Human Nature In Lord Of The Flies

Krish Patel

Mrs. Kirkpatrick

English 10 - period 6

3/13/2023

The Evils of Human Nature

Throughout history there has been a big question over human nature that has not been answered to this day, is human nature evil? William Golding uses his Novel, Lord of the Flies, to give his answer by using kids marooned on an empty uncivilized island. In Lord of the Flies, Golding implies that human nature is evil, which is a fair assessment. There have been many instances throughout history and literature that show the evils of humans being aggressive and savagely.

Golding shows his point of human nature being inherently evil by using children separated from society as his main example. He gives many examples of human nature being evil, one of them is

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, college students are separated into two groups, the prisoners and the guards and are required to play the parts. The Stanford Prison experiment shows how abusive humans can be, in real life, to their own classmates in a short amount of time. This is shown when, “Within hours of beginning the experiment, some guards began to harass prisoners… Push-ups were a common form of physical punishment imposed by the guards. One of the guards stepped on the prisoners” backs while they did push-ups, or made other prisoners sit on the backs of fellow prisoners doing their push-ups…The guards again escalated the level of harassment, forcing them to do menial, repetitive work such as cleaning toilets with their bare hands” (Mcleod). Only a couple of hours in, the guards are already harassing and punishing the prisoners with punishments that get worse and worse, some of the reasons that the prisoners are being punished are not even bad, but they still get cruel punishments. The guards are hurting the prisoners, who are actually their classmate and friends, and finding it amusing, showing off the evil human nature in them. The punishments are physical at first but as time goes on they start abusing there mental stability as well, “Next, the guards broke into each cell, stripped the prisoners naked and took the beds out. Soon #8612 “began to act ‘crazy,’ to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control.” It wasn’t until this point that the psychologists realized they had to let him out… The psychologists removed the chain from his foot, the cap off his head, and told him to go and rest in a room that was adjacent to the prison yard. They told him they would get him some food and then take him to see a doctor. While this was going on, one of the guards lined up the other prisoners and had them chant