[HN Gopher] When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)
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When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)
Author : smollett
Score : 439 points
Date : 2021-06-02 23:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| [deleted]
| block_dagger wrote:
| These children set out together with the intent to escape, an
| entirely different scenario than the novel. I imagine a racially
| diverse set of kids in the novel and my take is genocide would
| happen fairly frequently. Lord of the Flies is a wonderfully
| insightful book on human nature.
| caligulatte wrote:
| Is it a coincidence this is posted now? The Peter Warner written
| about in the article drowned just recently, on April 13th.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Experienced seafarer Peter Warner dies after boat capsized in
| northern NSW Laura Chung By Laura Chung April 13, 2021 --
| 10.23pm
|
| https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/experienced-seafarer-pet...
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| I went down the rabbit hole reading about the incident when
| that happened, pretty interesting.
|
| He didn't just rescue the shipwrecked kids and move on, he was
| treated as a hero in Tonga, the king of Tonga asked him what we
| wanted as a reward and he asked for fishing rights in an area
| he had been denied before and it was granted, he lived in Tonga
| for 30 years after that.
|
| He was involved in a second shipwreck rescue of a yacht named
| the Sospan Fach. The member of his crew that spotted the second
| shipwreck was Sione Filipe Totau. Sione was one of the boys
| rescued from the first shipwreck.
| Zamicol wrote:
| My high school's district required students to read The of Lord
| of the Flies.
|
| My freshmen English teacher hated the book so much he broke
| district requirements and told my class he was giving everyone
| A's on that assignment. He asked the class to read any substitute
| book in its place. To this day I still consider him to be a wise
| teacher.
| askvictor wrote:
| I'm curious how many of that class read it purely as a result
| of his request. Though I suspect they might have read it in a
| different light.
| [deleted]
| chriskanan wrote:
| I used to be a voracious consumer of fiction, but somehow
| critical reading of Lord of the Flies knocked that out of me in
| sophomore high school English. I think it was all the deeper
| meaning analysis I was forced to do moreso than the book. It
| just seemed like we were going far beyond the author's
| intention in a joyless analysis exercise.
| bllguo wrote:
| well this is the key thing really. why are we so hung up on
| authorial intent? For example, Bradbury claimed that
| fahrenheit 451 is not about censorship - should we let that
| influence how we interpret and utilize his work? I think it
| is valuable to use fahrenheit 451 as a precautionary tale
| about censorship, regardless of what Bradbury originally
| intended.
| souprock wrote:
| We now have proof that it really is "going far beyond the
| author's intention". Texas licensed a poem for a standardized
| test. The poem's author was still alive, and was unable to
| "correctly" answer test questions about the meaning of the
| poem.
|
| So yes, the English teachers really are spouting nonsense,
| and we have proof.
| goatlover wrote:
| Depends on whether you subscribe to the "death of the
| author" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGn9x4-Y_7A) or
| not. Does the author's intent in writing something trump
| everyone else's interpretation? What if we don't have the
| original author around to ask? A good example of this is
| all the interpretations of various passages in the Bible
| different groups have had throughout history.
|
| Instead of privileging the author's intent, one can treat
| literature, or even religious text as akin to art. The
| reader participates in the meaning of the piece. Or you can
| think about how people argue over and critique movies and
| television shows.
| souprock wrote:
| You can find your own meaning, but you should be honest
| about the fact that it is your own meaning.
|
| English teachers are demanding "correct" interpretation
| that has nothing to do with what the author intended.
| It's bullshit, and they need to admit that. It's also
| squeezing very important topics out of the schedule, such
| as the teaching of proper grammar and other things needed
| for non-literary writing in a professional career.
| antran22 wrote:
| There also is a similar story of such in my country. There
| was this guy who wrote a short and it was included in the
| national textbook. The guy's son (or grandson, I can't
| recount exactly) was assigned to analyse that short and the
| author, out of curiosity, made the kid submitted his
| analysis instead. The teacher even went as far as
| commenting "You don't understand the author's intention at
| all". Which really make us think how absurd literary
| education can really go.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is the fate of much good literature - forcing
| recalcitrant high schoolers to dissect something that doesn't
| talk to them which can result in a life-long hatred.
| yboris wrote:
| I was turned off from fiction in high school because I
| thought "we are being told to read the best of what the
| world had to offer, and most of this is shit".
|
| Turns out there are great fiction books out there - took me
| a while to unlearn the bias.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I wonder if it would make it better if teachers would
| explain to you that this bit is not very useful in and of
| itself, but we do it to practice writing and because other
| people think we should. It might dissuade some people from
| pursuing English literature degrees in college, but that's
| probably not a bad thing. Would the honesty help at all?
|
| I didn't hate literature class in highschool but I think I
| might have liked it better if I wasn't so confused about
| why the various arguments and analysis seemed so tenuous to
| me. Fundamentally, the analysis of literature is the least
| productive skill we teach kids in high school, although
| writing is still very important.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _I think it was all the deeper meaning analysis I was
| forced to do moreso than the book. It just seemed like we
| were going far beyond the author 's intention in a joyless
| analysis exercise._
|
| That was literally my entire high school honors English
| program. You must interpret everything, to the satisfaction
| of the English teacher, _or else._
|
| It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved reading
| and made them _hate_ books. I 'm not quite sure the point of
| it, really. It took me a decade after high school to read a
| fiction book again, and this is far from uncommon among those
| who suffered through it alongside me.
|
| I don't remember a thing about Red Badge of Courage except I
| had to extract meaning from why the grass in this particular
| scene was green - to symbolize new life, hope, rebirth, etc.
| garmaine wrote:
| > It quite reliably took people who absolutely loved
| reading and made them hate books. I'm not quite sure the
| point of it, really. It took me a decade after high school
| to read a fiction book again, and this is far from uncommon
| among those who suffered through it alongside me.
|
| I pretty much only read science fiction now, and the
| occasional crime thriller, although I used to be a
| voracious reader. I din't realize why until I read your
| post: high school English made me hate fiction. It's like I
| was playing a game of guess-the-password, and was being
| graded on how close my arbitrary answer matched the
| teacher's expectation. I hated it, and it destroyed any
| interest in reading "high" literature to this day :(
|
| I think I can appreciate sci-fi books in particular because
| my brain knows there's no way they'd ever be taught in an
| English classroom, so it doesn't evoke memories of those
| horrible literature classes.
| hypnoscripto wrote:
| I kind of enjoyed the absurdity of it, but I openly
| acknowledged it was a game. Fortunately discussions at my
| highschool after freshman year were less about the teacher
| imposing their will, and new ideas were the most rewarded.
| It was fun racing to support tenuous conclusions before
| anyone else could.
|
| Spanish Literature was an especially exciting class. I
| still think one of the greatest accomplishments of my life
| was writing a two page Spanish paper on a 12 line poem and
| only receiving marks off for grammatical mistakes. My
| teacher even wrote "haha" in the margins next to one of my
| more ridiculous explanations, but didn't say it was
| necessarily wrong. I used the improvisational analysis
| techniques I learned in those classes to entertain art
| student friends in college sometimes. Especially popular
| with free drinks in an art gallery.
| lumost wrote:
| I recently learned that 19th century literature was often
| released one chapter at a time. This lead to substantial
| "filler" chapters which were required for the author to
| keep the story going.
|
| I sometimes wonder if at least some portion of literary
| analysis is equivalent to teaching contemporary fan
| theories while waiting for the next episode/sequel/release.
