Here is a heartwarming story of survival and cooperation with a happy ending. The island nation of Tonga is a Polynesian country in the south Pacific, roughly 3,000 miles SSW of Hawaii and maybe 1,500 miles NNE of New Zealand.
The TL;DR summary goes something like this —
in 1965, six teenagers were bored so they ‘borrowed’ a sailboat and decided to head to Fiji about 500 miles away; basically it’s a not-smart teenager stunt
a storm hits and wrecks their small sailboat; they are stranded in the ocean
they wash ashore onto a deserted island
they survive, and thrive, for several months
they think they’ll be stuck there the rest of their lives
they form a harmonious society with rules and chores and routines
after 15 months on the island a fisherman spots them and rescues them
their families had already given them up for dead; funerals had been held
See this:
10mins, old documentary, black & white
I searched and don’t think this has been a thread here.
I remembered this story when I saw @Beckdawrek’s recent MPSIMS thread with Lord of the Flies in her title:
It was more of a teacher’s nightmare written up upon awakening. It was popular as a Cold War warning against “utopian” thinking: “this is what happens if you don’t have someone with a firm hand in charge, so you beatniks and unionists and civil rights activists and hippies and yippies just better settle down and let the adults run things!” The Tongan teenagers are a real-life counter-example. Rutger Bregman challenges Flies and many of these dystopian myths in his book, Humankind
I first heard of this story (Wikipedia article here, for those who don’t want to watch a video) in April this year, when Peter Warner, the Australian sailor who found the boys, died.
I detested Lord of the Flies. I was always one of those utopian thinkers and I was also a radical children’s libber and the damn tale offended me all to fuck.
Lord of the Flies IIRC (read it a long time ago) is a depiction of a group of boys from a boys’ school in which certain types of bullying were considered normal in the first place. A group of teenagers from other cultures would have been likely to behave very differently – with the differences varying with the cultures.
It never made sense to me to take it as being something universal about human nature.
Lord of the Flies had been required reading for many school kids, including me. The message of both the book and that it is required reading is — to me — that societal order is fleetingly fragile and, given the ‘opportunity’ to live outside of any societal order, humans would devolve into chaos and criminal actions, including murder.
The point with this real-life example is that is not necessarily the case, and people can choose to live in peace, harmony, cooperation, and civility. The point with the OP is less about the book and more of this harmonious nature of people.
I agree that that’s the message that’s usually given. I expect, however, that given the opportunity to live outside of any societal order but also given the presence of other humans, what most humans are actually going to do is to rapidly create a societal order.
From what we’ve seen of human societal orders, of course, that doesn’t rule out murder. That I think is going to depend on the particular group of people who get tossed into the situation; including what they’ve been raised to think is normal social behavior, as well as their individual natures.
I didn’t think the Lord of the Flies fictional example was implausible in itself. I think, and thought at the time when I read it, that assuming it could be generalized and would apply to any situation of teenagers on their own was wrong.
Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.
The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn’t get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.
The experience of the Tongan teenagers suggest that Graham’s assessment isn’t universal, but it does seem applicable to the culture in a lot of American public school systems. It certainly was the case for mine.
I’ve always preferred Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky (which I had thought was a deliberate response to Lord of the Flies, but turns out to predate it slightly): A bunch of teenagers are stranded on their own, and so create a society.
But I don’t think that LotF’s message is that teenagers are savages, or that they’re worse than “adult” society: Remember, their rescuer criticizes them for their violence… while captaining a warship on its way to a battle. The teenagers on the island were meant as a microcosm of human society, not a rejection of it.
