Friday, May 6, 2011

Lord of the Flies is About Fascism, Not Anarchy




Lately, I have been thinking about the Lord of the Flies. This is a well-known book, one widely read in schools across the country, and one whose themes and allegories are explored, or rather dictated. The narrative generally pushed is that the book, and Golding, take a view of human nature as malicious and entirely self-serving, a distinctly Hobbesian view, and that Ralph’s civilizing them was all that kept them together before they became savage. I cannot help but find the truth to be the opposite. What the plotline of the story shows is the destruction of a society based on democracy by a charismatic leader who establishes himself on dictator- it is not a storyline about the dangers that come from humanity losing civilization and ‘devolving into anarchy’, but the dangers of authority and hierarchy.
            When the boys arrive on the island, Ralph convinces the boys to form a democracy of sorts- granted, a representative one, which is hierarchal, but one where at least the leader is held accountable to the rest of the community. They work together communally to build shelter and fire. The charismatic and power-hungry Jack, however, seeking glory, leads his choirboys to become hunters- this is in essence the beginning of the division of labor. Jack’s division of labor and establishing official roles for various groups (his choirboys as hunters and fire tenders) is reminiscent of corporatism, the economic system of fascist state, while Jack’s system was effectively a democratic commune.
The leadership of Jack, the unelected charismatic boy quickly becoming a despot, leads to poor initial consequences. The boys miss a chance to be rescues because Jack and his friends have taken the elite role of hunting and tending the fire, but neglect their duties.
            Meanwhile, the little ones (an allegory for the little man?) begin to become increasingly afraid of an unproven danger. Jack, like any despotic leader, uses this ‘fear of the other’ to gain control. In a way similar to how nationalists use the threat of foreigners, religious fundamentalists use the threat of heathens, or Statists in general use the threat of ‘lawlessness’, Jack exploits the threat of the Beast to gain control and establish himself as master of the group. This is how the Stalinists gained control of the Russian Revolution (fear of the Capitalists), how the conservative faction of the political structure justified repression of leftist thought in the US (fear of the Stalinists), how certain religious fundamentalists gain control of populations in the developing world (fear of the US), and how the US justifies crackdown on civil rights (fear of the Jihadists). The fear of the other is a building block to any successful putsch for greater control, and Jack played it as expertly as Hitler playing the resentment, fear of Communism, anti-Semitism of the post-Versailles German populace to aid his rise to power.
            After the children mistakenly come to believe in the beasts’ existence by misidentifying dead soldiers, Jack is able to exploit the fear of the children to grant himself total dominance. He leads his new followers off to create their own tribe.
            Jack’s tribe takes on ‘animalistic’, ‘primitive’ customs such as face painting, but this is no allegory for their ‘descent’ from civilization. Rather, it is allegorical for their relying increasingly on emotion and less on rationalism- this is a trait not of ‘primitive’ cultures, but rather, more uniformly, of fascists. Emotional appeal is, like the fear of the other and Jack’s charisma, a key in establishing the type of power structure found in fascist, phalangist, or Nazi states. The face painting also serves as an in-group identity of sorts, a uniform that masks difference and diversity with a symbol of group identity.
            Simon, a character who seems to be representative of peace, goes off into the island to search for the beast himself- it is the gentle one who looks for the truth behind what everyone is afraid of. He seems to find it, in the answer that the fear of the other, the beast that Jack uses to scapegoat, is indeed a creation of the boys, and that the beast, the capacity for irrational fear, wild emotion, and hatred of the other, is within us. He tries to explain the truth behind the Beast to Jack’s followers, but, like raging nationalists too blinded with hatred of outsiders to think, they fall on him in a fury whipped up by their religious/tribal ceremony- much like a crowd at a Nazi Rally in a fit of nationalist fervor for their Fuhrer.
            Jack’s tribe then raids the more peaceful democratic tribe lead by Ralph, kills Piggy, tortures Sam and Eric, and seeks to kill Ralph. It is, in short, an expansion for resources followed by a purge of opposing groups. This, again, is not the nature of ‘anarchy’, that name that our own philosophers and leaders use so easily to instill the fear of the other into us, but the natural extension of hierarchal power structure.
            Those who interpret the book as a ‘descent into chaos’ when ‘law and order’ and no longer imposed on humanity make a series of mistakes. First, they associate society, community, and civilization with hierarchy. Incapable of imagining any way of living without rulers, elected or otherwise most readers have a worldview that is a dichotomy between the hierarchal, orderly, and peaceful society of humanity, and the anarchic, chaotic, and warlike barbarism of ‘savages’. They mistakenly believe that hierarchy maintains the ‘rule of law’, and have an image of hierarchal systems as static and orderly- they do not analyze the structure of hierarchy and see its reliance on fear, both of the other and of punishment for disobedience, nor do they note the drive of hierarchies to expand and consume.
            What is truly baffling, however, is that readers so often view the tribe of jack as a move away from governance, where the ‘savage human nature’ runs free and untamed. The reality is quite the contrary. While Jack does use emotion and his tribe moves away from rationalism, it is not in the direction of anarchy, but in the direction of authoritarianism, dictatorship, and a certain type of mystic, supercharged tribalism whose only best parallel in the real world is fascism. The democratic society the boys start with is not destroyed by their turning their backs on civilization and losing the rule of law, but by their being exploited by a manipulative and ambitious ruler who, in so many Machiavellian ways, becomes, by force of personality, the fuehrer of the boys. Yes, Jack’s tribe moves away from rationalism, but this does not mean a move away from governance. We shall find that the worst governments tend to be the ones based off of irrational hatred- it is the political zealot who seeks by force of government to make his worldview reality and to gain power for himself that is the death of freedom. It is authoritarianism, not anarchy, that kills democracy in this book.

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