Lord of the Flies is one of those novels that people remember wrong. People remember its central theme as "take away civilization, and we all turn into Hobbesian little monsters."

But if you read the book as an adult, instead of an 8th grader speeding through, you find a

different meaning. Again and again Golding makes clear that he actually does not see a distinction between the 'uncivilized' world of the children and the world of the adults--who are at that moment fighting a world war. The "world of adults" is no better than the world of the

children. Base human nature absent the constraints of law and order is *not* what this novel is about.

The novel is about how systems of order and virtue fall apart. Why they are vulnerable to being hijacked by the worst among us and the worst within us.

There is this idea that Golding believes we are all little monsters deep down. But this is not really true of his characters. Many of the children in the novel are creatures of good; many are completely neutral; a small minority are brutes.

But the brutes *win.*

That is what Golding wants to figure out. All of his characters are archetypes, symbolic representations of certain parts of human society. Science and learning; religion, art and the spiritual life; good authority and righteous leadership; the will to power; cruelty and sadism.

Golding wants to figure out why the bad parts in society inevitably seem to overwhelm the good. Why does democracy fail, what gives the power-hungry their chance, why can't goodness and civility long persist? Golding believes that they *don't* long persist--but can you blame him?

The man who wrote LotF lived in an empire that was collapsing and in a society threatened by the spectre of atomic war. He wrote less than thirty years out from WWI, twenty years from the fall of Europe to Communism and Fascism, and less ten years out of World War II.

He fought in that last war and was permanently scarred by it. If I am a Brit in mid 1950s I would probably conclude that norms, order, goodness, *civilization* is always doomed to fall apart as well. It would have been the totality of my own life experience.

But why?

That is what LotF is meant to answer. Golding is not trying to play this Rosseau-v-Hobbes game of bringing humanity back to the state of nature and see what they look like. His children are not living in a natural state: they are self conscious heirs to an entire civilization,

and they realize quite early on that they live on the razor's edge of life and death. So they create rules and orders to keep their society running. A little democracy that honors natural goodness and leadership.

A little democracy that does not last.

And that is what people don't seem to get about this book. It isn't a parable about what happens when you taken men out of society--it is a parable about how men act *in society.*

Why do we have Hitlers and Mussolinis and Lenins and civil wars and world wars and great terrors? You can answer that question with economic statistics and long chains of historical causation or with the intellectual genealogy of the anti-liberal political philosophy....

Or maybe there is something more fundamental at work. Maybe there is something about fear, or the power-lust, or cruelty that transcends any individual political program or historical moment. Maybe there is something that holds together tyrannies the world over.

Golding thinks there is. His little parable--one of the most carefully and artfully constructed in English literature--is an attempt to get at what those things may be.

Reducing this novel to "all humans are evil once you take civilization away" doesn't just over-simplify Golding's message; it fundamentally misunderstands Goldin's entire project.

That is all.