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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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Lord of the Flies is a book about a group of boys that are stranded on an island after a plane crash. They are the only survivors and there are no adults on the island with them. As a group, they will learn how to survive and create tribes and leadership roles. Not everything is perfect with the groups they create. Everything will fall out of order, chaos and death will be shown in the groups.

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Violence is a strong force to take. You can always find yourself stuck in it. In the book Lord of the Flies, the author William Golding explores the brutality of civilization in contrast with responsibility and respect for others. Stranded on an island, Ralph and Piggy, two young boys, explore the wilderness and face conflicts with savagery from Jack’s tribe. The idea and the article “What makes good people do bad things” by Melissa Dittmann explores the effects an individual can have on the fear of becoming an outlier and uses the term deindividualization as becoming less self aware.

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Therefore, many youths fall victim of becoming aggressive and engaging in criminal behavior just by residing in those troubled neighborhoods. He goes on to assert that the strive for “respect”—or being treated “right”—induces violence and criminal behavior in the society. And according to Anderson, this is true because some alienated members of the society, who believe that they have no positive or dignified position in the mainstream are still convinced that they deserved some sort of personal ‘respect’. So, those people show and display “nerve”, devising and exercising rules in violation of mainstream norms so that they can gain respect. In effect, when one abides by the ‘code’ and manifests ‘nerve’—so that people don’t mess with him/her—the end result, if successful is the

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“No grownups!” the fair boy exclaimed excitedly. However zealous he seemed at first, this boy’s enthusiasm turns out to be short-lived. Lord of the Flies, a novel written by William Golding, explores the social degradation of young boys stranded on an island without adult supervision. As the novel progresses, the majority of the youth fall into savagery, led by an older boy named Jack.

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