| jeffwass wrote:
| Stephen King released The Green Mile in serial form like
| this.
|
| He said it was a major challenge because once the chapter
| is out there it's committed, so you can't go back and fix
| major plot holes that you didn't foresee at the time.
| edejong wrote:
| A bit like modern television series, isn't it?
| db48x wrote:
| Yes, a lot of modern television shows have been serial
| works rather than episodic ones. Babylon 5 comes to mind
| as one of the earliest serialized television shows, if
| not the earliest.
|
| Well, I suppose soap operas existed before that, but as
| far as I can tell they rarely had proper narrative
| endings; they were designed to last as many years as
| possible.
| eric-hu wrote:
| I was wondering why you wrote Babylon 5 when I can think
| of earlier long running shows, I.e. the original Star
| Trek, but I guess those are more like soap operas? Hm.
| db48x wrote:
| It's not about how long a show was on the air, it has
| more to do with how interconnected the episodes are and
| whether the work has a story arc that was planned in
| advance. In a purely episodic work, you can experience
| the episodes in any order and have the same enjoyment. In
| a purely serial work, the order of the episodes (or
| should we call them installments?) matters a lot.
|
| Star Trek was episodic. No matter what happens in one
| episode, most things remained status quo for the next.
| There were some slow changes to the cast, but for the
| most part you could watch the episodes in any order.
|
| TNG was book-ended by their dealings with Q, but that
| story had no closure and only took up about four or five
| episodes out of 7 years. There were some other stories
| like that as well, stories that were longer than an
| episode but much shorter than the show as a whole.
|
| On the other hand, Deep Space Nine was closer to a single
| story with a beginning, middle, and end. There were still
| plenty of episodes that would still make sense if you
| moved them to a different season, but it was much less
| episodic than the previous shows.
|
| Voyager was billed as a serial work, but was so badly
| written that most episodes could be moved around at will
| with no harm to the storyline.
|
| Babylon 5, in contrast, gave every episode some link to
| the overarching plot, even if it was just hints.
| (Especially in the first season, when the main
| antagonists were still hidden and all we had were hints.)
|
| It's easy for episodic shows to be written at the same
| pace that they are filmed. With serial shows, you have to
| know in advance where the story is going to go even if
| you still write most of the dialog at the pace of
| filming. I didn't watch much of Lost, but I got the
| impression that while it was a serial, the writers had no
| real plan from the start and that everything was made up
| as they went along. The result is that the story is
| incoherent. I've never watched any soap operas either,
| but I gather that they try to arrange for frequent
| cliffhangers and dramatic changes (making the story more
| serial), but that there is never a planned end to the
| story; they're perpetually in the middle. The result is a
| work with constant churn and no resolution.
| eric-hu wrote:
| That makes sense. Thank you for the explanation.
|
| Lost definitely felt episodic and incoherent at times. I
| think they did plan out some arcs loosely that worked
| over the course of a few seasons. Some character
| progression and morality flip was clearly unplanned, and
| those arcs felt like a soap opera.
|
| I've seen the other shows you've mentioned, but not
| Babylon 5. I had read of comparisons between it and DS9
| before, and now that comparison makes more sense.
| paleotrope wrote:
| The Great Gatsby and that light. Grrr.
|
| I actually read it again 30 years later and it's a pretty
| good book. Terrible people in it though.
| mythrwy wrote:
| I remember being stunned in high school that people would
| get degrees and an entire semester would be devoted to
| finding hidden symbolic meanings that authors in many cases
| obviously didn't intend.
|
| This was back when you could read Huck Finn. The teacher
| droned on and for over a week about how it was a symbolic
| journey of a boys growth towards manhood, how Huck was on
| the metaphorical river journey of overcoming racism. I said
| no, I didn't think that was what the story was about. It
| was just a story, in a certain time, in a certain place,
| meant to entertain, not to enlighten. She got really mad.
|
| So I opened up the intro to Huck Finn where Twain writes
| the following:
|
| * "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative
| will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in
| it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in
| it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF
| ORDNANCE"` *
|
| I read it out loud in the class and said I didn't believe
| he was joking. He had foreseen the possibility of people
| like her arising and attempted to preempt it! I'll never
| forget her standing there with her mouth open and no
| answer.
|
| There is deeply symbolic literature, no argument. But all
| of it clearly is not. And interpretation of symbolism in
| many cases is summoned directly from thin air. Turns out
| it's an entire profession!
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| This reads like something you would find on the
| ThatHappened subreddit. I bet your classmates also
| clapped after you so brutally took down that dumbass
| teacher with facts and logic, right?
|
| You had to take that class to learn not to take
| everything you read at face value. As sometimes happen
| people decide to go the other way around and declare that
| texts never have any deeper meaning and that it is all
| just nonsense and gosh darn how can those liberal arts
| even exist??????
|
| It's a shame because it prevents you from enjoying
| literature at a deeper level, instead of saying that Anna
| Karenina is the exact same as some silly airport novel.
| vkou wrote:
| > * "Persons attempting to find a motive in this
| narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find
| a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to
| find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
| per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE"` *
|
| Have you considered that Mark Twain, a master of satire,
| may have intended that passage to be just that?
|
| I think the 'will be shot' gives it away.
|
| I don't know much about metaphoric journeys on rivers
| from boyhood to manhood, but there was more of a point to
| that story than you seem to think.
| xorcist wrote:
| While satire clearly can go above a young boy's head, it
| is important to keep an open mind about literature.
| Symbolism doesn't necessarily need to have a purpose.
|
| We can also learn a lot about the environment in which a
| writer operated, just by learning from which symbols was
| used to convey a message. This is one of the central
| points, but also perhaps the most misunderstood, of
| modern (and post modern) literary criticism.
|
| Your teacher may not have been the best, but that does
| not mean all literary criticism is bad.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Symbolism doesn't also necessarily need to exist.
|
| Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
|
| My complaint was (and still is 30 years later) is that an
| entire cottage industry seems to have arisen around
| finding hidden meanings.
|
| Would we do that to television today? Does the cartoon
| "King of the Hill" contain hidden significance and deep
| moral lessons? Maybe. Or maybe it's just wit mostly
| designed to entertain.
| stephenhuey wrote:
| While some may analyze beautiful literature into oblivion
| and I feel your pain, I can't agree with you on Huck
| Finn. My interpretation of the intro you quoted is very
| different from yours.
|
| Mark Twain went out of his way to highlight barbaric
| racism on rubber plantations in the Congo by writing a
| satirical pamphlet to try to get the word out:
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62739
|
| Even though he masterfully wove his beliefs into the
| underlying fabric of Huck Finn, I am sure he wished to
| subtly communicate important truths while spinning a
| really delightful tale.
| [deleted]
| mythrwy wrote:
| My take is he was sort of the Mike Judge of his time.
| Less a moralist, more a cynical and very amusing observer
| of human frailty.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I was also one of those students who loved to read going
| into high school only to have it beaten out of me by
| English teachers over-analyzing everything. But... as an
| adult I can definitely see and appreciate the value of it.
|
| I can't tell you how many times I've seen comments on
| r/TheHandmaidsTale along the lines of "why do people keep
| bringing up abortion laws here it has nothing to do with
| this show!" or have discussed Avenue 5 or South Park or
| some other satire with someone only to realize they've
| _completely_ missed the underlying message the writer(s)
| had made _exceedingly_ obvious.
