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collectively after a shipwreck, wrote a book about how humans can't do that, and now people cite it like it's a historical document
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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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.
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
Golding was inspired to write the ‘real’ story of what would happen if boys were stranded on an island – ‘in Lord of the Flies he had written Coral Island in reverse
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!!
this is like that time morbius said "It's morbin time!" and morbed all over the place
to this day I cannot believe they let that much morb appear on screen at once - truly grotesque
I call it appeal to cinema. It's something my dad has picked up and gives me the same frustration and the thought "oh, this conversation is going nowhere in a hurry."
I remember one time he announced to me that he would "change the question" which is like going "now imagine yourself as this strawman."
appeal to cinema is a nice punchy name for it!
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The causality is utterly confused, MiB cannot be used as evidence, it is written that way because the writer wanted a character to say that. It's possible a writer wanted a character to say that because the writer believed it to be true, but it's also possible that it was included for many other reasons.
People do this with all sorts of shit: from movies, to the bible, to things politicians say. It's just them laundering their own opinion through some perceived authority.
I like to do it specifically with really dumb movie lines or make up a line that is the total opposite of the message of the movie or character.
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Nah you’re right tho. It’s also when people use idioms as logic. “time is money therefore money is time” type shit. straight up reality detachment
p2: Ah but remember men in black? a person is reasonable, people are dumb panicky animals
And liberals will tell you with a straight face that they aren't propagandized.
Once had an argument with a guy who tried to demonstrate that communism is bad using the example of Lois Lowry's The Giver. When I pointed out the absurdity of trying to use a children's fiction book to prove your enemies wrong, he fixated on the "children's" part and started throwing out titles like 1984 and Atlas Shrugged.
Same people who mock the religious people for believing “fictional stories.”
a person is reasonable, people are dumb panicky animals
It applies well in the movie it was written for, in the context of extraterrestrial life existing as fugitives on earth, but there are of course other circumstances where a person can be a dumb panicky animal and a group of people can be reasonable.
I have a petty thing about a movie that I have spoken about but nobody seems to share my anguish. It's the famous "You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?" zinger from Happy Gilmore, my mind is locked on the fact that Adam Sandler literally wrote the script, he made him say that dumb line so his character could respond in such a way.
Happy Gilmore
IIRC it was a running joke on that movie that "Shooter" McGavin's one liners weren't working. Like he said "and Grizzly Adams had a beard" sarcastically, only for a random guy to reply "Grizzly Adams did have a beard."
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Not only is it childish, but Terry Pratchett said the same thing, but better.
I'm sure everyone's encountered some variation 'socialism good, communism bad remember animal farm', heard that one at work last week but was on the phone and could't do anything but make a face. The poor Murkkkian countrymen wouldn't know communism from any other -ism if it clapped both cheeks and gave them a copy of Wage Labor and Capital.
I try to reach further for examples when I'm talking about stuff specifically so I don't just resort to "this is like blideo gaem" but sometimes it's hard lol
I find it funny someone would turn to MiB for this instead of something like groupthink or any of the other social psych constructs that attempt to explain group behaviors. Literally a century of research into this kind of shit (not all of it is very useful)
"We should do thing from Starship Troopers because in the book it totally works!"
It works because Heinlein believed it would work, not because it would work that way in reality!
This is just like in Idiocracy, probably.
-so you are a secret alien is what you are saying?
I knew a person that quoted that MiB line all the time and I always wanted to call them out on that
Live vicariously through me.
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