Civilization, Myth, and Savagery: Reading Lord of the Flies

After reading Lord of the Flies, it’s tempting to accept William Golding’s grim hypothesis — that without the rules of civilization, children (and by extension, humans) descend into savagery. The novel unsettles precisely because it pokes at a myth Western societies have long told themselves: that schooling and tradition civilize us.

Golding’s Background

Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, and commentators never fail to note how profoundly he was shaped by war. He had served as a naval officer in World War II, witnessing the D-Day landings and the horrific destructiveness of modern conflict. These experiences stripped him of youthful optimism about human goodness.

Seen in that light, Lord of the Flies is a multi-faceted allegory:

• A political allegory, dramatizing the fragility of democracy.
• A psychological allegory, mapping Freudian drives (id, ego, superego) onto its characters.
• A religious allegory, with Simon’s Christ-like martyrdom.
• And most centrally, an allegory of war itself — showing how quickly human beings turn to violence when stripped of external order.

Golding was also, in many ways, offering a fictional argument in line with Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), which famously argued that in the “state of nature” life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The Eton–Waterloo Myth

Take the famous line:

“The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”

Supposedly uttered by the Duke of Wellington (though almost certainly apocryphal), it became shorthand for the idea that elite British schools instilled discipline, teamwork, and leadership through games.

This was myth-making at its finest:

• False cause fallacy – Wars are won by logistics, strategy, and manpower, not cricket.
• Exclusivity bias – Most soldiers at Waterloo weren’t Etonians; the victory was collective, not aristocratic.
• Propaganda – The line justified elite dominance by pretending privilege produced virtue.

In short, the “playing fields” weren’t about education; they were about producing obedient officers and administrators. Schools functioned less like centers of learning, more like factories of hierarchy.

Golding’s Rebuttal

Golding’s boys are straight out of that British school culture. If the Eton myth were true, they should have embodied resilience and teamwork. Instead, stripped of adult authority, the structure collapses: rivalry, fear, and violence take over.

Lord of the Flies reads like a direct contradiction of the Waterloo slogan. Where the myth glorifies discipline and leadership, Golding reveals how thin that veneer really is. The training doesn’t hold; savagery lurks beneath.

Golding’s argument is more than narrative pessimism — it’s a literary counterattack against a cherished national story. The “playing fields” didn’t save Europe from tyranny; they masked the same impulses that fueled fascism and war.

The Tongan Counterexample

Critics often point to the 1965 case of six Tongan boys, aged 13–16, who survived over a year on a deserted island. Unlike Golding’s children, they cooperated — building gardens, sharing food, and caring for the injured until rescue.

At first glance, this real-world story undermines Golding’s thesis. Yet comparing the two is a false equivalence:

• Golding’s boys were younger, strangers, and written as products of a competitive, individualistic culture.
• The Tongans were older, already friends, and grounded in collectivist Polynesian values.
• Different ages, different cultures, different contexts.

The Tongans show that cooperation is possible — but it’s shaped by culture and bonds of trust. Golding wasn’t denying cooperation exists; he was warning how easily fragile social systems can unravel when they lack those supports.

This aligns with more optimistic views of humanity, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea that humans are born good and corrupted by society — and with modern works like Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History (2020), which argues that cooperation is our default instinct.

Schools as Factories

Put together, these stories highlight the real role of schools in the industrial and imperial age. They were less about nurturing curiosity and more about producing soldiers, workers, and administrators. Bells, uniforms, rigid schedules — all echoes of the factory floor.

The Eton myth celebrates this as a virtue. Golding exposes its fragility. The Tongans remind us that cooperation and resilience can emerge — but only where culture and relationships make it possible.

In a sense, Golding was writing not just against the Eton myth, but against the very assumption that discipline alone equals civilization. He suggests instead that civilization is precarious, requiring constant moral choice, not just training.

Modern psychology reinforces this point. The infamous Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) by Philip Zimbardo showed how quickly ordinary people can adopt cruelty when authority structures collapse or shift. Like Golding’s novel, it suggested that savagery is never far below the surface.

Conclusion

Golding’s pessimism wasn’t universal, but it was pointed: the stories elites tell about civilization are often myths designed to preserve power. Whether through slogans like “Waterloo was won at Eton” or the sanitized image of schooling, the underlying assumption is the same — discipline equals virtue.

Lord of the Flies forces us to ask:

What happens when those myths are stripped away?

What happens when humans devolve?

Golding leaves us with a haunting possibility: without culture, compassion, and constant vigilance, civilization is only a mask.

Can humanity rise above savagery at its most desperate times?