[like_any_other]

Strange how proving the book utterly false has not dimmed its literary reputation even a little, nor caused a resurgence of the "unrealistic" Coral Island that Golding set out to disprove and displace [1]. In fact being proven false has not been acknowledged at all by the literary world, which show how much respect that world deserves.

[1] Golding thought that the book was unrealistic and asked his wife whether it would be a good idea if he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies#Background

[andy99]

It’s famous for being an allegory isn’t it? Isn’t this like saying Animal Farm remains popular even though we’ve proven that animals don’t actually self organize like in the book?

[thrance]

Animal Farm is more like a thin metaphor over actual events. Most of the animals in it can be mapped to historical figures or groups of people from the 1917 revolution.

Lord of the Flies is "philosophical fiction" that is trying to make a point about human nature. That point has been shown to be overly pessimistic.

[ThrowawayR2]

If you're suggesting that humans can't be that terrible, I recommend that you do not open this link (It is a link to a BBC article but I feel compelled to give a trigger warning since it is genuinely that disturbing): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45942652 History is rife with similar examples; those who still believe there is any inherent goodness in human nature should acquaint themselves with them.

Golding is right on the money. Humans are merely animals and will behave no better than animals given the right circumstances.

[MangoToupe]

The above poster isn't claiming humans can't act poorly, just that lord of the flies is a bad depiction of how humans come to act that way.

[like_any_other]

> suggesting that humans can't be that terrible

No, he's suggesting that children usually aren't that terrible. That a real scenario of ~50 unsupervised children (or adults), 99 out of 100 times, wouldn't play out that way. That something is possible does not mean it is the norm, and only those that can't grasp numbers (such as English majors) think otherwise. With such significant caveats, can one really say that the novel is about human nature in general?

[ThrowawayR2]

You are pulling equally fictitious numbers out of your hat to defend your comfortable worldview, without even the benefit of extensive exposure to children as a schoolmaster, so how is your argument on any better level than Golding's?

[like_any_other]

> You are pulling equally fictitious numbers out of your hat

Am I? Ignoring the natural experiment the Guardian article retells, how often do self-supervised human societies descend into savagery or war among themselves? How often when they are smaller than 100 members (Lord of Flies is about a group of 50)?

Even without the <100 member criterion, only the most violent outliers of human societies reach a 1% yearly violent death rate [1]. So my "fictitious numbers out of my hat to defend my comfortable worldview" are actually the worst humanity is capable of (the average for the 20th century, with all the world wars, was 0.06%). Yet I'm not getting a Nobel prize despite being closer to the truth. I guess that's why he got it in literature, not a scientific field.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...

[metadope]

I first read this book when I was about the same age as the main characters. I saw the movie not long after that. I was deeply moved (disturbed) by the drama and the outcome of the fictional story. Even though the story did not arrive at a happy ending where a hero emerges both victorious and virtuous, even though the negative outcomes (for characters I cared about) were personally distressing to me, my main takeaway was a new sense of a harsh reality, a terrible truth that was being presented to me, which accurately reflected my actual contemporaneous experiences in the real world, in my life.

True story: when I was nine years old, I was sent, for the first time in my life, to a place known in the midwest US as "summer camp". Most of the other kids there were older than me. I learned that canoes are very hard to get into. I learned that ponds had horseflies and mosquitoes and leeches. I learned that once I'd climbed the tower of the high-dive my legs would turn to jelly and I would struggle to make it to the end and jump off anyway.

In a weird twist from home, someone had stashed into my suitcase a large can of spray deodorant. I was only nine; did I stink already? I had no idea why I had it, but it was a great toy that I put to use immediately. Run up to a boy, spray some deodorant into their face, run away, cackling.

I delighted in this trick often enough that I soon had an angry mob chasing me-- up and down the trails of the camp, many older boys clamoring for my scalp, revenge. Eventually, I ran out of road and was cornered, as a significant crowd formed an intimidating semi-circle around me, closing in.

Kids were still cursing me as they rubbed sting from their eyes. The atmosphere was ugly. It got quiet. I'd really messed up. I felt fear, real like the highdive.

Just when I thought I'd had it, one boy stepped forward and turned and faced the crowd: he actually held out a hand like a traffic cop. To this day, I don't know what compelled him to put himself between me and all those older, bigger boys. He wasn't that much older than me. But he talked them down, got them to let go of their justified displeasure with me. One of the older boys snatched the can of deodorant out of my hand. A lot of fingers were wagged in my face. But nobody hurt me. Nobody stuck me with a stick like a pig.