|
| I remember my teacher used to talk about the "what level"
| and the "so what level" and he definitely went overboard in
| exploring the so what level but I'm also grateful I'm not
| blind to it. I think there are a surprising number of
| people who are unaware of any meaning beyond the literal
| words they read or hear.
| garmaine wrote:
| On the other hand, the meaning of art is determined by
| what you bring to it. If you find a self-consistent
| interpretation that is not or perhaps even contrary to
| what the author had in mind or the classical analysis,
| that interpretation is _just as_ right.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I happen to agree with you but this is hotly debated:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author :)
| DavidSJ wrote:
| High school English class was like this for me too. It was
| usually obvious what my teacher wanted students to say but
| it just seemed all so contrived and I couldn't bring myself
| to participate in the silliness. On my report card she once
| wrote, "stubbornly sticks to his opinions even when wrong".
|
| One day, for fun, I tried out saying what I thought she
| wanted to hear. I got a lot of praise from her that day.
| garmaine wrote:
| Blow up that report card and frame it on your wall.
| That's high praise.
| vkou wrote:
| Depends on the opinion. Being stubborn about insisting
| that water isn't wet makes you a fool, not an
| unappreciated genius.
| garmaine wrote:
| Context.
| p1necone wrote:
| Luckily I just never made an effort - I got by reading
| cliff notes and writing C/B grade essays. Enjoyment of
| reading intact.
| mathattack wrote:
| I already had the skepticism in high school to think "How do
| you know what they wanted?"
|
| English got worse for me in undergrad so I never reached the
| real experts.
| raviisoccupied wrote:
| I did a degree in English Literature. It didn't make me hate
| reading, it just really, really complicated my relationship
| with the activity.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Me: High School Sophomore in the early 90's
|
| Class: English
|
| Book: The Lilies of the Field
|
| Assignment: Write about what the main character (Homer) does
| after leaving the nuns he'd helped.
|
| What I did: Wrote a hysterical (to me, at the time) story
| about how he went to South America in search of a mystical
| coffee with some made up Latin name which, when translated,
| meant "Grave-digging coffee that really stinks". I'm still
| proud of that line. His team of scientists (who all looked
| like "Billy" from The Far Side) were all killed in various
| ways while traversing the Amazon, all of them funny (to me,
| at the time). I was very, very happy with myself. Creative
| writing was _fun_.
|
| Teacher: Rewrite it, be serious.
|
| Me: Wrote some drivel that I hated, turned it in, got a lousy
| grade.
|
| That stifled me for a long time, because it's been hard ever
| since to just let loose on a story. I criticize it every step
| of the way now. I find short form poetry (often as music
| lyrics) to be far simpler and just as expressive if not more
| so.
| moksly wrote:
| Why? We read it when I was in the Danish ground school (ages
| 6-16, as in not from 6-16 but 9-10 years during those years)
| and we never got the idea it was anything other than fiction.
|
| I'm a tad surprised that humans defaulting to corporation is
| supposed to be news. It's always been taught to us as rather
| common knowledge because it's basically the only way a
| functional and stable society can evolve. But maybe it explains
| why so much American post-apocalyptic fiction is so silly.
| robotmay wrote:
| What a dude. I too was forced to study that book in school and
| if my teacher would have let me do anything else they would
| have had my lifetime loyalty.
|
| I hate that book.
| munificent wrote:
| What people so often forget is that the stories we tell ourselves
| _create_ our nature just as much as they _describe_ it.
|
| When we decide how to act, many of our decisions comes from our
| culture, which is the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
| We don't tell stories just to learn, but to become.
|
| One wonders how those six Tongans would have acted had they had
| the misfortune of reading Lord of the Flies before they went
| sailing.
| stakkur wrote:
| This story is examined nicely in Rutger Bregman's book
| _Humankind: A Hopeful History_.
|
| TL:DR; It turns out that in the real world, nothing like the Lord
| of the Flies happened; in fact the _opposite_ happened.
|
| Highly recommend Bregman's book, by the way, which shoots down
| many of the faulty foundations of what we take for granted as
| fact today about human nature. I believe this article is an
| excerpt from the book.
| FriedrichN wrote:
| >Highly recommend Bregman's book
|
| I second this. It challenged a lot of my beliefs and busted a
| lot of myths (Stanley Milgram, the Stanford prison experiment,
| etc.). I didn't agree with everything but I rarely ever do,
| nonetheless it was a great read. A very readable book as well,
| shouldn't take you longer than a week to read.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Does the book cover the experience more from the boys'
| perspective? I was a little disappointed the article was so
| light on the details of how they managed.
| Kelamir wrote:
| The book does show the story from the survivor's perspective.
| Here's a little snippet:
|
| "The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict
| roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they
| quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by
| imposing a time-out. The squabblers would go to opposite ends
| of the island to cool their tempers, and, 'After four hours
| or so,' Mano later remembered, 'we'd bring them back
| together. Then we'd say "Okay, now apologise." That's how we
| stayed friends.'19 Their days began and ended with song and
| prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of
| driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged
| from their wrecked boat - an instrument Peter has kept all
| these years - and played it to help lift their spirits."
| dyates wrote:
| To quote a since-deleted twitter thread written in response to
| this article at the time:
|
| > Golding is not trying to play this Rosseau-v-Hobbes game of
| bringing humanity back to the state of nature and see what they
| look like. His children are not living in a natural state: they
| are self conscious heirs to an entire civilization, and they
| realize quite early on that they live on the razor's edge of life
| and death. So they create rules and orders to keep their society
| running. A little democracy that honors natural goodness and
| leadership.
|
| > A little democracy that does not last.
|
| > And that is what people don't seem to get about this book. It
| isn't a parable about what happens when you taken men out of
| society--it is a parable about how men act _in society._
|
| The whole thread is worth reading, though it's not well
| preserved:
|
| https://twunroll.com/article/1260958965082488832
| abraae wrote:
| That's a wonderful story and and an uplifting rebuttal to Lord of
| the Flies.
|
| But to be fair, six Tongan boys were probably far hardier and
| well equipped than the typical British schoolboy of that time
| would have been. It seems they thought nothing of stealing a
| fishing boat and heading to sea, and they most likely had
| abundant life skills already - they basically relocated from life
| on one pacific island to another.
|
| So a great story but I don't know how much can be extrapolated
| from it about human behaviour in general.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Maybe the issue to consider isn't human behavior but rather
| leadership structure of the group of boys. With the boys in
| real life on the island who lead and how? There were moments of
| disagreement and they also had a system of administering
| justice and resolution. Did they follow the one boy who knew
| most about survival? That is a very different system of
| government than a voting democracy. The key is that when one
| broke his leg the rest provided for him. This goes all the way
| back to Plato observing city states in Ancient Greece attempts
| at creating institutions for mutual survival and defense.
|
| Thirty years ago I saw recording of a heated interview with
| William Golding about the character in the book the boys should
| have chosen to lead. I can't remember if it was Ralph vs Piggy
| however I think Golding argued that it was Simon, the Christ
| like mystic, who would have provided salvation for all the boys
| if he was followed. Simon represented altruism in the book
| picking hard to reach berries for the smaller boys who couldn't
| reach. So in real life when a group of boys who are stranded on
| island who have religious values, altruism like in the case of
| caring for the one boy with a broken leg it is like they would
| have chosen Simon as Golding suggested in his interview to
| lead.
|
| It might not be a rebuttal to the Lord of the Flies. It is a
| confirmation of what Golding said about the boys and their
| values.
| axaxs wrote:
| This was my thought, as well. At the risk of sounding...I don't
| know some 'ist' word, people are just raised differently and
| the world varies so much.
