I have not seen this diaried, but I did not search very far back. Apologies if I missed it.
Tom Sullivan, over at Digby’s Hullabaloo, posted about an instance of young boys marooned on an all but uninhabitable island. It described a real-world parallel to William Golding’s 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies. (I have a free for use picture at top, but the picture posted at Digby more clearly shows how inhospitable Ata Island truly is. And Rutger Bregman has more pictures in his Twitter comment.)
Lord of the Flies postulates young, seemingly still impressionable young people succumbing to the lure of incivility and anarchy. As if our inescapable human nature is incompatible with cooperation and humane, effective relating.
More below.
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It’s a popular theme in today’s world, with our two dominant political parties, one favoring the idea of cooperation, collaboration and pulling together (‘we’re all in this together’), and the other pushing the idea that we’re all on our own, screw you.
It is easily seen in the attempts by the current administration to encourage and support divisiveness and viciousness everywhere possible, never collaboration, cooperation, respect, getting along. Certainly they like (and effectively leverage!) the idea that we are evil in our core.
Yet, what if the pessimistic model - so long cherished in our society - isn’t really how young people behave in a rule-less society, a society of six, isolated in a survival situation? What if our nature isn’t so ominous, after all? What if a fictional account is thoroughly debunked by a real-world account of good young people, isolated, yet working together to survive in a dangerous world?
Rutger Bregman chronicled just such a case, of six Tongan boys, rescued in 1966, after a harrowing ordeal that, per Tom Sullivan:
after 15 months on a remote Pacific island did not revert to behaving as animals. They retained their humanity. Indeed, they deepened it.
Of course, the variety of personalities on our planet is practically infinite. If one of the stranded boys had been like HIM, the admirable humanity of the Tongan group would have been disrupted. (Not that any reasonable group would have invited him along.)
But I, for one, am delighted that William Golding’s fictional story has been revealed as just that: FICTION (and not well-intended fiction, either). We’re better than that, we humans. And we deserve better.
Even if, we, like the Tongan boys, have to do it ourselves.
Rutger Bregman just posted extensive followup to the story of the Tongan boys in his Twitter thread. And do please read the Guardian account of Bregman’s story and research. Well worth it.
On to tonight’s comments!
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