I never saw the hero again. I've never used deodorant since.

We are exposed to a lot of fairy tales when we are young. Some of them are Grimm, but many are illusory misrepresentations of a fantasy world that the adults in our lives wish they could provide for us.

Buried beneath the surface is the always unspoken reality, which often entails a trail through a wilderness to a gingerbread house on a gumdrop mountain where a witch is waiting to boil us alive.

Lord Of The Flies is grim but true. On the playground, in small groups, when the adults are absent, children become a hierarchy of peer pressure and social eruptions, like spots on the face of a Head Boy at whatever English prep school. The savagery is there, the power struggles, the bully and the rebel, the shrinking violets and the blooming idiots, they're all real, and they often have a life-long after-affect on the lives of those who came together, on that day, when that happened.

> Lord of the Flies is "philosophical fiction" that is trying to make a point about human nature. That point has been shown to be overly pessimistic.

I don't know who you cite as an authority here-- has been shown to be? By whom? 'Overly pessimistic' in situ, I await illumination...

I don't see Lord Of The Flies as overly pessimistic. I think it is a masterpiece of literature, providing insightful and frightful expressive splashes of sound, fury and color; allegorical visions of what childhood really is like for modern and post-modern Western civilization. Highly recommended.

[like_any_other]

> A lot of fingers were wagged in my face. But nobody hurt me. Nobody stuck me with a stick like a pig.

Never got into a fight as a kid? All that would have happened is you would have gotten punched a few times.

[compiler-guy]

Don’t know where you grew up, but a lot more damage than that happened to plenty of us in childhood fights.

[jacquesm]

Or knifed. Or shot. Depending on the location.

[billy99k]

The crazy part is that just looking at how people behave on Reddit and HN, I could easily see adults with the same outcome as Lord of the Flies.

It also could be that children are mostly posting, however (since there is no age verification, it's hard to tell these days).

[bigyabai]

I think you're misconstruing the point of Lord of the Flies. It is not a children's book, and most of it's commentary can be generalized to adults. We see the exact same outcome in the highest echelons of politics, business and academia alike.

[like_any_other]

Partly. But again, in the author's own words, he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave". Even his motivation was that Coral Island was "unrealistic". You'd think that would earn the book at least a little asterisk. Meanwhile Animal Farm is obviously intended to be allegorical by using animals as protagonists.

While I disagree, one could argue that Lord of the Flies deserves to be so highly regarded despite being so wrong about children. But can one really argue that, when a highly regarded and extremely well known work, that is ostensibly about children, gets shown to be completely factually wrong on children, the appropriate amount of self-reflection for the literary world, that had heaped (and continues to heap) so much praise on it, is zero?

[metadope]

> gets shown to be completely factually wrong on children

I'm not sure I understand this. Who/what has shown Golding's classic novel to be "completely factually wrong"? How did you establish this? Is there a reference you could steer me towards?

I'd really be interested in exploring the background of where this idea comes from-- my curiosity piqued: Is Lord Of The Flies a misrepresentation of childhood savagery? Is there no such thing? What is it that you are contending here, and where did you get this idea?

TIA!

[Jtsummers]

> In fact being proven false has not been acknowledged at all by the literary world

You are aware that the book is a novel right? That means it's pretty much all made up. Sometimes novels pull from reality (real people, places, events, etc.), but they are always made up (fictional) stories. So of course it's been proven false, it never happened because it was fiction.

Did you also know that there was never a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man attack on NYC? Shocking!

[like_any_other]

A fictional novel purporting to shed light on real human nature. In that respect it has been shown to be, at a minimum, significantly mistaken.

[notahacker]

it's been no more "proven" to be "significantly mistaken" because six friends from a Polynesian island nation were actually pretty good at helping each other subsist on a Polynesian island than "proven" correct because another kid shoots up a school or some kids got trained by adults to commit war crimes that make Lord of the Flies look tame.

[criddell]

I think The Hobbit has also been proven false. You should add it to your list.

[wtcactus]

> “Proving the book false”

It’s a novel, it has nothing to prove. It’s a deeply philosophical book.

[bondarchuk]

Since when does "proving the book utterly false" apply in any way shape or form to a fucking novel? HN in charge of reading books...