|
| Picture you're on a beach, and behind you is a shirtless man
| with a machete. How you feel is completely dependent on where
| you are in the world. In LA, you'd run for cover. In south east
| Asia, it's Tuesday.
|
| I learned a lot from my travels, to back the adage about
| traveling and learning. I remember being in a small fishing
| village and someone caught a large fish. I don't even remember
| what it was now, but the fisherman was so excited to catch this
| big valuable fish he shared it with everyone, even me the
| foreigner he'd never see again. Made me think about how selfish
| we as Americans can be. We already have a good life, and still
| look for ways to get ahead of everyone else. Yet a person with
| nothing is happy to share what little they'd found.
|
| Story aside, I agree that the experience would vary wildly by
| country, or at least upbringing.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yup, much as the world is becoming more and more culturally
| homogenous thanks to freely sharing information, there's
| still significant differences that shouldn't be
| underestimated.
|
| I mean even though we consume the same media, I still
| strongly dislike many aspects of American culture.
| abraae wrote:
| Funny you mention the machete. Last time I was in Suva in
| Fiji, some of the locals come into town for their evening
| drinks, directly I guess from cutting sugar cane in the
| fields, all with machetes hanging from their belts. It's a
| head turner all right if you're more used to people being
| kicked out of pubs just for wearing their jandals.
| northwest65 wrote:
| Lord of the Flies was somewhat a rebuttal to The Coral Island.
| More enjoyable to read though.
| [deleted]
| mattmanser wrote:
| I don't think that's true. So my Dad grew up in the 50s in
| Southend, UK, and I wouldn't have been surprised at all to hear
| a story about him stealing a boat with his brothers for a joy
| ride.
|
| And the oldest was 16, almost an adult and easily far past the
| age children are often taught to sail in the UK even today.
|
| A year younger than when their rescuer originally ran away to
| sea at 17.
|
| And they were clearly still a bunch of idealistic, uninformed,
| woefully unprepared children, not even taking a map or a
| compass. And bringing only fruit as victuals.
| goto11 wrote:
| There is a lot of complaining in this thread about English
| teachers over-interpreting literature. But I think it is pretty
| clear that the question Lord of the Flies tries to answer is
| not "what would happen to a bunch of boys stranded on an
| island?" but more like "how could the holocaust happen?".
|
| The fact of the matter is that Nazism, WWII and the holocaust
| did happen and many people in 1954 was looking for some kind of
| explanation and understanding of how Europe could descend into
| barbarianism. Whether the book is insightful in its association
| between totalitarianism and tribalism and primitive religion is
| a different question.
|
| The story is a "rebuttal" in the same way that it would be a
| rebuttal to Animal Farm to prove that pigs are not actually
| able to learn to walk on two legs.
| watwut wrote:
| The most disturbing for me is that people interpret work of
| fiction as if it really happened rather then one persons
| speculative take. Lord of flies is made up. It is not
| sociological study.
|
| Yet, the other thing is that boarding schools are notorious
| for bullying problem. And English boarding schools have ...
| particular history where older boys were allowed to beat
| younger boys. If we insist on making it real, that someone in
| charge of such school writes a book like this says less about
| general humanity. It says more about about how that
| institution was run and how he thinks they shaped the boys in
| their care.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| > So a great story but I don't know how much can be
| extrapolated from it about human behaviour in general.
|
| Given that this really happened, a lot.
|
| Lord of the Flies came out of the fantasy of an English
| superintendent. Yet, it has permeated our culture as a
| cautionary tale about human behavior. It is 100% fiction.
|
| I'd like to recommend Humankind by Rutger Bregman - a wonderful
| book dismantling the toxic narratives we have about ourselves.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _Lord of the Flies came out of the fantasy of an English
| superintendent._ "
|
| One would think that a schoolmaster would have excellent
| insight into the behavior of children and young adults.
|
| In any case, a quick look at the commonness of bullying (e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicides_that_have_bee.
| ..) should quickly persuade anyone that Lord of the Flies,
| despite being fiction, is not all that unrealistic.
| nesarkvechnep wrote:
| I second that book, it's great.
| strken wrote:
| I haven't read Humankind yet, but a recent review I _have_
| read[0] gives a mix of positives and negatives to it. A lot
| of the cited studies are controversial in their own right:
| S.L.A. Marshall 's claim that only 15% of soldiers in WW2
| fired their weapons is based on subjective evidence, omits
| mention of whether they had any opportunity to fire, and has
| many other flaws that have since been picked apart, for
| example.
|
| This is not to say that our negativity is justified! Only
| that Bregman seems to have as persistent a bias to positivity
| as other writers have to negativity.
|
| [0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-
| human...
| skrebbel wrote:
| I read both the book and this review, and while the review
| makes some valid points, it also holds the book to a pretty
| high bar.
|
| Usually I'm all for doing exactly that, but this book is
| not about hard scientific proof for some fancy new theory.
| It's about an _idea_ , the idea that humans are good by
| default. To be taken seriously as an idea, it only needs as
| much proof as the idea it's rejecting, which is that humans
| are a razor thin layer of civility over evil, savage
| animals.
|
| It's about debunking that as much as it is about proposing
| an alternative. I think Bregman is perfectly happy to leave
| the hard science for the scientists. If readers agree that
| his idea is at least as plausible as the one he's up
| against, he's done pretty well. And to my reading, even
| this review agrees with that.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Cultural experience matters a lot here though. If 6 boys who
| dealt with hard grueling hunter gatherer labor, they'd have
| no issue pulling themselves up by their makeshift sandals so
| to speak, in the jungle. Western boys who may have had at
| worst, had a few days of hard labor, the rest school and
| sports, not so much.
|
| Your forgetting about culture shock. White boys who know
| nothing of hunting and gathering aren't going to fare well
| compared to Tongan boys who studied the school or hard knocks
| first hand. It's like dropping a black bear in the Arctic and
| guffawing that it can't adapt like the polar bear! They're
| not equipped for the situation appropriately.
|
| People are trusting. We know this. People want to work
| together. People want to survive. The simple fact that we are
| here today is evidence of that. Hunter gatherers, trusting an
| outsider showing them dropping seeds in the group produces
| crops. And now we have iPhones. All because baseline humans
| are "selfishly selfless." We learned that delaying
| gratification of the Id can provide greater rewards. That's
| why we aren't still animals fighting over berries with
| grizzley bears...
| filleduchaos wrote:
| I have no idea where you are getting the idea that six
| boarding school boys had "dealt with hard gruelling hunter
| gatherer labour" or "studied the school of hard knocks
| first hand".
|
| That is an amazing amount of assumption to draw out of the
| simple fact that they were Tongan.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| Lord of the flies was written shortly after world war 2,
| which also really happened... I don't take it seriously as a
| story of what would really happen if boys ended up on an
| island, but humans killing each other for dumb reasons is not
| the stuff of fantasy.
| XorNot wrote:
| No, but the _why_ is. It 's worthwhile being very careful
| taking fiction books as a depiction of how peoples minds
| work, because they're just plainly not - they're a
| depiction of how a very small subset (authors who publish
| books) _think_ peoples minds work.
| NateEag wrote:
| Smaller than that - each author's mind is unique.
|
| Any piece of fiction should be considered on its own for
| whether its characters are plausible and consistent.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| "Distasteful" and "dumb" are far from the same thing, and
| the second world war happened for the former and not the
| latter.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| It's a distinction without a difference- one could argue
| a less primitive species wouldn't have found itself
| caught in world wars. The man-children starting world
| wars are paralleled by the children-children killing each
| other on the island.
