With the 2020s midway over, the previous appears painful but tangible, the current chaotic, and the long run… nicely, maybe simply an train in retaining the core of humanity’s soul in a world more and more like that of Lord of the Flies. For a lot of, emotional trauma appears to be life’s painful act of branding — hollowing out or ending lives lengthy earlier than the nursing house. Xbox and TikTok fulfill the loneliness that nostalgia can’t treatment, whereas one other brutal college capturing turns into simply one other headline.
Traumatic experiences have a tendency to depart no bodily scars, despite the fact that many people would gladly commerce short-term bodily ache for a lifetime of psychological anguish. Typically, turning to the previous supplies us with that much-needed blueprint for the place all of it went incorrect, and artists like William Golding (1911-1993) had been sounding alarms about right this moment’s groupthink barbarism a long time in the past. Whereas it’s straightforward to dismiss 1954’s Lord of the Flies as tame right this moment, how this story torched UK innocence within the quick aftermath of British imperialism nonetheless echoes.
Golding’s Island Despises Order and Chaos in Equal Measure
Lord of the Flies desires to decimate order in favor of chaos, and its island setting, removed from Britain’s Royal Coat of Arms, permits one-half of Golding’s youth to indulge their bloodlust freely. The opposite aspect, the civil group, desires to keep up the established order, despite the fact that Ralph typically enjoys the joys of Jack’s primal urges. Ralph and Piggy cling to the beliefs of legislation and civility, whereas Jack’s tribe provides itself to bloodlust and pleasure.
Via a post-colonial lens, the novel’s central battle reveals extra profound anxieties about empire, and Golding’s ultimate statements on colonialism, whereas enlightening, should not with out their issues. As Stefan Hawlin notes, Golding’s narrative at occasions leans into the previous empire mythos, restating “the misrepresentations of white enlightenment and black savagery.”
But Lord of the Flies resists being pinned down as a easy endorsement of imperial considering. Regardless of some objectionable language, significantly racial slurs voiced by the characters, the novel affords a much more crucial have a look at British superiority than authors like Kipling ever dared. Golding’s forged — solely white, largely middle-class — unravels into barbarity not due to outdoors forces, however due to instincts buried deep inside their so-called “civilized” psyches. On this manner, Golding prefigures a postmodern understanding of id: even the “purest” societies harbor the seeds of their undoing.
The island itself turns into a fractured society, with Ralph’s group preventing to make British order nice once more, whereas Jack’s tribe brazenly embraces energy, dominance, and a will to beat. Via Ralph’s eyes, Jack’s descent into savagery feels monstrous — a mirror of how colonial Britain as soon as justified conquest by portraying indigenous peoples as irredeemably Different. This framing turns into particularly difficult from a post-colonial perspective: are Jack’s tribe and their violence meant to characterize the colonized as savages? Or does Lord of the Flies present how simply the so-called civilized fall into the identical brutal instincts they as soon as projected onto others?
As Golding suggests, the reply might lie someplace within the uncomfortable grey. Ralph and Piggy’s tribe fights to impose their imaginative and prescient of order—a imaginative and prescient rooted in the identical mode of considering that when fueled imperial conquest. Jack’s chaotic and bloody insurrection displays each the resentment of the colonized and the violent start of recent orders.
Finally, Lord of the Flies forces readers to reckon with the uncomfortable concept that civilization just isn’t an antidote to savagery. It’s merely one other masks we’re all too fast to use — one which prefers to neuter our darkest impulses with the quickest dopamine hit accessible on the street to hypocrisy.
Ralph vs. Jack
Golding’s island shortly turns into greater than only a setting — it’s a stand-in for British society, stripped of grownup supervision however not of its values. Because the boys break up into two competing tribes, their motivations mirror a deeper battle between inherited order and untamed intuition. Ralph and Piggy’s group, self-appointed stewards of civility, goal to protect the principles of house: hearth, shelter, and discourse.
That civility, nonetheless, comes with baggage. Their mission to comprise Jack’s tribe — to rein in what they see as chaos — echoes Britain’s historic justification for empire: the concept conquest was essential to impose order on these deemed much less civilized.
Ralph’s tribe, whereas usually forged because the protagonists, begins to “different” Jack’s group in a lot the identical manner imperial Britain othered the individuals it colonized. If Jack and his tribe are framed as savages, what does that suggest in regards to the real-world victims of empire?
Nonetheless, the roles aren’t fastened. Together with his starvation for management, Jack turns into Lord of the Flies’ clearest image of aggression. His descent into violence, culminating within the homicide of Piggy (democracy), attracts a chilling parallel to how colonizing powers, together with Britain, silenced indigenous leaders throughout Africa and past.
On this mild, Jack isn’t simply the villain. He turns into the embodiment of empire itself, the proverbial rot behind the crowns, thrones, and scepters. Subsequently, Ralph and his tribe are, sarcastically, the colonized—compelled into hiding, stripped of energy, and hunted.
The boys’ descent additionally lays naked a extra primal theme: the battle for superiority. This isn’t nearly who will get to talk on the conch circle. It’s about whose worldview survives. Ralph believes in his group’s ethical excessive floor: hearth, order, duty. Jack believes in dominance and the pleasure of rule. Each declare legitimacy, and each search to impose their will.
