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Government In Lord Of The Flies

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According to A Novel Approach to Politics, government is a set of agreements, laws, or other political structures designed to provide permanent hierarchy (p 57). I believe that humans are social creatures that require structure, rules, and regulations. The movie Lord of the Flies is about a group of boys stranded on an island trying to survive, thus illustrating that men are inherently evil in their state of nature. Based on the film and Thomas Hobbes’ theory of “social contract” (Lecture, Sept 16, 2014), I do think that government is the result of a type of social contract in which we have agreed to relinquish some of our rights to form a state and leave our state of nature; therefore, it is not far-fetched to believe that once we removed …show more content…

You are responsible for your own well being. The young boys in the film found themselves in a world ungoverned and willing to do whatever they could to stay alive, including killing each other. Government roles are essential in every society to avoid living in a chaotic world. Lord of the Flies showed the establishment of an earlier form of a democratic government and a dictatorship government. We see the very first establishment of a government with the boys appointing a leader via voting, thus creating a democratic society to protect and serve. We then see the leader asserting his power by appointing each individual with their assigned duties (Lasswell H., definition of politics, Lecture, Sept. 4, 2014). Of course as time progressed and the “veneer of civilization” started peeling off and the struggle for power (Hans Morgenthau’s definition of politics, Lecture, Sept. 4, 2014) arose among the boys who were driven by fear and …show more content…

Faced with the option of survival and keeping your morals and principles in a world with no rules, you will choose to survive. For example, the character Jack, the dictator, could not kill a pig at the beginning of the movie, but hunger and the will to survive trumped his civility, morals, and principles of his old governed society. The turning point in the movie was the killing of the character Piggy because it symbolized the boys’ “evil” nature, their savagery, and their loss of morality and rationalism. They did not second guess their action or the effect on their

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