Lord of the Flies | Official Trailer | Netflix

More about the nature of the education of privileged British schoolboys than anything else. It chooses a very specific group of people to strand on the island for a reason. They are not a representative group of humanity. They are a group specifically indoctrinated with very strong hierarchical structures and obedience. The most fundamental source of their morality is duty to institutions, they are not truly supposed to be moral agents themselves. You obey a teacher not because you have decided they are a trustworthy and someone you respect but because they have been bestowed authority by an institution. You do what you're told because otherwise you will get a caning or whatever. Their morality did not disappear when they became stranded, they didn't actually have it to begin with. Obedient children to grow up to be obedient soldiers don't need to be making moral judgments on their own.

Hm. I see what you’re saying. But I think when Golding wrote it, he took for granted “normal” childhood for his generation. Which would include a lot of behaviors, actions and beliefs we don’t tolerate today. Things we now understand are traumatic, things we now understand are linked to anti-social behavior.

Childhood trauma from war generation issues was part of the social commentary of the book. Also the moral deterioration stems from Jack being about status and trying to be dominant. He wants to be the king but doesn’t want to do the ugly stuff that comes with it. And as he leads the hunters, they get easy success (making a plan and upholding a social hierarchy is a lot less flashy than bringing meat) making people want to be part of the glory. So I would argue the deterioration of the society is a result of who Jack is more, than society just doing it by itself. It’s more “everyone can do evil, but it takes someone evil to get the ball rolling” than just “society is doomed to fail because everyone is default evil”. So I think showing that Jack is this way not because of himself, but his upbringing and Ralph is good because his parents raised him with more care, kind of strengthens the core message.

Give it a rest, Britta