This is an essay I did for my highschool English course. It's related to the book, Lord of the Flies (William Golding). Lord of the Flies is a book full of symbolism and allusion and I recommend that you read it. (If you have never read Lord of the Flies, this essay might not make much sense-there are many references to the book)
Here it is:
Topic: Compare the authoritarian and democratic power of Ralph and Jack with situations in our world today.
In the novel, Lord of the Flies, Golding portrays a society of English schoolboys, who have crash landed into an uninhabited island. They must fend for themselves and must learn to stay together. Golding shows how they develop a democratic society at first, probably because of the conditioning of the society from which they originated. Slowly, however, their society turns to dictatorship, violence and savagery. To compare Golding’s group of schoolboys to a society in our world today would indicate some interesting connections. To be fair, one must compare the schoolboys to a society that has had democracy to start with, but is gradually advancing in the path of dictatorship.
The most obvious example of a society that laid its foundation on the concept of democracy is the United States of America. The second sentence of the Declaration of Independence is clear proof of this democratic mindset; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Slowly, but surely, the rights of the American people are fading. In Lord of the Flies, one can recognize that gradually, Jack’s group retrogressed to killing members of their own group. Ethical deterioration such as this is also evident in many of today’s countries, including the USA. Recently, the Obama administration gave itself the authority to assassinate any Americans which it deemed to be a threat. This includes the American public and since “threat” was not defined, anyone could be killed.
In the beginning of the novel, Jack and some of his followers chose to be the “hunters”. The hunters showed little interest in keeping the fire lit (hence they had little interest in being saved), and instead pursued their own interest of killing pigs. Since the book constantly refers to the fruits on the island, Jack’s group had no reasonable excuses to waste their time on hunting. Jack’s followers were in the early stages of becoming power-hungry savages, who thought that by killing pigs, they became more powerful. Clear evidence of this is seen in parts of the book such as, “knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink”, and “'Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!” The mentality of being powerful, and abusing that power to impose your will on others or to sacrifice the weak, is a mentality that exists in our world today, and evident in American politics. At first, the idea of Manifest Destiny was proposed, which means that a strong union between individual states used to fulfil the common “destiny” which is expanding the borders of the US to consume weaker countries. And even today we see that some politicians push for the taking over (killing) of weaker countries (pigs). An indicator of this is the fact that after the Haiti earthquake, the United States sent more soldiers to Haiti than Humanitarian Aid, while such a weak and small country does not need an army trained to kill, but food and supplies to survive.
Golding’s novel raises some questions about the fundamentals of human nature and politics. Among these questions, one is, “Why do democracies slowly fade to authoritarianism?” To answer this, one must realize that the unification of a nation to fight a common enemy is not a bad idea in itself, but when the leaders of a society create the non-existent enemy to instil fear into the hearts of their own citizens for selfish reasons such as power and authority, that is an evil concept. We realized, in Lord of the Flies, that the idea of “the Beast” was raised by a small child, but Jack, realizing the potential that the concept provides, used it to gain absolute power. We can see that, while in reality the Beast was only existent in the hearts of the boys, they made it real by sacrificing meat to it and constantly exaggerating it. When Jack realized that the Beast was a way to gain power, he explained that “The beast is a hunter... we couldn't kill it” thereby protecting his own status as supreme leader. Some politicians in the United States have done just that; created enemies such as Cuba and Iraq, and used it to gain money and power. For example when we look at the situation in Iraq, we can see that the only reasonable excuse to continue the war at the cost of, not only 2 trillion dollars of tax-payer money, but the lives of soldiers and civilians, is for the corrupt officials to gain power.
The Lord of the Flies, while being a tale of fiction, represents very real aspects of human psychology, politics, and the devolution of people into savagery. One may even apply the basic plot of the story to all societies which are on the road from democracy to authoritarianism. The story starts out with a group that is organized into smaller groups each with a purpose and order. The smaller groups slowly lose their sense of unity and order, and civil war begins. One group overpowers another, and eliminates almost all opposition, until a saviour comes and stops the cruelty. Unlike the story, however, real societies must remember that the saviour is not going to appear miraculously, but must be one of the citizens of the society itself. The people of the USA cannot wait for a naval officer to save them from the situation they are in. The only way to save such a society is to raise leaders like Abraham Lincoln, who re-enlightened the fire which is the freedom as promised by the founding laws of the USA. If such leader were present in Lord of the Flies, the conch would not have been destroyed, and murder would not have happened.
The Story of Lord of the Flies portrays a society and how such a society deteriorates from democracy to authoritarianism. An example of a society that is similar to the schoolboys in Lord of the Flies is the United States. One similarity is the fact that both societies have created enemies for themselves. Another similarity is the idea of taking over smaller societies for the pure enjoyment of imposing your will. Both the schoolboys’ society and the United States have given themselves the right to murder a member of their own population. If any social order sees itself turning to authoritarianism and fitting into the plot of Lord of the Flies, it must look for a savior to protect its own democratic future, because democracy is a constant struggle for freedom.
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