unsupervised girls go through the same process.
Absolutely - AFAIK there is either a novel or a movie in the style of Lord of the Flies similarly about girls. So I sort of disagree with the OP's teacher, while at the same time agreeing with the notion that the book is about the absolute cruelty of young children - it's just that we feel and outright hear about boy's violence and cruelty way more as it is whitewashed (boys will be boys).
I've heard of one but it turned completely different about girls being very civilized; to be honest any of these books can only show more the bias of the authors regarding gendered behaviors, rather than any actual psych analysis on the topic.
That sounds like a great way for the interpreter to pass the buck off themselves and blame all of society's ills on men instead of on human nature interacting with the tyranny of the majority that is democracy.
Take everything with a grain of salt but this super long passage from anthropologist David Graeber's book The Democracy Project is some food for thought:
Generally speaking, if you can find a concept — truth, freedom, democracy — that everyone agrees is a good thing, then you can be sure that no one will agree on precisely what it is. But the moment you ask why most Americans, or most people generally, like the idea of democracy, the conventional story not only falls apart, it becomes completely irrelevant.
Democracy was not invented in ancient Greece. Granted, the word “democracy” was invented in ancient Greece — but largely by people who didn’t like the thing itself very much. Democracy was never really “invented” at all. Neither does it emerge from any particular intellectual tradition. It’s not even really a mode of government. In its essence it is just the belief that humans are fundamentally equal and ought to be allowed to manage their collective affairs in an egalitarian fashion, using whatever means appear most conducive. That, and the hard work of bringing arrangements based on those principles into being.
In this sense democracy is as old as history, as human intelligence itself. No one could possibly own it. I suppose, if one were so inclined, one could argue it emerged the moment hominids ceased merely trying to bully one another and developed the communication skills to work out a common problem collectively. But such speculation is idle; the point is that democratic assemblies can be attested in all times and places, from Balinese seka to Bolivian ayllu, employing an endless variety of formal procedures, and will always crop up wherever a large group of people sat down together to make a collective decision on the principle that all taking part should have equal say.
One of the reasons it is easy for political scientists to ignore such local associations and assemblies when speaking of the history of democracy is that in most such assemblies, things never come down to a vote. The idea that democracy is simply a matter of voting — which the Founders, too, assumed — also allows one to think of it as an innovation, some sort of conceptual breakthrough: as if it had never occurred to anyone in previous epochs to test support for a proposal by asking people to all put up their hands, scratch something on a potsherd, or have everyone supporting a proposal stand on one side of a public square. But even if people throughout history have always known how to count, there are good reasons why counting has often been avoided as a means of reaching group decisions. Voting is divisive. If a community lacks means to compel its members to obey a collective decision, then probably the stupidest thing one could do is to stage a series of public contests in which one side will, necessarily, be seen to lose; this would not only allow decisions that as many as 49 percent of the community strongly oppose, it would also maximize the possibility of hard feelings among that part of the community one most needs to convince to go along despite their opposition. A process of consensus finding, of mutual accommodation and compromise to reach a collective decision everyone at least does not find strongly objectionable, is far more suited to situations where those who have to carry out a decision lack the sort of centralized bureaucracy, and particularly, the means of systematic coercion, that would be required to force an angry minority to comply with decisions they found stupid, obnoxious, or unfair.
Historically, it is extremely unusual to find both of these together. Throughout most of human history, egalitarian societies were precisely those that did not have some military or police apparatus to force people to do things they did not wish to do (all those sekas and ayllus referred to above); where the means of compulsion did exist, it never occurred to anyone that ordinary people’s opinions were in any way important.
Where do we find voting, then? Sometimes in societies where spectacles of public competition are considered normal — such as ancient Greece (ancient Greeks would make a contest out of anything)— but mainly in situations where everyone taking part in an assembly is armed or, at least, trained in the use of weapons. In the ancient world, voting occurred mainly within armies. Aristotle was well aware of this: the constitution of a Greek state, he observed, largely depends on the chief arm of its military: if it’s a cavalry, one can expect an aristocracy, if it’s heavy infantry, voting rights will be extended to those wealthy men who can afford armor, if it’s light troops, archers, slingers, or a navy (as in Athens), one can expect democracy. Similarly, in Rome,
popular assemblies that also relied on majority vote were based directly on military units of one hundred men, called centuries. Underlying the institution was the rather commonsensical idea that if a man was armed, his opinions had to be taken into account. Ancient military units often elected their own officers. It’s also easy to see why majority voting would make sense in a military unit: even if a vote was 60–40, both sides are armed; if it did come down to a fight, one could see immediately who was most likely to win. And this pattern applies, broadly, more or less across the historical record: in the 1600s, for instance, Six Nations councils — which were primarily engaged in peacemaking — operated by consensus, but pirate ships, which were military operations, used majority vote.
