Lord of the Flies: That's not how people work

Whenever some section of modern civilization is hit by some huge natural disaster, you always get the same wankers who are convinced it's all going a bit Lord of the Flies. That everyone will inevitably go feral and tear each other apart in a bid for survival.

That fucking book has convinced us all that we turn into monsters, and has a lot to answer for, because that attitude can have real effects in real life.  

It's everywhere in contemporary fiction, with The Walking Dead mining the same rotting ground for years, and it's still a major part of prestige drama in the year 2023 - that one episode of The Last Of Us where love and compassion override selfishness was an aberration, not the norm for the show, which was full of murderous doctors, fascist dickbags and "ordinary folk" killing each other with a horrific casualness. 

(I remain convinced that America is the only country that has ripped itself apart in the Walking Dead, and the rest of the world have dealt efficiently with the zombie problem, and are all just a bit embarrassed how much Americans turned on each other)

But William Golding was a depressed drunk who struggled with all kinds of anxiety his whole life, and that worldview might make great fiction, but it's usually only fiction. In disasters, people don't turn on each other, they pull together and help each other out, because that's what human beings do.

It happened after Hurricane Katrina, where breathless reports of rampant violence in the aftermath turned out to be total horseshit. And it happened here in New Zealand a couple of months ago, where another huge storm destroyed the homes of hundreds of people, and social media were full of reports of looting and violence, when there wasn't any more crime than usual, and the vast majority of people just helped their goddamn neighbours out.

We don't have to turn on each other when shit goes down, and we mostly don't. Lord of the Flies has all sorts of meaning and metaphors that still ring true - making it such a classic tale - but it's really not a blueprint for how people work.