Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the 2018 Festival of Dangerous Ideas. I am here today to examine whether the greatest threat to civilisation is humanity itself? I strongly believe that, humanity is most definitely the greatest threat to civilisation. While Lord of the Flies was first published in 1954 by William Golding as a response to the rise of Nazism and after the horrors of human evil witnessed during World War II, it still speaks directly to our world today in 2018 where nations and world leaders such as Xi Jinping, Kim Jon Un and Vladimir Putin continue to fight for world domination because of their greed for power. Golding uses each of the characters in the play to represent an element of man’s personality to show that when a man’s own survival is threatened, man will abandon all rules, morals and decency to survive. This play …show more content…
He uses his authority to set rules to protect the common good of the group by trying to enforce the morals and laws of the English society that the boys grew up in. The rule to use the conch shell when speaking allowed each boy to speak freely in turn. The conch is a symbol for democracy and represents civilisation which at the beginning unifies the boys. The conch allows for everyone to get an equal say and for their ideas to be listened to. This is much like our democratic system of government today. However, the opposite of democracy is communism, autocracy and dictatorship. Towards the end of the play, as the boys became more determined to survive, the conch began to lose its affect as the civilisation the boys created, moves away from democracy, where everyone has an equal say, to an autocracy or a dictatorship, where one person, Jack, had absolute power over everyone else. The play shows that as humans are pushed to survive, they are willing to do anything to do so including to abandon rules and laws which results in