this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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Lord of the Flies is one of the biggest ones of these. MFer heard about people surviving collectively after a shipwreck, wrote a book about how humans can't do that, and now people cite it like it's a historical document
I literally was taught this book alongside 1984 and Brave New World. It was like a whole anticommunist book unit
Back when I was taught they did 1984, Brave New World, Handmaids Tale and Clockwork Orange back to back. It was miserable.
What's really funny to me is that all these books are just about how terrible and miserable England is (and I guess the anglosphere more generally re: Handmaids Tale) and then projecting that onto the USSR and communism. Like yes, 1984 is terrifying-- it's about the UK government though, not the fucking Soviets.
Pretty much, Clockwork Orange is borderline unreadable with its made up slang too. Can't believe these books are so highly regarded.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
There was actually an IRL situation like Lord of the Flies, and the kids handled it pretty chill.
In most disasters, people cooperate and join together to get through it. Even all the shit happening during Hurricane Katrina, people were helping each other with the burger brain property rights fuckwads causing the most problems (i.e. threatening to shoot """"looters"""").
I think it's white settlers who are incapable of working for the greater good as seen with covid.
Yeah that is what the book is based on.
The book was written a decade before this though.
Oh must be another incident or I am wrong about the order, but I could have sworn it was based on a similar event.
It wasn't really an incident, but a writing trend - Lord of the Flies was a rebuke to a very colonial fiction that had become popular about white christians becoming stranded and thriving due to their civilisation and cultural superiority (and the book Coral Island specifically). Golding thought that was horseshit and wrote about kids getting stranded and then acting like kids instead of white Christian saviours.
I think you're thinking of another fictional book called The Coral Island. Lord of the Flies sort of parodies it
https://william-golding.co.uk/lord-flies-coral-island
People always miss the real point of that book: that british "people" are savages
I am building a hell specifically for people who think Lord of the Flies has anything useful to teach us about the nature of society and cooperation.
It's also a crap book. Read it as a kid, it sucks
It's one of my favorite books! :cri:
But mostly because I like survival/wilderness horror, not because I think it's an accurate portrayal of human nature.
Do you know the hatchet books? I loved them as a child.
Yup! Read Hatchet and Brian's Winter both as a kid.
Sucks to your favorite book!
Nooooooo not my beanmar!!