| jpttsn wrote:
| Your "less primitive" species would have had what reason
| to split the atom?
| anotherman554 wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that pacifists do in fact,
| sometimes invent things.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Reducing the historical and contemporary reasons why
| humans engage in war to people being "man-children" is a
| level of sticking-my-head-in-the-sand that I hope to
| never attain. I've never understood the urge to think of
| people and things one morally/politically disagrees with
| as simply stupid, braindead or immature - but there seem
| to be way too many people who seem incapable of
| contending with the idea that humans can be intelligent
| _and_ highly amoral /immoral.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| I have had the privilege to visit concentration camp
| museums. I actually didn't have the feeling these were
| unintelligent savage places. It was actually trying to be
| orderly, efficient and exceedingly bureaucratic. These
| institutions were very much a part of civilization.
| Everything was thought through.
|
| They weren't run by man children.
| [deleted]
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| My parents lost members of their families to genocide.
| The people who planned it were not stupid. Ruthless yes,
| calculating and callous and cruel yes. But not stupid,
| and it's both amusing and highly frustrating to see
| people who've mostly never had to confront these things
| pretend that it's just the work of "man-children"
| (because gods forbid that we contend with the idea that
| the intellectualism and intelligence we place on
| pedestals might ever be morally bankrupt).
| samatman wrote:
| World War II happened largely because the Great War
| happened.
|
| I'm comfortable describing the reasons for the Great War
| as "dumb". Your mileage may vary.
| abraae wrote:
| Pointless pendatry over words doesn't move discussion
| forwards. I wouldn't personally use either of those words
| to describe Nazis, which is largely what WWII "happened
| for".
| filleduchaos wrote:
| I'm curious about what the pointless pedantry is in
| drawing a distinction between "stupid" and "morally
| abhorrent".
| abraae wrote:
| Those were not the words you used, and (continuing the
| pointless arguments about words), "morally abhorrent"
| does not mean the same as distasteful, at least to most
| english speakers.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| The (very clear, to me at least) point was that calling
| war "dumb" because it is unpleasant is irrational. WW2
| was very clearly not the product of stupidity.
|
| It's interesting though that you are nitpicking about
| "distasteful" vs "morally abhorrent" (and will probably
| do the same about "unpleasant") while calling _my_ point
| pedantry.
| croes wrote:
| >humans killing each other for dumb reasons is not the
| stuff of fantasy.
|
| But it's the exception not the norm in human behaviour.
| TheOrange wrote:
| It depends on whether you have social constructs in place
| which take priority over human behaviour.
|
| Remove all of this.. what happens.. humans will
| eventually go back to primal instincts
| croes wrote:
| And one primal instinct is social bonding.
| esyir wrote:
| Which is also the primal instinct that allows for
| tribalism, which is really important when the other tribe
| is competing for a scarce resource.
|
| Humans are social creatures, but not social with the
| entire world.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Not social with the entire world _yet_. Give us time.
| simiones wrote:
| Tribalism is generally closed, but not automatically
| antagonistic with other tribes. In contexts where there
| is no forced competition, tribes rarely fight.
|
| The modern view is that most likely hunter-gatherer
| societies, which didn't have fixed lands and had no
| general reason to be territorial, had little warfare. It
| is only with agricultural societies, where competition
| for land becomes a factor, that we start finding evidence
| of warfare, as far as I understand.
| [deleted]
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| I think it's fair to say "don't bet against human ingenuity and
| spirit".
|
| I mean, we're here aren't we? We are alive, because of the
| will, intellect, and energy of those who came before us.
| Survival is essential to living things, so why expect that
| humans will degenerate to their worst in the absence of
| civilization rather than come together and make the best of it?
| jpttsn wrote:
| Those we ate to be alive are not.
|
| I believe "human ingenuity and spirit" is not add odds with
| "our worst".
|
| Our most ingenious/sophisticated technology often works for
| its human wielder against their fellow humans.
| kgeist wrote:
| Survivorship bias? If another group of boys failed to form a
| successful team with enough skills to survive, they wouldn't have
| survived to tell their story. So it's not surprising that the
| author only found a successful story. We don't know what happens
| to the thousands of boys who go missing every year.
| watwut wrote:
| > We don't know what happens to the thousands of boys who go
| missing every year.
|
| These are not lost kids surviving islands. These are kids
| escaping abusive situations. They typically become homeless,
| get money either by small crimes or sex work. They eventually
| end up in prison fairly often.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| This story is amazing and The Guardian did a great job presenting
| it in an interesting way.
|
| The comments here make me wonder, just why did Lord of The Flies
| become popular in the first place? Was there a generation that
| thought it was a good story for illustrating human nature? Why?
| Scarblac wrote:
| It's from 1954. That generation was very occupied with trying
| to understand how the Holocaust could happen.
| totetsu wrote:
| This got a lot of coverage last year.
|
| This article questions the colonial view point it was mostly
| reported from. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/416819/concerns-
| over-a-tale...
|
| Here's an interview with one of the survivors
| https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018746636
|
| And the reason the island was uninhabited. the Pacific slave
| trade
| https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/20182...
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| > This article questions the colonial view point it was mostly
| reported from.
|
| That's funny coming from a member of the colonial power famous
| for the heroic conquest of 300,000 km2 of ocean and thousands
| of islands using nothing but dugout canoes.
|
| What she really means is that it's the view of the people who
| came late to the party and played the game on easy mode.
| nojokes wrote:
| > "For me it's so hard to process because 'whiteness' believes
| it can own anything and everything," she said.
|
| Sounds overly racist to me.
|
| > The New Zealand Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi has
| weighed in on the conversation, writing on Twitter that in his
| opinion, "you should prioritise Polynesian (Tongan if
| possible!) filmmakers as to avoid cultural appropriation,
| misrepresentation, and to keep the Pasifika voice authentic".
|
| > Gesa-Fatafehi agreed that if the story was made into a film,
| she would like to see Tongans behind, and in front of, the
| camera.
|
| Well, they can do it if they want to - nothing can stop them to
| make a movie like this but they do not have any right to stop
| others to make their own interpretation (and they can dislike
| it and explain to everyone what is wrong with it).
|
| I would like to see a Hollywood movie with mostly white but
| with at least one Asian and at least one black actors :) Ok, I
| am just joking about Hollywood stereotypes here.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Sounds overly racist to me._
|
| Read "whiteness" as describing culture, and it seems more
| true than racist. It's your traditional Victorian English
| capitalist, top hat and monocle, making children work with
| heavy machinery and turning the sky grey. Your colonialist,
| beating children for speaking the language of their parents
| and expecting them to be grateful for it. Your Disney,
| selling a child-sized "tattooed Polynesian skin" costume.
| (Why are all my examples about children?)
|
| I agree it could be phrased better, but I assume this is a
| quote from an interview? The speaker had seconds to think of
| a wording.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| > Your Disney, selling a child-sized "tattooed Polynesian
| skin" costume. (Why are all my examples about children?)
|
| The people who got upset with the Maui costume strike me as
| the exact same type of people as the characters in the
| movie who got upset about the titular character's "cultural
| appropriation" of seafaring.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| There's a difference between children painting
| Polynesian-looking tattoos on themselves because they
| think they're cool, and a multinational corporation
| exploiting whatever fragments of culture seem profitable,
| and wallpapering "Disney magic" over the rest.
