I was wrong about Lord of the Flies.

[00:00:00]This is like my eighth cup of coffee today. If I didn't have ADHD, I'd be bouncing off these walls. And then all my books would fall down and that'd be terrible.

[00:00:10]Anyway, what was I talking about? I haven't started yet. Oh, yeah. I'm being silenced. Gods! Gods! They're They're silencing me. I'm joking. [laughter] That's silly. No, but seriously, I recently made one of my dream videos. I have wanted to talk about this topic for years, and for whatever reason I kept putting it off. And that video was effectively me angry ranting about how William Golding's Lord of the Flies is terrible, actually. And I was honestly very happy with how it came out. I was very confident in my argument. And I thought, yeah, great. I've got Rutger Bregman on my side, after all. So, checkmate you. As I said in that video, I studied Lord of the Flies in school, and it had a very profound effect on me.

[00:00:57]Then, when I became a teacher myself, I had to teach it to students who were the same age I was when I read it. Now, many, many years later, I have come to despise it. When I read Rutger Bregman's Humankind, that helped me open my eyes even more. And so, I finally made an angry rant about how Lord of the Flies is terrible. And even though one of the big pieces of advice for YouTubers is don't check the comments, I check the comments. Mostly because I have a great community, and I like being in my comment section, having open conversations and decent dialogue with intelligent people, and also, obviously, snackily and wittily slamming down the naysayers and dumb people who come my way. And so, as usual, an hour into that video going up, I start checking the comments, and oh my word, several people pointed out similar arguments to each other that got a lot of likes each. All of which flew in the face of everything I said in my argument. And what they had to say was so good that initially I went, "Oh, rubbish."

[00:01:59]>> [laughter] >> So, I was going to rip it up and throw it away. No. I sort of had that like conservative politician edge to just dig my heels in and go, "No. That's it's mm no."

[00:02:11]Like, [laughter] maybe you've got a point and maybe I'm too proud to admit that I refuse to see your point because because I made my point and it was a good point and I >> [laughter] [snorts] >> I don't want you to disagree with me and and have a sound argument. That's not fair.

[00:02:29]>> [laughter] >> BUT, YOU DID HAVE AN ARGUMENT. The people who who said these things, they got me thinking. They got me wondering if I'm wrong about Lord of the Flies.

[00:02:40]And here's the thing about art, you can have different interpretations. My interpretation of Lord of the Flies, as I've said, has changed over time and I still despise the book. But, my mind and my eyes have been opened to a different way of interpreting the book, a different message about the book and I'm not going to throw that away. At first, I wanted to out of stubbornness and shame, but I'm not going to. So, let's start by looking at those comments and then I'll keep rambling and giggling to myself. So, let's go through some of these comments that have me thinking.

[00:03:15]One of the more dangerous activities for women, I would argue.

[00:03:18]>> [laughter] >> This is the first comment and it's currently the most popular and upvoted comment on the video. I always interpreted the book as a critique of British boarding school culture in particular rather than general human nature. The British boarding school system greatly dehumanized the boys who were forced to participate in the bullying, abuse, and brutality that went on there and in fact diminished their capacity for human emotions like empathy. I read somewhere that Golding greatly disliked the genre of kids novels where a civilized British kid could tame the savage people of the colonial empire when in reality it was the British kids who were the savage.

[00:03:59]Next comment. Maybe I'm wrong but I never read Lord of the Flies as an enforcement of British Christianity. I read it as a critique of the British school system. When left to their own devices all the boys did was an extreme version of what they've been taught at boarding school, cruelty, bullying, violence. They have the facade of well-to-do rich upper class boys. But when the adults find the children and all that's left of them is the qualities they encouraged in the first place and it deeply disgusts them. Third comment.

[00:04:28]I usually agree with you but I had the opposite interpretation of the book.

[00:04:32]Like I thought it was saying these upper class British Christians were not as civilized as they thought themselves to be. The boys in the book weren't some generic representation of humanity. They were the sons of powerful privileged men and the savagery they wrecked on the island is a microcosm of the savagery of war people with a similar background wrecked on the world. And the final comment. Lord of the Flies is very directly a critique of an English schoolboy series about a class of boys who go on magical adventures, who civilized a magic island population.

[00:05:06]It's very much anti-colonial and calls out how the children of a violent colony population would be the same once they were under any rules. I struggled so much to accept these comments because they really put me in my place and weakened my entire argument. I was forced to sit and wrangle with what these people have been saying and think, yeah, okay, maybe they have a really, really good point. Maybe I'm totally wrong because here's the thing. The reason I went from being very impacted by Lord of the Flies when I studied it to ending up despising it is because of its cultural impact. In 1983, when William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the Nobel Prize Committee said this, "For his novels which with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth illuminate the human condition in the world of today."

