#114. Lord of the Flies: A Harmful Distortion of Children’s Nature
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#114. Lord of the Flies: A Harmful Distortion of Children’s Nature<br>Sometimes a fiction is repeated so often that people believe it’s true.
Peter Gray<br>May 16, 2026
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Netflix is airing a 4-part “Lord of the Flies” series based, of course, on William Golding’s classic 1954 novel by that name. It strikes me, therefore, that this would be a good time to re-post an essay about Golding and his famous novel that I posted originally on my Psychology Today blog nearly 6 years ago. Here goes:<br>“Well, what about Lord of the Flies?” How often I have heard someone say that after I’ve talked about the value of children’s independent play, away from adults, or about a democratic school where children of a wide range of ages interact without adult supervision. “Lord of the Flies” is the shorthand that people use to express the belief that children are incapable of self-discipline and will eventually run amok and attack one another if not supervised by adults. My first response, when I hear this expression, has always been, “Well, you know, Lord of the Flies is a work of fiction.”<br>William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, as you probably know, is about a group of British schoolboys who were stranded on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. At first, they cooperated and worked out rational survival strategies, but, over time, the worst instincts of the least disciplined of them took over and they broke into warring factions. By the time a rescue ship arrived, three of the boys were dead and the island was in flames. Golding saw it as a story about human nature, not just children’s nature, but because the characters are children, it is passed along as a lesson about children’s nature, especially boys’ nature.<br>In the real world, children rarely, if ever, act like the fictitious children of Lord of the Flies. When children become brutal, there are usually adults leading or provoking the brutality. When real children are abandoned and realize their lives are in danger, their survival instincts kick in and lead them to cooperate even more than they normally do. They know, deep in their DNA that cooperation is their only chance of saving themselves.<br>Think, for example, of the Lost Boys of Sudan—the thousands of orphaned boys who, in groups of various sizes, escaped the genocide in their homeland and trekked, in some cases thousands of miles, toward refugee camps, helping one another along the way. Generally, the older boys were the leaders in any given group, but in some groups, those older boys were as young as 10 to 12 years old.<br>A true-life example of boys stranded on a deserted island
The Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman, some years ago, unearthed a nearly lost true story of boys who actually were stranded on an uninhabited island, much like the island of Golding’s fantasy, and he wrote about it in his wonderful book Humankind.<br>The boys were students at a strict Catholic boarding school, in the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga, who, sick of school, decided to “borrow” (without permission) a fishing ship and escape to Fiji, about 500 miles away. But they didn’t know much about sailing, and a storm came up and ruined the ship. After eight days of drifting, they came to an uninhabited Island. The boys were on the island for 15 months, beginning in June of 1965, until they saw and hailed a passing ship and were rescued. Bregman managed to locate the ship captain and one of the boys—who were by then old men and were still close friends to one another—and learned the story.<br>The boys did quarrel, but they developed ways of resolving their quarrels peacefully. One of them managed to create a fire by rubbing sticks together, and they carefully kept the fire going the whole time they were there. They figured out what they could eat. They created a garden. They kept regular watch to hail any ship that might pass. They made a sort of guitar using driftwood, a coconut shell, and steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat and played it to lift their spirits. One of the boys fell and broke a leg, but the others managed to set it and all of them took care of that boy as he healed. They survived a severe summer drought by taking great care of what water they could find.<br>When they were finally rescued, the doctor who examined them was amazed at their excellent health and at how well the boy’s broken leg had been set and had healed. The conditions of this real-life story were very much like those of Golding’s fiction, but the outcome was entirely different.<br>The attraction of schools to Golding’s book
In 2010, Time Magazine included Lord of the Flies in a review of “The Top 10 Books You Were Forced to Read in School.” Yes, it’s right up there...