This idea, popularized by narratives like Lord of the Flies, furthers the notion that society is just a thin veneer and people are just going to become animals the second civilization isn’t around to tell them what to do. Ideas like this were/are used to justify colonialism.https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1259248932326170631 …
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Replying to @thelindsayellis
My own personal reading of LotF is that everything goes to hell precisely because these are sheltered British upper class white boys with a twisted sense of entitlement
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Replying to @arthur_affect @thelindsayellis
I genuinely thought everyone understood LotF as «once you've scratched the thin veneer of education and "good manners", privileged boys soon reveal themselves as nasty little brutes» Feels weird to realize one's understanding of that book was far from being universal.
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Then again it's not that weird when one's stop and think about it: the two readings («people revert to savage without Daddy Leviathan telling them what to do»; «Privileged white boys hide all the vices "civilized" people project ont "barbarians"») trully differ on one thing only:
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The role the education play in the kids behavior. If one read it as "The posh education the kids received was what kept them civilized and once you removed the teachers and school, they reverted back to savagery" then the book appear as pro Daddy Leviathan…
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Replying to @Laurent_Weppe @thelindsayellis
This is an extremely weak reading imo, like at no point do they have any great triumphs of science or reason like the original Coral Island And I know this is easy to miss but the point of the framing story is that Britain itself has been destroyed in a nuclear war
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...I did, in fact, very much miss that
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A lot of people assume that the reference to evacuating London is to the Blitz in WWII but flying across the ocean in a plane was very much an anachronism for that war Golding was writing in 1954 and writing about a near future WW3
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The boys at one point idly talk about what they know about nukes (very little) and about who survived and what the retaliation for the bombing they evacuated from will be
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