Chapter Seventeen: When Democracy Dies. . . .
Democracy's Demise: A Warning from Golding's Island to Modern America
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau’s famous declaration appears in chapter 1 of The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right,” published in 1762.1 These words reverberate when one reads Lord of the Flies.2 Would Rousseau have delivered this declaration if he had read this novel? Questionable.
The novel is vague concerning a number of important issues, and that vagueness has given rise to variety of interpretations.3 For the purposes of an American in November of 2024, Lord of the Flies should be read as a parable of politics and governance. The lesson is starkly dramatic. We learn through this book how easily something which we hold so dear—so close to our definition of ourselves—can slip away.
A group of English schoolboys ranging in age from 6 to 13 find themselves stranded on an island, probably located somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The boys were being evacuated from a war zone. We assume the year is 1954, the year the book was published. Therefore, the story takes place after World War II in which the author William Golding served. After Auschwitz. After Hiroshima and the possibility of nuclear annihilation. In the words of one critic, the book presents “a view of humanity unimaginable before the horrors of Nazi Europe.”4
The first two boys we meet are Ralph and Piggy. Ralph is 12 years and a couple of months old. He is in the midst of a physical transformation. He has “lost the prominent tummy of childhood” but adolescence has not yet made him awkward. “[H]e might make a boxer, as far as width and heaviness of shoulders went, but there was a mildness about his mouth and eyes that proclaimed no devil.”5 We also take it that Ralph is of the upper social class by the reference to his belonging in the “Home Counties.”6
The phrase “proclaimed no devil” is rather damning by faint praise. We are supposed to like and even admire Ralph. It is his father who is supposed to rescue the boys.
Almost immediately, however, Ralph does something that colored my perception of him. At the beginning of the novel, Ralph encounters “the fat boy.”
The fat boy helps to establish that there are no grown-ups on the island. He suggests a census of the boys who escaped from the plane which crashed. And he also wants to have a meeting.
The fat boy says he does not care what he is called “as long as they don’t call me what they used to call me at school.” What was that? asks Ralph. The fat boy replies, “Piggy.” Ralph “shrieked with laughter” shouting “Piggy! Piggy!”7 And Piggy is how this boy is known from that moment until he is killed. We never learn his given name. Ralph may be the best bet among the children castaways on this island, but he is not without his flaws.
In addition to being overweight (OK, fat), Piggy has asthma. And his accent suggests he is from a lower social class. All of which means that Piggy can be marginalized, which is unfortunate because he is the smartest kid on that island.8
Ralph and Piggy discover a conch, a large shell which can be used as a horn. Ralph summons a meeting using the conch. Jack Merridew arrives with a choir of boys who obey his instructions.
Ralph observes that “we ought to have a chief to decide things.” To which Jack responds, “I want to be chief because I’m chapter chorister and head boy. I can sing C sharp.” What follows is a vote. It is Ralph versus Jack. Ralph is elected. It seems that all is well. This is democracy in action. “Jack and Ralph smiled at each other with shy liking.”9
The island on which the boys were marooned could have been a lot worse. As Ralph observed, it was “a good island.” Indeed, the trees were laden with fruit. Fresh water was plentiful. And there were pigs that could be hunted for meat. As Ralph said, “until the grown-ups come to fetch us, we’ll have fun.”10
Food was plentiful. The temperature was mild so minimal clothing was all that was called for. The boys did need shelter, which they built. And they needed a fire which generated enough smoke so that they could be spotted by either the ships or planes of grownups who would rescue them.
This novel is very brief. Only 189 pages. However, it is packed with clues as to why the democracy the boys had originally set up degenerated into anarchy. Jack and Ralph came to be at one another’s throats. A mysterious beast is said to lurk on the island. A pig is killed in a truly horrifying Black Mass. Jack and his many followers smear themselves with the pig’s blood, and they paint their bodies. They become savages.
Jack and his tribe, as they label themselves, set the whole island on fire. In an orgy of bloodlust they launch a hunt not for another pig but for Ralph. By this time, the boy Piggy has been murdered. The conch, which had been used to summon meetings, was destroyed with him. The fragile institutions of democracy—the voting, the meetings—could not contain the savage impulses of these children transplanted into a benign but unfamiliar environment.
Man may be born free as Rousseau wrote; but without institutions to guard and restrain him he finds himself—at least in the view of this novel—in an environment which looks like Nazi Germany in 1939.
Please take a moment to watch the video below from 19:59 to 20:46.
The saturnalia ends when British sailors, having spotted the smoke from the burning island, arrive to rescue the boys, who by this time have turned into hunters and hunted. The naval officer says “I should have thought that a pack of British boys. . . . would have been able to put up a better show than that. . . .”11
“‘It was like that at first,’ said Ralph, ‘before things—’ He stopped. ‘We were together then—’”
Ralph broke down. “[S]obs shook him . . . Great shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body . . . . Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”12 Man, it would appear, is born not free but dangerous.
Where does the vision summoned up in the novel leave us today in the United States? Like the boys on that unnamed island of lost souls, we seem quite willing to let democracy slip from our grasp. “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a wimper.”13
Like those boys, we may discover how very dark life can be without the constraints of democracy and its attendant institutions. We may discover that once we lose it, we cannot get it back. Or we may discover, like the Germans who lost their democracy in 1933, that it can only be retrieved after Götterdämmerung. The Germans refer to May 8, 1945, as Stunde Null, zero hour. What was once one of the most cultivated countries in the world had to start all over from scratch.
In Donald Trump, the United States has elected a man who has it within his grasp to become a dictator for life. History has seen enough dictators so that we have a good idea what that means. Yet his second coming is greeted with the sound of silence. Unlike the 1960s, the college campuses appear to be quiet about this election. The rest of us wait for January 20. Can it happen here? Can it really happen here?
This novel should be required reading today. So should Alan Bullock’s brilliant Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (with special attention to Chapter 5: “Revolution after Power”)14 and William Sheridan Allen’s classic The Nazi Seizure of Power (with special attention to “Chapter 14: The Atomization of Society”).15
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/cole-the-social-contract-and-discourses
William Golding, Lord of the Flies (New York: Penguin, 2016).
See especially, Harold Bloom, “Major Themes in Lord of the Flies,” https://www.scribd.com/document/565354093/Major-themes-in-Lord-of-the-Flies
Robert McCrum, “The 100 best novels: No 74 – Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954),” The Guardian, February 16, 2015.
Golding, Lord, p. 11.
Golding, Lord, p. 7
Golding, Lord, pp. 11-12
See Bloom’s discussion of Piggy in “Themes.”
Golding, Lord, pp. 21-23.
Golding, Lord, p. 34.
Golding, Lord, p. 188.
Golding, Lord, pp. 188-189.
T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” https://www.d.umn.edu/~tbacig/cst1010/chs/eliot.html
New York: Bantam, 1961.
Brattleboro, VT: Echo Books, 2014.