Argumentative Essay On Lord Of The Flies

People have come to agree that a “good” world is one where order, equality, and kindness all reign supreme over their negative counterparts. The problem with this good world is that these qualities are not the values which every human default to. Correctly demonstrated through William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, George Orwell’s 1984, and experiments like the Stanford Prison Experiment, human nature at its core is exploitative and aggressive. These traits are the entire driving point behind the story of Lord of the Flies, being the reason that the group of once civilized boys descends into chaos and destruction all so rapidly. This book attempted to display what would happen if a group of boys were to revert to the ways humans tend to behave

In this scene, the boys, led by Jack, are in a frenzied ritual of sorts when Simon stumbles upon them and is mistaken for the infamous, ever allusive beast that has haunted the boys’ fear for their entire time on the island. In the heat of the moment, the once boys now savages threw themselves upon Simon like animals and “screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws” (Golding 153). The addition of the detail where there were no words signifies that there is a loss of humanity, which a reader could correlate to speech and communication. This loss of humanity could be considered a loss of pacifism and brotherhood, substituted by their repulsive opposites of violence and hate, the very things Golding claims that human nature embodies. In a different way, Golding conveyed the idea that it’s in people’s nature to also exploit others for their own benefit, as seen through Jack after he has usurped the position of leader on the island. When the place which all of the boys stay at under the leadership and total control of Jack is first described, it is made abundantly clear that Jack leads as a dictator of sorts, with his tribe “in a semicircle

One prime example of both exploitation and aggression is the Stanford Prison experiment. In this experiment, a group of young men was randomly separated into prisoners and guards, where they would spend two weeks acting out those roles. The experiment had to end early, however when the guards began to abuse the power given to them by their position to harass and abuse the prisoners. As Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist in charge of the experiment, wrote in his reflection that there was a group of guards that were “hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation” (Zimbardo), which goes to show that when put in a position of power with what felt like no limits, people tend to abuse the power given and hurt others. These make-believe guards became power drunk quite quickly into the experiment, which forced the psychologists in charge of the test to shut it down over a week early. As put by Zimbardo, “the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching” (Zimbardo). These acts of violence when the coast was assumed to be clear shows just how bad the aggression these guards harbored truly was. When faced with no restrictions and power, these people who all seemed quite normal in the preliminary examinations and interviews, had become sadistic and abusive towards people just like