On this sense, the island turns into a microcosm for world energy struggles, the place neither aspect is solely harmless, and never everybody desires to select a aspect. A number of the boys, like these mocked or ignored by Jack’s tribe, merely need to survive the insanity with out participating; they function a quiet echo of the various civilians caught between empires, with no voice within the violence surrounding them.
Hero Worship Disintegration
Jack’s tribe doesn’t simply reject civilization; they embrace the uncooked pleasure of energy. Their authority isn’t constructed on justice or cause however on the joys of domination, irrespective of the ache they inflict. Ralph, against this, sees his group as morally superior as a result of they resist these primal urges. But Golding complicates that binary. Ralph’s insistence on order mirrors the imperial logic the British as soon as used to justify their colonial conquests. He isn’t simply attempting to keep up civilization; he’s implementing a slender definition that excludes any different worldview.
Even Piggy, the image of cause and rationality, operates inside this framework. He and Ralph characterize a sort of well-meaning imperialism: the idea that their model of order is the one proper one. Naturally, Jack resents it. His tribe pushes again, not simply in opposition to the principles however in opposition to the worldview these guidelines uphold. Golding exposes the resentment that festers when one group tries to impose its cultural imaginative and prescient on one other, a resentment deeply acquainted to anybody on the receiving finish of empire or cult of persona.
Jack’s descent into brutality additionally faucets into one thing deeper than insurrection. He channels instincts that civilizations have all the time wrestled with: the enjoyment of destruction. These impulses could also be disturbing, however they’re additionally a part of what formed empires within the first place. Golding appears to warn that even Britain, contemporary from its stand in opposition to fascism in World Struggle II, wasn’t immune to those drives. As scholar Stefan Hawlin notes, the novel quietly explores how simply the roles of liberator and oppressor can flip.
Finally, Lord of the Flies affords no clear heroes. Ralph and Piggy stand for logic and legislation, however their ethical certainty veers towards cultural supremacy. Jack’s tribe indulges in chaos, however their insurrection additionally rejects domination. The result’s a society break up not simply by energy, however by imaginative and prescient: one aspect demanding order, the opposite demanding freedom, nonetheless brutal, and let the chips fall the place they could. In that conflict, Golding provides us a haunting allegory for the lengthy, uneasy legacy of empire… trauma begetting trauma.
Desert Islands (Discord Servers)
The gnawing pit within the middle of the abdomen throughout grief doesn’t all the time correspond to loss of life, as many survivors of emotional and even bodily trauma can lay declare to. As an alternative, that hollowed-out feeling can even accompany the lack of innocence.
Survivors of traumatic experiences throughout adolescence have each a curse and a blessing to battle as they drift by means of life’s bittersweet corridors. Youth trauma performs out each minute of the day throughout each society on this planet, simply because it did for Golding’s stranded boys, and the younger victims of empire compelled to shift their cultures and identities. The actual terror in Lord of the Flies isn’t that civilization breaks down: it’s that the instruments of empire (dominance, ideology, compelled conformity) stay alive and nicely, even in youngsters.
Golding might not have named post-colonialism, however his story captures its haunted define: the interior struggle between who we’re and what energy tells us we needs to be. That struggle hasn’t ended. It simply retains altering type. Ralph, Jack, and the opposite survivors have an extended street of emotional battle forward, made extra unlucky by an period that most well-liked such emotions to be bottled.
Because the a long time coalesced into the AI-driven wasteland of the collective solitude we now have right this moment, arson, spears, and violence have shifted to the numbing artifice of distant self-absorption. Immediately’s youth carry the scars of a distinct kind of conquest: the enslavement of the soul for the contemporaneous acquire of these in energy.
Sure, We Nonetheless Want Allegories
Commenting on the largely panned 1990 remake of the unique 1963 movie model of Lord of the Flies, Roger Ebert mentioned, “On the time of its publication (1954) makes an attempt had been made to seek out political messages in it, however right this moment it appears extra like a tragic prophecy of what’s taking place in neighborhoods dominated by medication. What week goes by with out one other story of a Ralph gunned down by a Jack?” That evaluation could also be a bit harsh, as it may be mentioned that Golding’s boys had been a parable for liberalism vs. commerce lengthy earlier than medication destroyed untapped potential.
What lingers most in Lord of the Flies isn’t simply its commentary on empire or ideology; it’s the uncooked emotional wreckage left behind. Golding wasn’t solely writing about civilization or conquest in a tidy parable; he was writing about youngsters compelled to navigate terror, alienation, and loss with out the scaffolding of grownup safety. The violence between Jack and Ralph’s tribes is simply as a lot psychological as it’s bodily, a brutal initiation into trauma that strips away id and lets the primordial ego and pleasure precept run amok.
That’s why Lord of the Flies nonetheless resonates. In an age when younger individuals face fixed strain to evolve, carry out, and decide sides — whether or not on-line or in real-world social hierarchies — the breakdown on Golding’s Island feels painfully acquainted. The concern of being forged out, the seduction of belonging at any price, the convenience with which violence turns into a type of energy — these aren’t relics of colonial historical past. They’re a part of the emotional structure that right this moment’s younger individuals nonetheless should navigate.
By the point the rescue arrives, there’s little left to save lots of. The boys aren’t who they had been, and so they can’t return, very like the youth destroyed by the grinding arches of the bloodthirsty British Crown (the primal ego that solely desires to guard the established order).
That’s the true heartbreak on the middle of Lord of the Flies: not simply what civilization misplaced, however what childhoods throughout quite a few cultures by no means had an opportunity to carry on to.
