Netflix’s splashy take on Lord of the Flies has renewed interest in the tale, which follows a group of British boys descending into savagery after getting stranded on a remote island. So let me repeat what the great psychologist Peter Gray always reminds us about that story: It is fiction.
We can’t use it as a reason to give kids less freedom because “this is what happens.” No, it isn’t.
In fact, as Gray points out, there’s a different story of six boys marooned on a tropical island in 1965. One key contrast: It actually happened—a little over ten years after Lord of the Flies was published. The kids weren’t found for 15 months. Did they kill each other and stick a pig head on a spike?
No. Not only did they build shelter and divvy up tasks, they went so far as to hold funerals for the birds they killed to eat.
So much for barbarism.
The “Tongan Castaways” had been buddies at a strict, Catholic boarding school. They were so bored that they devised a plan to run away—by boat. (Tonga is an island country in Polynesia.)
One night, they snuck off with some bananas, coconuts, and a small stove in a boat they stole from a fisherman they hated. After a storm destroyed their sail and rudder, they drifted for 8 days until they finally spied ‘Ata. The island had long been deserted after many of its inhabitants were captured as slaves in an 1863 raid.
Talk about actual savagery.
The boys found the remains of the island’s village and moved there. “The next step was to build a little house. I was the one who knew how to weave coconut fronds, and that’s what we walled the house with,” Sione Filipe Totau, one of the Tongan castaways, recounted to Vice. “Then we started organizing everything in a roster: how to keep the fire, how to say our prayers, along with taking care of the banana palms. We all worked together as though we’d live on the island for a long time.”
When one of them broke his leg, they even managed to set it. (He recovered.)
At last, they spotted a ship about a mile off shore and swam to it as fast as they could.
The first one to climb on board introduced himself and explained he was from Tonga. The ship’s captain, an Australian, wired ashore and 20 minutes later heard back: These were the boys who’d been missing and presumed dead! Funerals had been held.
And now they were heading home.
Their story was recently brought to life by Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind: A Hopeful History, which was excerpted in The Guardian. But you’ll notice the Tonga story has far less cultural currency than that of Lord of the Flies.
In part, that’s due to the obvious: High school students have been assigned William Golding’s novel for decades, making it one of the few literary references people across generations still share. But it also remains salient because it’s just so dramatic and devastating. And that stuff sells.
The current Netflix series was adapted for the screen by Jack Thorne, co-writer of the crime drama Adolescence, which was, in case it needs repeating, also fiction. Yes, it was inspired by some awful crimes in England, but not specifically one that was committed by a 13-year-old so deep in the manosphere that he killed a classmate he had a crush on.
Thorne’s twin soap operas about about the evildoings of kids left to their own devices—without enough supervision—may tempt adults to shake their heads and helicopter parent.
But far from rampaging, today’s kids are often sitting at home. A Harris survey of kids 8-12, the age of many of the Lord of the Flies boys, found the majority have “rarely” or “never” even walked around their own neighborhood without an adult.
Kill a pig? Kill each other? Fully 71 percent say they’ve never used a sharp knife.
If only there were some way to dramatize their story—a story of dysfunction driven by our distrust of them, their abilities, and their common sense. How demoralizing to grow up so infantilized. Child and adolescent mental health problems have been going up over the decades that their independence has been going down, replaced by adult-run, adult-supervised activities.
That fact is unfortunately not fiction. But it isn’t dramatic either. It is not dripping with blood. You can’t stick it on a pole.
So instead we just keep perseverating on how badly kids behave when they’re not in travel soccer. Then we round them up and pile them in the Tahoe, off to what passes for adventure.