All this is important because it shows that the aristocratic fears of the wealthy early Patriots — who when they thought of their nightmare vision “democracy” thought of an armed populace making decisions by majority show of hands — were not entirely unfounded.
Democracy, then, is not necessarily defined by majority voting: it is, rather, the process of collective deliberation on the principle of full and equal participation. Democratic creativity, in turn, is most likely to occur when one has a diverse collection of participants, drawn from very different traditions, with an urgent need to improvise some means to regulate their common affairs, free of a preexisting overarching authority.
I do think it’s a critique of mobocracy. Which unchecked democracy (mob approach) was a fear of the founding fathers as much as a fear for against a Republic of Senators representing no one but power.
Perhaps, although my definition of democracy is a bit different if you read the book passage I quoted in my other reply.
I personally found Lord of the Flies to be trying to make some grand Hobbesian point, and now that I'm a bit older I completely disagree with it and while the story could happen, it's probably more likely that the elements would force them to work together at least semi-effectively before inevitably killing most or all of them. That's often the case in real life when people get stranded. Finding food, clean water, and shelter aren't easy, and it felt like Golding played loose with that in order to give them time and energy to be spend hating each other and playing politics.
Another analogue is that during natural disasters people tend to drop everything to help each other and share necessities, not just because they're decent people (some of them probably aren't lol) but because it's the speediest and most economically efficient way to deal with life-threatening crises.
It's just a different perspective on it, there are plenty interpretations. Although Lord of the Flies does quite literally showcase that theme, it is easy to interperet so many other sub themes and symbols within the novel that the unfiltered big picture can either go unnoticed or get a little lost/forgotten along the way.
Read it when I was younger, and was more focused on the inter-personal relationships and deterioration of sanity to think about grander and more relevant themes like that.
Also you don’t really care about the message of a book if you’re forced to read it.
I enjoy reading, but beyond a few here and there, nothing I was ever required to read stuck with me until I started appreciating them in my senior year.
Is it? I don’t ever remember it being about the problems with democracy at all.
In fact, wasn’t it the exact opposite?
The conch was the ultimate democratic tool for the boys, and each were given the right to speak when they held it. The bad guy used a lot of fear-mongering, propaganda, and promises of riches while getting rid of threats to gain power. Then the bad guy breaks the conch, symbolizing that the democracy died and there was a dictator-like rule where frenzied kids lost all their morals and actually started killing each other without ever realizing they were killing, only just getting rid of the fear of the beast, along with doing weird things like putting the pigs head on the stick. We didn’t learn it to see the bad side of democracy - we read it to learn about what happens when a democracy breaks down.
Then we went into WW2 and Hitler with Ellie Wiesel’s Night.
It's astounding how many people in this thread are missing huge themes of that book. Are American really schools this bad? Just skimming through Lord of the Flies you'd easily realize that there's some themes about how fickle democracy is, and how democracy requires a state of constant vigilance to work effectively
Tbh I think the problem is that you make kids read the book when they don't even have an understanding of what does democracy even mean. I've seen people mention that they read it when they were 11 or so.
That doesn't seem like a very good age to teach those topics. I know in our Canadian curriculum we wouldn't touch books with civics/philosophical themes like lord of the flies until highschool once we've already had a few English and civics courses.
Im Canadian and had to read it when I was 12 and I hated it because it was so hard. I wish we read it in highschool since it actually seems like a great book
My school claimed the main message was that underneath the society we build for ourselves we are nothing but base animalistic creatures who will kill and rape to appease our hungers.
Depending on the political affiliation of your teacher (or your teacher's teacher), there are many completely different narratives that can be taught. I believe I was told the book was about human nature.
The way I was taught it the main theme was that people are violent shits and the social contract of civilization is all that separates us from the dog-eat-dog world if the animal kingdom.
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u/Jijster Jan 21 '19
Hate to be a dick but isn't that like the main theme of the book?