Much to the delight of hard-drinking middle school English teachers, a lush new adaptation of Lord of the Flies just dropped on Netflix. It's a pretty good show based on a pretty bad book. Much like Atlas Shrugged [1], LOTF is a propulsive literary achievement built on the faultline of a false binary. Authored as a rebuttal to R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island, in which stranded British boys civilize natives and dispatch pirates, Golding's masterpiece indicts the imperial hubris of England's ruling elite without rejecting the Victorian civilization/savagery binary. Morally sensitive but politically unimaginative, Golding couldn't envision peaceful anarchism even though it turns out to be quite common.
As anthropologist David Graeber argued convincingly in The Dawn of Everything, democracy emerges from the fringes and frontiers. Graeber's claim — based on fieldwork in Madagascar, studies of stateless peoples, and research into the voluntarily marooned pirates from whom America's founding fathers (and corporations) borrowed ideas about representation, shareholding, and written constitutions — was simple: "Human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be." Natural experiments support this idea. In 1965, six Tongan schoolboys castaway on a South Pacific island for fifteen months gave their Australian rescuer a tour of their garden, gymnasium, and badminton court, plus a tutorial on dispute resolution. But it's the unnatural experiments that stick in the public imagination.
Years before LOTF, Golding divided his Bishop Wordsworth's pupils into rival factions to see if they'd turn on each other. They did. He concluded that they were, by nature, nasty, brutish, and short. Not so. They were just short. The rest they learned from him.