[00:06:05]And I think that statement from the Nobel Committee is very short-sighted and kind of dismal. And it's an attitude that so many people after reading Lord of the Flies seem to come away with, that human nature is a dark and terrible thing. That behind a thin veneer of civilization and discipline and religious teachings and laws and rules and so on, we are all just barbaric, twisted, malignant, evil things. I just despise that argument. We're not. We're pack animals. We are predisposed to being kind to each other, working together, building communities, building civilizations. Humanity, like any other mammal species, is kind and good and curious and intelligent. And as I grew to believe that and then read Humankind, which only bolstered my positive belief about human nature and I guess mammal nature in general, I only became more and more jaded at Lord of the Flies, which I saw as being diametrically opposed to that mindset. As I said, suddenly Lord of the Flies seemed like this jaded, cynical, dark thing that people were using as a yardstick for truth. Like, Lord of the Flies actually proves that the better angels of our nature are demons, actually. I hated this. I read Humankind and Rutger Bregman over and over is saying things that only expanded on what I had already come to believe. And I was nodding along going, "Yes, yes, yes." And then he provides a real-life example of Lord of the Flies where it didn't play out as William Golding cynically thought it would. And now suddenly I am hit with a series of fantastic comments and arguments that fly in the face of everything I said in that video, that reframe what Lord of the Flies is, what it represents, what Golding was trying to say, what Golding was doing. And here I briefly want to bring up a video from my second channel, a video I recently put up about whether or not the film The Silence of the Lambs is transphobic. And to spoil that video, my argument comes down to yes and no. No in the sense that the filmmakers did not intend to make a transphobic work of art, but yes in the sense that The Silence of the Lambs has arguably had a very negative impact on society as a whole's perception of the trans community, which is out of the film's control. The filmmakers did a great job of making it very clear that the killer in The Silence of the Lambs is not a trans woman, is in fact closer to a very troubled and lonely and disconnected incel man who naively has convinced himself that he's trans because he's got this identity crisis.

[00:08:54]But society as a whole, for lack of any other depictions of trans people in popular culture and fiction and cinema at that time, clung on to the depiction of Buffalo Bill as well as films like Ace Ventura as evidence that trans people are weird and dangerous societal pariahs. The Silence of the Lambs is one of my favorite films, it's wonderful, I think it's a genuine masterpiece, and I don't think it is a transphobic work of art, but I believe it's had a transphobic impact. And at the end of that video I mentioned The Lord of the Flies, and I think where I come down now, I guess, is that the people who left these comments have really reframed my attitude towards Golding and his book and I love their arguments. I really enjoy what these commenters said, but I remain angry at the impact of Lord of the Flies on society at large just in the same way that I'm annoyed at the impact that Silence of the Lambs had on society's understanding of and perspective on the trans community. It's not Golding's fault that so many people and apparently even the Nobel Committee saw his work as some sort of portal into the truth of the human soul, which in actual fact is dark and evil. When in truth, I love what these commenters had to say about how actually Lord of the Flies is a deconstruction of British values and colonialism and Christian normalcy, etc. That it's pretty much the reverse of everything I claimed it was, but so many people have taken it to be what I was angry at it being. It's basically a case of me buying into what Lord of the Flies appears to be saying about human nature and rather than believing that and having it twist my mind in the way that so many people have, I went, "No." and I dug my heels in and I said, "No, it's it's not it's not true. Human nature is not like that.

[00:10:54]What's wrong with you, William Golding?"

[00:10:56]And now we've got a bunch of people pointing out to me that that was never the case. That's not what Golding was doing. The intention of the artist is in direct opposition to the impact that the book has had on the public as a whole, myself included. It's like not realizing something is satire, not getting the irony, missing the memo. And honestly, that makes me enormously embarrassed.

[00:11:22]But, in my opinion, the best thing anyone can do when they feel shamed, when they feel embarrassed, is go against all instincts and open themselves up and say, "I was wrong." Or at least, maybe the other people, maybe the opposite view has a point. Maybe there is value in what they're saying.

[00:11:42]Make a statement, be very confident in that statement, and then keep your mind open to something that might prove you completely wrong. It's so difficult to do, honestly, because pride and shame are so powerful. Hopefully, I've I've done a decent job here, I hope, because I mean, the idea that William Golding was saying that colonialist Christian European British society isn't as refined and civilized and correct as they thought they were, as they still think they are, it's brilliant. It allows me to suddenly enjoy the book again, to revisit it with a different perspective in mind. I really appreciate that. I mean, so many times in my videos, I have openly mocked close-minded perspectives on characters, themes, authors, and so on. And here I am having a close-minded perspective on a book, and being very politely, I'm grateful that it was very polite, having the opposite pointed out to me as a potential reading of the book that I find very convincing. I hate the cultural impact that Lord of the Flies has had, but I no longer hate Lord of the Flies. And I think what these wonderful commenters in their wonderful comments have pointed out to me is, I mean, I'm so grateful for it. Thank you.

[00:13:00]So, was I wrong about Lord of the Flies?

[00:13:02]Yeah. Yeah, I I think I was. I was wrong about the book. I wasn't wrong about its impact. I don't like the impact of Lord of the Flies. I do think, like with Silence of the Lambs, it's done more harm than good, but that doesn't make it a bad book. That doesn't make the author someone of ill intent, someone who was as cynical and bleak-minded as I first thought he was, as I often thought he was. In actual fact, Lord of the Flies is a lot smarter and more nuanced than I gave it credit for, and I'm really grateful for that. So, thank you to the people who left those comments. I really cannot say thank you enough. I'm really grateful. Thank you. If you enjoyed this, check out my second channel, check out my book Managing an Other Lives, check out my Patreon, and there are links to all of those things in the description box below. Subscribe for books.