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Social Norms In Lord Of The Flies

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A human will revert back to its original state if not checked by society’s standards. Lord of the Flies was written by William Golding. It is about a group of British schoolboys who crash land on an uninhabited island without any adult supervision. The book focuses on a few of the Boys Ralph the Leader, Jack the Braun, Piggy the Intelligent, and Simon the Spiritual. The story goes through their time on the islands with showing the bad, the good, and the ugly. The standards that society places on its people are extreme but when the standards are loosened the outcome is deadly.
People succumb to society’s standards and they let it run their life but when they decide to break free from those standards something good or bad could happen. According to William Golding in the Article Why Boys Become Vicious. He said, “ It would not surprise me if in these conditions, where the orders and patterns of society …show more content…

According to Psychologist Philip Zimbardo in his Stanford Prison Experiment When normal prison guards who were good at their job and followed the rules. When they were introduced into a no rules environment “showed that one-third of the guards began to show an extreme and imbedded streak of sadism.” (Qtd in Shuttleworth). This shows that good people could turn savage when they have no social norm. In Lord of the Flies Jack, a boy with a very militaristic side of him shows very early the signs of savagery. “He’s going to beat Wilfred ... He’s been tied for hours, waiting.” ( Golding, Lord 159) Jack beat up Wilfred a little kid because he wanted to prove a point that you can not trust Ralph the leader of the group. This truly shows that jack is a savage person. Society wants people to be one thing and people follow that but there is a thing in our mind where we want to be hunters and gatherers like our ancestors

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