Comment | I made a mistake in the column, and it led to the discovery of a much finer true story

I got it reader feedback.

from Vantaa Petri Sarlin had read my columnwhere I compared Lord of the Flies – novel to modern Finland. of William Golding in the novel published in 1954, a group of boys left alone founds a community of their own and drifts deeper and deeper into the cycle of mutual hatred and interference.

I saw parallels in the classic book with the current development in Finland, where a relatively small group of young men, who have often grown up without safe adults, are responsible for the most brutal crimes.

Sarlin said in his email that he is currently reading Rutger Bregman records A good history (Athens, 2020). In the book, the historian and journalist shares a belief in the ultimate goodness of man, even if it is claimed otherwise.

According to Bregman, one of the most influential pessimists has been Golding and his classic novels.

Later also another reader referred to in his public department letter to the same work.

Reading time service A good history found in seconds.

Lord of the Flies at the beginning of the chapter, Bregman discusses the history of the bestseller. According to him, Golding said to his wife in 1951: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if I wrote a book about a group of boys stranded on an island to show how they would actually behave?”

Golding, who also worked as a teacher, seemed to have a clear understanding of boys’ behavior. “Even though we are an unwritten journal at first,” he stated in his first letter to the publisher, “our nature compels us to act recklessly.”

The human image was dull anyway. “Man produces evil like a bee produces honey,” he is reported to have said.

“

“I understood the Nazis, because I was one by nature,” the author has confessed.

In the year of publication In 1954, the book sank into fertile soil, when a new generation asked their parents about the horrors of the Second World War. We wanted to know if Auschwitz was just an exception or if there is a Nazi hidden in all of us.

Lord of the Flies seemed to answer that question, and it sold tens of millions of copies in total. The work became a kind of guide to the human mind, and Golding even received a Nobel Prize for his production.

According to the Swedish Academy, it represents “realistic storytelling” and “brilliantly sheds light on being human in today’s world”.

Good in history Bregman thoroughly questions Golding’s work. He looked into the author’s biography and found out that he had been a depressed alcoholic who beat his children.

“I understood the Nazis, because I was one by nature,” Golding confessed at one point, according to Bregman.

Lord of the Flies such exuberant faith in the evidentiary power of fictional literature can be found in some Väinö Linnan interpretations of novels that refer to real events than, for example, current magazine articles dealing with auto fiction.

In them, the books are considered to tell something universal about historical events, human nature, or anything at all, even if the author is just releasing his traumas in the work.

Bregman’s however, the report’s greatest merit is that he has dug up real life from history to support his argument Lord of the Flies – story.

In the year 1966 six boys left Tonga on a fishing trip. They got caught in a storm and were shipwrecked on a deserted island. The boys lived on the desert island for a year and a half in very similar conditions Lord of the Flies human beasts.

However, the result was completely different from Golding’s novel. In real life, the children did not start fighting each other in blood, but agreed to work in pairs. Two worked in the vegetable garden, two cooked and two had to watch. Sometimes they had a quarrel, but then they went in different directions for a while until they calmed down.

The captain who finally rescued the boys later wrote in his memoirs: “By the time we got there, the boys had built a small community with a vegetable garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to collect water, a gym with special weights, a badminton court, chicken coops and a fire that was constantly maintained. All this they had done by hand with the help of an old knife blade and a good dose of determination.”

As in lord of the flies, also in real life, the cliff edge was the fate of a boy. This fell down and broke his leg. Then the other boys carefully descended to him and helped him back up.

The leg was ingeniously bandaged and the boy was allowed to rest in a bed padded with tree leaves. The leg healed and no one was left to die.

No the story, unknown even to Tongan boys, tells the whole truth about the ultimate nature of human nature, of course not. Still, it’s scary how much the story emphasizing Golding’s competitiveness, cruelty and sheer evil still appeals to us.

TV researchers consider Golding to be the spiritual father of the reality television genre.

“I read Lord of the Flies again and again,” Survivorsthe inventor of the t-hit series has stated.

According to Bregman, in the American Kid Nation -in the reality TV show, forty children were placed in a ghost town in the hope that they would attack each other.

“Again and again they ran into the fact that we got along too well,” one of the participants later recalled.

“

The power of cruelty is so great that we won’t get rid of Lord of the Flies in the future either.

Also to many Finnish readers, at least in their fifties, Lord of the Flies seems to have made an impression. Helsingin Sanomat I’m reading in this series Minister of Education Anders Adlercreutz (rkp) says that Lord of the Flies taught him how it can go wrong if you go to be carried away by the group and don’t give in.

“Lord of the Flies also shows that there is both good and bad in every person,” he said. “Circumstances can make anyone do anything. Maybe the story is kind of merciful – that no one can really judge anyone.”

It is at least comforting that the politician considers Golding’s novel to also contain a good possibility, unlike some of his more nihilistic colleagues.

So great is the potency of cruelty that we cannot From Lord of the Flies in the future as well. A new film adaptation of the book has been in production for a few years now.

In it, the children shipwrecked on the island are girls. And without a doubt, new stories will emerge that reinforce the belief that young women are also capable of beastly behavior.

I personally try to avoid writing one.

While waiting for the movie, maybe we can focus on another Nobel writer, a Russian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to words.

One of his most famous lines goes something like this: “The battle line between good and evil runs through every human heart.”

Lord of the Flies (Otava, 1960) has been translated into Finnish by Juhana Perkki. The translator of Good History is Mari Janatuinen.