|
| Imagine the uproar if Disney made a film about Christian
| culture - maybe some story about St Paul going on a quest
| to slay a dragon using _Jesus Cant_ (the tongue of magic)
| - and then started selling tacky Body-of-Christ merch (or
| something), and _that was the only representation of
| Christianity in mainstream culture_. Some people would
| get upset, and I don 't think they'd be unjustified.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I do have a problem with movie merchandise in general for
| being cheaply made plastic garbage, I just don't think
| there's anything more egregious about the Maui costume
| than anything else. And Christians already have the
| market cornered with tacky Body-of-Crist merch in the
| form of Mass play sets. If you ask me the Orthodox have
| the right idea, just give the kids the real Holy
| Communion from the moment they're baptised, bypassing the
| whole need for that garbage, but that's besides the
| point.
|
| I think Moana was actually very good, and I was greatly
| and pleasantly surprised to see something of that quality
| come out of Disney. It's a captivating story that stands
| on its own legs without any pandering or preaching, and I
| see nothing wrong with how it represents Polynesian
| culture.
| nojokes wrote:
| I can confirm that Moana (the movi) induced respect and
| interest in Polynesian culture in me. Fortunately
| prevalence of crap merchandise is not wide where we live
| (in EU).
| finnthehuman wrote:
| >Read "whiteness" as describing culture, and it seems more
| true than racist.
|
| No, describing a group of people based on their race
| instead of a more accurate descriptor for the category
| you're looking to talk about is just plain old racism.
| Being more specific might also be, but this is guaranteed
| to be.
|
| And your statement just sounds like the contemporary-
| palatable version of grandpa explaining that when he talks
| about black people, of course he doesn't mean all black
| people or exclusively black people.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Fair enough. There are still people I wouldn't begrudge
| for using "whiteness" like that, but I probably shouldn't
| assume good faith straight off the bat. You're right that
| this kind of thing is important to stamp out.
|
| That being said, we don't really have a good word for
| "originally-European (but kinda American too now) take-
| everything attitudes". How would you describe this
| succinctly?
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| "Western"?
| totetsu wrote:
| not sure of your context, but I often find that concepts from
| outside (de(post(colonial))) national experience are tricky
| to translate directly into it. The word racism particularly
| has a lot of unstated philosophy behind it depending on which
| country it is used in. To be plain, white people in history
| did try to 'own' everything in the Pacific, and that history
| is the base of the present we have today ect..
|
| As for the film thing, maybe Taika is talking about the
| 'camera on the shore' https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programm
| es/saturday/audio/201...
| nojokes wrote:
| I think I understand. Still this comment made me
| uncomfortable.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| The author of this article, speaking about Davos:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8ijiLqfXP0
|
| This article is an excerpt from Chapter 2 one of his latest book.
| The book, Humankind, seems to be making the argument that humans
| are essentially trustworthy and industrious and are thus proper
| candidates for UBI. UBI is more or less the topic of his first
| book.
|
| Here is a review of his first book, Utopia for Realists:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/13/utopia-realist...
|
| From an interview about the book:
|
| "OK, so basic income is all about the freedom to say no. That's a
| privilege for the rich right now. With a basic income, you can
| say no to a job you don't want to do. You can say no to a city in
| which you no longer want to live. You can say no to an employer
| who harasses you at work . . . that's what real freedom looks
| like."
|
| "This is not about AI," he insists. "You go back to the 1960s,
| and all the economists, all the philosophers, all the
| sociologists said we're going to be working less and less and
| less and less and boredom is going to be the great challenge of
| the future. Didn't happen . . . mostly because we have this
| ideological obsession with creating new jobs."
|
| Some other articles he has written for The Guardian:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/wealth...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/12/phone-...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/07/rutger-bregman...
| Clewza313 wrote:
| From the other end of the spectrum, a famous case of (adults)
| getting shipwrecked and going batshit insane:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batavia_(1628_ship)
| trhway wrote:
| The Bounty mutineers' settlement on an uninhabited island also
| comes to mind
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty#Pitcairn
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Imagine having that as your family history. There are still
| 50 or so descendants still living on Pitcairn today.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| And several hundred descendants living elsewhere (Norfolk
| Island, Australia, New Zealand).
| mikestew wrote:
| For a discomforting high number of those, their ancestry is
| probably the least of their worries:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_sexual_assault_trial
| _...
| battles wrote:
| To be fair, it didn't help that they left a psychopath in
| charge.
| bongoman37 wrote:
| Its interesting everyone just keeps referring to the Catholic
| school they escaped from as a school. Knowing what we know about
| things like the Magdalene laundries and usual Catholic way of
| dealing with kids, they were likely escaping from a prison like
| and abusive situation. They would be more likely to be
| cooperative to not end up back where they started from. There is
| really no comparison to LOTF here where the kids were going back
| to a middle class existence if rescued.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| It's not quite as simple as "it works like 'Lord of the Flies' or
| it doesn't". Nicholas Christakis, in his book "Blueprint",
| devotes a chapter to a database that he and his grad students
| made of shipwrecks, where the survivors lived long enough, in
| enough isolation, that they had to more or less put together a
| temporary society. There were lots of cases where they turned on
| each other, and lots of cases where they did not.
|
| My review of Christakis' book, in case you're curious:
| https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2851365787
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > The attempt to infuse sociology with biological facts (e.g.
| genes matter, evolution still impacts humans, etc.) has been
| controversial (even today the term "sociobiology" is
| radioactive to some).
|
| My immediate reaction to your post was that maybe we could
| learn something about what causes societies to collapse, and
| learn something?
| lebuffon wrote:
| Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised
| Edition, Diamond
|
| Interesting overview
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Seconded.
| Andrex wrote:
| > There were lots of cases where they turned on each other, and
| lots of cases where they did not.
|
| The fact that it's a coin flip is the key aspect of the message
| Golding wanted to impart. It's chilling, and unsurprising, that
| reality bears it out.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| The coin flip in the book is that they had two potential
| leaders, one of the responsible and the other one pretty
| sociopathic but charismatic - the nascent society followed
| the sociopathic, charismatic one.
|
| At any rate there were quite a few more kids than 6 in the
| book, so pointing at this incident and saying 'see, it would
| work out' is just silly.
| grecy wrote:
| ... sounds a lot like many democracies choosing a
| sociopathic but charismatic leader.
| anitil wrote:
| He was a guest on the 'Singal Minded' [0] podcast a while back
| as well and talked about his research.
|
| [0] https://singalmindedconvos.fireside.fm/7 I use the RSS feed
| but that's the link to the exact episode
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for that!
| licebmi__at__ wrote:
| Nice review. In a sense I find this something akin to the late
| David Graeber point on it's column about bulling. How you can
| find data pointing towards the human society propensity for
| violence, and also data of human society propensity for
| cooperation and refusal to engage on violence even when
| confronted with losing their way of living, although he also
| raises the point when historically there has been more
| propensity to consider only the violent ugly aspect, as you can
| almost certainly find it on people who appeal to "human
| nature".
| dalbasal wrote:
| IDK if its a modern bias or a recurring one, but people are
| very drawn to the idea of a core human "nature:" what we are
| when all the surface level stuff is stripped away.
|
| The way the conversations I've had tend to go is ever more
| contrived scenarios. Eventually it gets to spaceships
| carrying sperm and eggs to be raised cultureless by robots.
