William Golding’s Lord of the Flies feels like one of those books you’d read as a novel study in English class. In the book, a group of British schoolboys of ages 6 to 12 are marooned on an island. The children democratically elect a leader, Ralph, thus beginning the accumulation of grievances that the runner-up, Jack, holds against Ralph. To me, Ralph, Jack, and the brains of the group, Piggy, seem to represent the superego, id, and ego respectively.
Soon, rumours begin to spread that there is a monster on the island. At first, Ralph and Piggy try to rationally explain to the group how monsters don’t exist. This is only temporarily effective, since as more people claim to have encountered the monster, trust in their leadership erodes. Ralph wants to use the threat of the monster to rally the group together to maintain a fire that serves as a rescue signal. On the other hand, Jack uses the looming threat as the pretext for a descent into savagery. He claims that the group should take up arms, hunt the monster down, and give up on all attempts of rescue. This disagreement escalates until the eventual fracture of the group.
Replace the word “monster” with “pandemic” in the previous paragraph, and we can draw many parallels to the ideologies surrounding COVID-19. In society today, both liberals and conservatives seem to believe themselves to be Ralph, and the “other side” to be Jack. From the point of view of a Democrat, mandates and vaccines are a way to unite the world to fight the pandemic, and their opponents are encouraging a dangerous descent into lawlessness and chaos. From the point of view of a Republican, upholding individual freedoms is the best way to prevent the descent into savagery, and Democrats are using the threat of the pandemic as a pretext for further power accumulation, just as Jack did.
Piggy’s attempts of mediating a middleground compromise are swept aside by the dogmatic arguments of Ralph and Jack. They both provoke fear and outrage to delusionally convince themselves of their absolute righteousness. Soon enough, the rest of the schoolchildren find themselves flocking to either polar extreme. This leads to another theme that was very powerfully portrayed in Golding’s book: the power of mob mentality to unlock the inherent evil inside all of us. I won’t elaborate on this point for fear of major spoilers though. Read the book yourself!
My main criticism of the book is that Golding uses way too many archaic words to give very descriptive imagery that doesn’t advance the plot in any way. So… shame on him for not knowing which English words would go out of style 70 years into the future I guess. The first three quarters of the book felt like a super long buildup. Fortunately, it was worth the wait because the last few chapters were an absolute thriller (and horror) to read.
IRL Update (07/16/2023): Finished this book around a week ago. Currently reading American Prometheus in anticipation of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which I will be watching very soon!