The breakdown of society can be rapid. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, this is the case. After a large group of boys are stranded on an island with no adults, they try to create a society. They vote in Ralph, but over time, Ralph loses his power to Jack, who rules through fear and encourages violent actions. The adolescence of their leader causes him to be naïve, which makes the boys vulnerable to manipulative leaders. Due to this internal factor, the boys become violent. Ralph’s lack of maturity led to him being seen as a poor leader and many of the boys defecting to Jack’s side. At the beginning, Ralph is voted chief, and he tells the boys to build shelters. However, many people do not help with the second or third shelter. Ralph does not tell them to help. And later, after Jack lets Ralph down by failing to do what he promised at a critical moment, Ralph calls a meeting, …show more content…
After the boys join Jack’s tribe, they kill a pig. While cooking and feasting on the pig, a thunderstorm begins, and Jack commands the boys to start dancing. Even Ralph, who simply showed up for food, joins in and notes that “They were glad to touch the brown backs of the fence that hemmed in the terror and made it governable” (Golding, Lord 81). In Jack’s tribe, Jack is the one who controls the boys’ fear and, by extension, them. And that is how he retains his power. When he lets them be “afraid together they discover that the violence within them can be almost bottomless” (Golding, “Why”). He aims the boys’ fear at who or whatever he wants destroyed, and they destroy it. Jack channels the boys’ fear into the dance, and when the circle is broken by another boy coming out of the woods, they literally maul him to death because now that boy is the object of their fear, so they become aggressive. Because Jack is the boys’ chief, and he encourages fear to retain his own power, and fear leads to strife, the boys act