| You need to avoid scenarios like these, where the boys know
| about raising chickens, praying and stuff. lol As if a
| parentless, cultureless person is more human than the rest of
| us... more indicative of "true" human nature.
|
| Once we set to answering a question, it seems very hard to
| question the question.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| >core human "nature:" what we are when all the surface
| level stuff is stripped away.
|
| That always seemed out of whack for me. If you change the
| environment, the individual changes too.
|
| That's just a different individual, calling it more "true"
| or "pure" seems like asking "how much is 1 + apple?" (where
| Apple is an actual apple, not a variable).
|
| The whole premise is fundamentally wrong. How I am right
| now is not false nor unnatural.
| dalbasal wrote:
| >> How (is it) not false nor unnatural.
|
| Exactly. There have never been culturaless, parentless
| people. If there were/are, then that is simply a terrible
| circumstance and terrible results will probably occur.
| necovek wrote:
| People are quick to discount the value of education (or
| upbringing) from the early age. Humans have started
| developing quickly with the development of language and
| especially writing. Take that away, and we are looking at
| another dozens of thousands of years of getting back to it,
| if at all.
|
| The best evidence to me is how those "lost in woods, found
| years later" kids have developed: mostly mimicking other
| animals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child). It's
| even hard to change that later on.
| gsich wrote:
| >Eventually it gets to spaceships carrying sperm and eggs
| to be raised cultureless by robots.
|
| I recommend "Raised by Wolves".
| jborichevskiy wrote:
| Awesome show; looking forward to the next season.
| Explores parenting, "religion" vs "science", desolation,
| and growing up.
| thedmstdmstdmst wrote:
| Yes of course, the natural course of development of humans
| is to do away with all other humans. Then you can be fully
| human.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| There is an idea that after the bombs fall we all turn into
| raping and pillaging marauders. I have no idea why people
| find this idea comforting.
|
| In reality villages will be built, laws written and
| religions made up.
| nerdponx wrote:
| It can be both, no?
|
| Look at human history: lots of villages and religions,
| also lots of raping and pillaging.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| We tend to record the raping and pillaging because those
| are the times of disruption. I'm not a historian, but I
| can imagine that there are long stretches of history that
| are relatively conflict-free for most of the world, but
| such times are not really that interesting so no one
| tells stories about them.
| dalbasal wrote:
| At least in the enlightenment period, tend to come from
| political philosophy rather than history... though the
| two are closely related in this period. Notably, Hobbes
| and his "state of nature" concept.
|
| Philosophy of this period (also Locke, Marx, etc) tended
| to speculate about the past using reason, rather than
| empirically. A lot of their ideas have been passed down
| to us.
|
| Hobbes' saw life in the "natural" state "solitary, poore,
| nasty, brutish, and short." Eventually government arises,
| using its monopoly of violence to end day-to-day
| violence, cheating and such.
|
| I don't think the original writers are compelling
| anymore, but they are hard to shake entirely. Memes die
| hard.
|
| In any case, I think the reality of people at all times
| is that cooperation is a fundamental. There are no
| societies without cooperation, some form of solidarity,
| love, etc. We could have never survived without it.
| Violence is also common in history, but we don't need it
| to survive. We also know that primates, dogs and other
| creatures have demonstrably empathetic behaviours, a
| sense of fairness and such.
|
| As I implied at the start, I think the mistake is literal
| fundamentalism. Human behaviour can't be logically
| derived from a fundamental nature.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| These villages better build defenses against the
| marauders or all is for naught. And of course, the best
| defense is a good offense. And... Fast forward to the
| presently peaceful times of mutually assured destruction!
| bluGill wrote:
| That is a point of a village as opposed to living in
| separate farmsteads. (there are other points to villages,
| but putting a group of people together is an automatic
| form of defense)
| dalbasal wrote:
| Historically, this doesn't seem to be true.
|
| Villages appear long before defensive fortifications in
| the record, in many cases. Pure reason is not very good
| at forming predictive theories about history, as a
| general rule.
|
| There are many possible reasons for villages, and
| cultural reasons are a very big determinant of how people
| live. So are economic reasons. Many of us live in big
| cities now, and it's generally less safe.
| dmoy wrote:
| You get villages because foraging really sucks. It's an
| ease-of-survival thing around food production.
| bluGill wrote:
| Foraging is done from villages as well. They tend to not
| have tents/houses, just a community fire that moves when
| the tribe moves. Still a village.
|
| Foraging sucks less than subsistence farming. However
| farmers are able to put a lot more people into given land
| area and so farming villages won out.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| "A Canticle for Leibowitz" is a great book which follows
| this scenario.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| probably the fallout games paint an accurate picture.
| watwut wrote:
| It is not what is human. It is also, how you raise those
| kids. Ars you raising them in bully house boarding school
| full of abuse? You get different results then if you raise
| them with different values.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Did they find any variables that could explain whether or not
| the group turned on each other? e.g. resource abundance, gender
| makeup, age of people, N people, N days stranded, etc?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| One important factor was, "did they sacrifice somebody early
| on?", for example in the actual evacuation from the ship.
| Once it is implanted in everyone's minds that individuals get
| sacrificed, it erodes trust, and makes everyone suspicious of
| everyone else. Of course, it's hard to distinguish between
| cause and effect in things like that.
|
| There's a lot of details in the details, though, you might
| want to read the whole thing! :)
| fighterpilot wrote:
| That makes sense. Nobody has a monopoly on violence so
| everyone wants to front-run their own demise by killing the
| person that will kill them with a small but non-trivial
| probability. Pre-emptive violence becomes rational in such
| an environemnt.
| freehrtradical wrote:
| These are the type of fascinating comments that keep me coming
| back to HN. Thank you.
| mrslave wrote:
| Book recommendations are especially high points for me. Thank
| you GP.
| lrem wrote:
| This review is obviously high effort. What's the incentive
| here? Is this what the community regularly does in Goodreads?
| Or are you somehow affiliated with the author and treat this as
| a favour?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Hmmmm...not sure, entirely. I think it's that, by putting in
| more effort, I end up processing the book mentally in a more
| thorough way. Something like what my grade school literature
| teacher might have said was the point of book reports.
| Thinking over "well, exactly what did I think of it?" tends
| to make me think over the book's contents more carefully,
| instead of just putting it down and immediately moving on.
| gadf wrote:
| Anything to do with goodreads becomes toxic. I think that's
| because the types of people who read and opine about books to
| the extent they feel compelled to blog/review on gr, are also
| likely to be the types of people who brook no dissent to
| their opinions, neither of authors, books nor the things they
| make them mean. They're independent, self-trusting, artistic
| thinkers (in the manner of Nietzsche), and the act of
| engaging in bookreading, where they are in their own closeted
| little world, alone with the author's mind, is the pinnacle
| of their innate joy, but the internet of everyman wasn't
| built for them, so they become little despots when faced with
| a sea of divergence.
|
| The comment above is an example of a hanger-on to this
| dynamic: not quite independent enough to be a despot in their
| own right, but an enabler of the despotism of these little
| opiners, who the userbase of goodreads epitomizes so well,
| leading to the toxicity oozing from the seams of goodreads
| observable in abundance.
| abraae wrote:
| Magnificent rant, I will forward it to an editor of my
| acquaintance.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I am looking at your comment history here and I suspect
| that the case is more that anything to do with _you_
| becomes toxic; I see multiple instances of you insulting
| people, then insisting that they're the ones hurling abuse
| and arguing in bad faith when they protest.
