An Unhinged Mimicry of Lord of the Flies

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”

– Pablo Picasso

There are several books that have been hailed as impeccable clairvoyants for their prescient outlook at how humanity would fall in the abyss of doom and gloom in near future. Whether it is the Orwellian nightmare of 1984, the caste system established through science in Brave New World or the decimation of every source of knowledge played out in Fahrenheit 451, most of the study that interrogates the ultimate withering of civilization is extracted from these novels. However, in my view, there is one fictional masterpiece that needs to be talked about with equal fervor, and that book is Lord of the Flies.

For the uninitiated, Lord of the Flies is set in an unknown period of a massive nuclear war during which a plane carrying a group of pre-teen Brits crash lands on an uncharted island. The surviving kids congregate and enjoy their newfound paradise brimming with fresh fruits, seafood. They agree to establish rules, choose a leader, and light a signal fire in the hopes of being rescued; but by and by they give in to the most inherent, egregious attribute of human nature: bestiality.

Given that the principal characters are school boys, one would expect the plot to take a feel-good route of happy-go-lucky kids experiencing a jolly good adventure with a happy ending. On the contrast, the book goes the opposite way with its sepulchral setting established right in the beginning.

William Golding’s Lord of Flies is a dark satire on those several feel-good novels in which Brit kids go on a fantastical adventures where they showcase flawless wisdom, demonstrate unquestionable behavior, and use their good religious values to keep pirates, witches and savages at bay. By the time Lord of the Flies came out, the fictional domain was teeming with such fictional tropes. William Golding, however, was having none of this BS. He knew how they would behave in reality [regardless of how civilized they were] if they wound up in a remote place and left to look after themselves with no adult supervision.

Born in England in the year 1911, William Golding was a high school teacher before being conscripted into Navy when second world war broke out. The horrendous reality of war affected him so much that he got disillusioned from the notion of the perfectibility of social man.

“I had discovered what one man could to do another. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey must have been blind or wrong in the head.”

– William Golding

Lord of the Flies dissects the term ‘savagery’ and its definition formed by the modern civilized society. This one particular character in the book [Jack] is the leader of a choir group that also finds itself marooned on the island with other boys. While establishing rules, this is what he says:

“We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we are not savages. We’re English, and the English are BEST at everything.”

– Jack (Lord of the Flies)

The irony writes itself when this same polished English kid lets his ego and ‘savagery’ get the better of him as he caresses his lofty pride and supremacist disposition instead of contributing towards rescue efforts, and then ultimately face paints, engages himself and other kids in trance-filled caper, runs around killing other hapless kids, and ends up burning almost the entire island, just to gaudily establish his tawdry power over others who try to imbibe sense in the group, which he finds as insolence to his supremacy.

Those were the actions of ‘savagery’ from a polished, civilized kid. It’s so ironic that savagery is attributed to primitive, spear holding, face painting indigenous populace who are believed to lack a sense of primly constructed modern civilization.

Just take a tad bit look around you. There are these ostentatious leaders of some of the most powerful and populous countries in the world. These leaders and their lackeys kept slacking off and evading all necessary action to curb the spread of raging pandemic in 2020. Holding on to their power, establishing their vanity, and propagating their gaudy image was paramount to them in their view instead of doing the right thing.

Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

One such leader led a nation wide revel, in the middle of pandemic, by capering through cacophony of light and sound for no reason. One antic followed another, one distraction followed another, one diversion followed another, and masses were happy to comply and follow the pied piper to myriad antics to a point where the country is at present facing a massive dearth of vaccines, medicines, and proper health care facilities. If you are not living under a rock, you probably know which country here is being referred to as of May 2021.

The need to establish supremacy and majoritarian pride has always managed to take over the senses of people who are led by mob mentality. If this wasn’t true, the Germans wouldn’t have been influenced by Adolf Hitler and his noxious politics of hate; and race/caste supremacy wouldn’t have been one the most prevalent social evils of this era.

Power-hungry politicians like them who neglect the voice of sanity are similar to Jack. They would rather stroke their pride and let all hell break lose than confront the crisis and resolve it. They keep gullible masses intoxicated through distractions and supremacist pride in such a way that their foot soldiers spring into action, in a heartbeat, to hassle and gaslight those who try to question the incompetence and negligence of people in power. The voices of proles, intellectuals and unbiased representatives of common men are muzzled by self serving, indifferent people in power, crony capitalists and their mob. This is something that is mirrored in the book as Simon and Piggy, the only two voices of sanity, are met with brutal murder committed by Jack and other kids.

We live in a world where savagery is fine as long as it is carried out by the civilized folks en masse, and it carries the validation of ideology of supremacy and majoritarianism.

The very aforementioned mob mentality and foot soldier like deportment harkens back at the mob mentality of the kids[in the book] who, in their intoxication of power and rage, killed two kids.

Towards the end of the book, these kids led by Jack chase Ralph to kill him, and set the entire island on fire to smoke him out. However, the plot plays Deus Ex Machina as they all stumble upon a Navy officer who finds them and witnesses what they have been up to.