| retrobox wrote:
| Other reviews for this book on Goodreads are equally high
| effort. It's not uncommon to see long and insightful reviews
| in the Goodreads community. I'd assume good intent :)
| kuu wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted when it's clear your
| question is out of curiosity.
|
| High effort reviews are common on Goodreads, why? Because
| it's a community about passionate readers and probably those
| who write the very detailed reviews have enjoyed reading some
| other reviews and want to contribute back to the community. I
| think it's the same reason as people contributes to
| wikipedia: for the sake of sharing knowledge
| rezic wrote:
| It does come across somewhat accusatory. Without the
| suggested affiliation with the author it would sound less
| so.
| watwut wrote:
| > I don't know why you're being downvoted when it's clear
| your question is out of curiosity.
|
| It is an odd question on the internet where people
| regularly and normally put a lot of effort into reviews,
| blog posts, discussion forums comments and so on.
|
| That coupled with question about affiliation probably makes
| people interpret is as not questions out of curiosity, but
| rather as sleazy way to introduce doubt on the author
| motivation.
| lrem wrote:
| Good point. That was not my intention. But my
| communication skills before caffeine digests are not
| where I would want them to be :/
| gjs278 wrote:
| no accusations of shilling. mods!!!!!!
| [deleted]
| jgilias wrote:
| It shouldn't be glossed over that these were six boys from a
| boarding school on a getaway. So, unless there were only six
| pupils in the boarding school, it would mean that this was a
| group of boys who like and trust each other enough to let in on a
| plan which could get them into serious trouble if the wrong
| person found out about it. Also, the school being a boarding
| school implies that the group had a preexisting social structure,
| and that they had been literally living together before the
| event.
|
| So, it's sort of a best case scenario of 'a group of boys forming
| a society on a deserted island'.
|
| EDIT: Another commenter posted an audio interview with one of the
| survivors, highly recommended:
| https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018746636
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| I would also put some emphasis on the fact that it is a "strict
| Catholic" boarding school. To Guardian readers this is a dog-
| whistle to signify oppressive and potentially abusive; but the
| reality is very possible that the boys had learned some of the
| positive aspects of the faith - it does after all state that
| they regularly sang and prayed together - so I would imagine,
| despite their boredom at school, they may well have learned and
| internalized some of the "love thy neighbour" type teachings
| and carried them into this situation.
| jgilias wrote:
| I believe you have a good point. I highly recommend listening
| to the above interview. He elaborates how they had a system
| in place where he would get any two boys who have a problem
| together in the evening to talk it through, hug, and then
| pray together. It's clear that at least from their own
| perspective faith did play a significant role in their group
| cohesion and survival.
| [deleted]
| emmelaich wrote:
| Related: Scouts being goaded and manipulated into fighting each
| other -- don't. They remain civilized.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/apr/16/a-real-life-...
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Map of island:
|
| https://goo.gl/maps/DRmA2F5roGeHmyKs7
|
| And Wikipedia page:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/`Ata
| morsch wrote:
| The only photo on the page is of the slaver that sealed the
| island's fate. Sad.
| jfk13 wrote:
| It's _wiki_ pedia. Maybe you could contribute something to
| improve it?
| NateEag wrote:
| I doubt OP has photos of the island's earlier inhabitants.
| keithnz wrote:
| I think the state of nature as imagined by the likes of Thomas
| Hobbes is more just an assumption that is more based on
| observations of conflicting social groups, as such it is an
| emergent nature. But, I think humans evolved on the basis of
| mutual cooperation is a better survival strategy. So I think we
| have this ingrained base nature that wants to work together with
| other humans.
| goatlover wrote:
| Humans evolved to cooperate within their tribe. Everyone else
| is an outsider, who you might trade and cooperate with, but you
| might also fight. All depends. At any rate, the history of
| civilization has lots of conquests and empires. Once an empire
| is established, forced cooperation also happens, until it
| doesn't.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The fact that he wrote the book during the English Civil War
| really ought to get more play than it does; amid such dire
| circumstances a desire for order at any price is
| understandable, but Hobbes' situation and personal biases are
| rarely taken into account.
|
| A thoughtful counterpoint (albeit a somewhat idealistic and
| romantic one) to Hobbes' is found in the writings of Peter
| Kropotkin.
| leet_coder_boi wrote:
| > opens link > ctrl+f nazi > "Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they
| wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?" >
| detecting bias > "Rutger Bregman is the author of Utopia for
| Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders and
| a 15-hour Workweek." > oh right: the guardian
| Evidlo wrote:
| I wish the article had more information about the boys' time on
| the island. It's mostly about the captain that found them.
| girvo wrote:
| https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/416819/concerns-over-a-tale...
|
| That article has some more information, and RNZ has an audio
| interview with one of the survivors:
|
| https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=2018746636
| WalterBright wrote:
| The six boys were significantly older than the Flies boys - 13 to
| 16.
| kgeist wrote:
| I also can imagine that a 16 year old kid in Tonga is probably,
| by most accounts, already considered an adult with enough
| skills to provide for himself.
| lozaning wrote:
| And real boys, LOTF is Fiction.
| kzrdude wrote:
| The tonga boys were 15 to 17. (Wikipedia)
|
| > From June 1965 to September 11, 1966, six Tongan youths,
| Sione Fataua (17, the eldest), "Stephen" Tevita Fatai Latu
| (17), "David" Tevita Fifita Siola`a (15, the youngest), Kolo
| Fekitoa (17), "Mano" Sione Filipe Totau (16), and Luke Veikoso
| (16, later a boxing champion),[15] all natives of Ha`afeva
| island, were shipwrecked on `Ata after running away from their
| strict Catholic boarding school, St. Andrew's College,[16] in
| Nuku`alofa on Tongatapu.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The article said 13..16, but that may have been when they
| were shipwrecked, and the Wikipedia gave ages at rescue.
| gavinray wrote:
| If anyone takes the time to read the entire article (it's
| somewhat long), it's an uplifting feel-good story.
|
| Worth the read.
| shannifin wrote:
| Regardless of whether its outlook was positive or negative, I
| thought _Lord of the Flies_ was too plot-driven and heavy handed
| with ridiculous character motivations (or lack thereof).
|
| Anyway, would be really cool to see a film of this story; I'm
| disappointed it hasn't been made yet!
| aronswartz wrote:
| Rip in peace.
| aronswartz wrote:
| I think I know your dad, sexually.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Documentary was made last year
| http://paradise.docastaway.com/six-tongan-castaways-ata-isla...
| shrubby wrote:
| This is something that I believe everyone should read:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52879286-humankind
|
| I bought nine of these to the local MP's last summer. Mostly to
| emphasize the fact that all of us are not as greedy as their
| context might be. Not very surprisingly I only got one message
| from MP that had read it.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Interview with Peter Warner, rescuer
|
| From Saturday Morning, 11:45 am on 16 May 2020
|
| Radio New Zealand
|
| https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/201...
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I think one of the things in the boys' favor is that they had
| true community. It sounds they they grew up on the same island.
| Were part of the same community. All went to the same Catholic
| school. From the mention of "Their days began and ended with song
| and prayer" along with the Catholic school, it also seems they
| were all religious.
|
| As much as we on HN like to think that logic and the rational
| mind is what makes people behave good, many times it is the
| subconscious ties of shared family, friendship, and faith that
| that help people pull together in times of crisis.
| prionassembly wrote:
| K-Hole's seminal pamphlet on normcore says something along the
| lines of: in the old days we were born into communities and had
| to find our individuality, now we're born individuals and must
| find our tribe.
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