The ending can’t be called a happy one although the kids find themselves rescued by the Navy. The officer who finds them looks at them and look back at his warship inferring the mirror reflection of the violence and ‘savagery’ they have engaged in through acts of war. A war that was fought by civilized people of the modern world. An act of killing and destruction that wrought nothing but irreversible damage to warring nations.

Various allegories can be extracted from Lord of Flies. What I saw in it is a revelation that humans inherently foster bestiality, and that is what masses find appealing if they lose their individuality and give into the intoxication of pride and supremacy. That is why it doesn’t come as a surprise that certain countries, after a momentary respite of choosing sensible leaders, find themselves attracted to uncouth, loutish, and power hungry megalomaniacs.

On To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch and heroism

I have recently had the chance of reading this novel, and I must say it has rightfully earned its position in the annals of literature as one of the greatest modern classics. If you haven’t read this novel, then I sincerely urge you to read it, and if you read it during your high school or middle school days as a part of a literary studies project, I would still urge you to read it again.

I am going to proceed with this post assuming that you have read To Kill a Mockingbird sometime recently or at least at a point in past from which you can still recollect the plot, characters and nub of the story. Also, this is not a review of the book, but an opinion piece on one of the primary characters and its reflection on the present era.

Although the book’s central character is a six year old girl, it is the principal character’s father (Atticus Finch) who I found to be the most inspiring figure, to an extent where I would consider him to be the greatest fictional hero of all time. I do comprehend that the universe of fiction is brimming with characters who have accomplished heroic feat, but for me Atticus Finch takes the honor, and there is an underlying reason behind this.

To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by a six year old old, and it takes place in 1930s America, when the aberrations of prejudices against African-Americans were normalized and seen as a standard for a customary social structure by majority of white men and women.

Save for handful of characters such as central character herself, Scout, her brother, Jem; their widowed father, Atticus; and their affable neighbor, Ms. Maudi; all but entire white population of the town that the story is set in saw nothing wrong in racial injustice. An act of empathy or support to people of color would wreak revulsion of the officious community of white people. 

So, as the story goes, Atticus Finch, a middle-aged lawyer, is appointed to defend a case for an African-American who has been falsely accused of violating a white woman.

To Kill a Mockingbird might have paved way for some of the Hollywood movies to scarcely set the character arc of their protagonists on Atticus Finch’s plot line. Avatar, Dancing With the Wolves and The Last Samurai follow a trope where the protagonist, who belongs to a certain powerful majority, fights for the OTHERS who are seen as enemies by his own folks, because he is motivated by the fact that his people are ready to put the minority populace in harm’s way just to satiate their fiendish interest and prejudices. Of course, there is a minor difference when it comes to these movies and the novel: unlike the protagonists from the aforementioned movies, Atticus Finch does not seem to be teetering in indecision whether he should stand for the one who has been wronged, but he sticks to his duty right from the beginning because he knows that every innocent has every right to seek justice in a fair world, and he sticks to it even when it rakes severance from some of his own people.

A still from the film adaptation of the novel.

Atticus Finch is not a stereotypical Gen Z hero: a genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist with a suit of iron armor, fighting diabolic monsters and aliens. He is just a common man with a typical job and a small family in a sleepy town.

What makes his heroism relatable is that Atticus Finch could be anyone, me, you, yes, you right there reading this blog post,  your siblings, your parents, your children, your neighbor, anyone.

Atticus’s character has ostensibly full knowledge of what his conscientious action towards his duty will wreak, and he still proceeds to do what he is supposed to, a trait that many of us lack in today’s world teeming with iniquity. We are afraid that questioning people in power or the government’s incompetence  will get us antagonized in the eye of public, and we will be labelled as anti-nationals; questioning religious charlatans will wreak the havoc of rabid, fanatic followers; questioning the rise of fascist powers will get us labeled as anti-state; questioning the unfair exploitation at the corporate house will get us tagged an contemptuous incompetent employees; basically we avoid going against bullies when we see them stomping on the weak, because we don’t want to be seen as someone who is against them, lest we see the bully wreak havoc on us.

Doing what is fair and right is seen as an act of naivety  in today’s vulpine world. While racism, jingoism, xenophobia, casteism and classism is becoming a norm in majority in many parts of the world, shunning these prejudices is seen as an act of rebellion by the majoritarian establishments.

People who vehemently support these unjust prejudices seek the validation of the majority. Maybe the rebellion of one Atticus Finch to do the right thing may look inconsequential in influencing the society at large; however, if many come forward and do what Atticus Finch did, it could help  inspire other majoritarians to stop being mere spectators and come forward to shed  their outlook on how they view minorities.

We see a similar stamp of his objective’s purity in many real-life figures from the past. Take, Nelson Mandela, for example, or Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr. There are many more examples of individuals from past and present on whom we could see the silhouette of Atticus Finch. They knew that the path to justice and fairness is paved with unspeakable malice of the oppressors, but they still strode the path of rectitude and fought for the oppressed.

To conclude, my take away from this classic literary piece and its essential character was a timeless reminder that heroism does not always have to be an ostentatious display of brawniness, that standing up for what’s right is not easy, but always necessary.