I recently finished listening to Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. I had read it many years ago (probably in high school) but remembered it always as a dark and violent picture of how bad anarchy is. I was not wrong. It is a violent tragedy.
Brief plot summary and spoiler: an undefined number of British schoolboys (ages 5 to 12) survive their plane crashing into a deserted island (resembling something in the South Pacific). Ralph, initially elected the leader, tries to organize them in building shelters and keeping a fire going to attract rescue, but most of the other boys don't want to do that and eventually leave to form a tribe of hunters. The resulting violent conflict ends when they are suddenly rescued.
In thinking about Ralph's efforts to form a society, I kept thinking of how the family is the basic unit of society. The collegial, democratic model sounds wonderful, but it will work only if there is an authority to set the rules, enforce them, and punish lawbreakers. In the book that was absent - the little ones were interested only in playing and eating, and the bigger ones felt no responsibility to help Ralph, and Ralph didn't try to punish anyone. Another model would have been to setup little family-like groups, with two older boys (like big brothers) sharing the responsibilities of caring for a small number of little ones. Perhaps the big brothers would have formed an attachment to their little brothers and worked to provide for them. Having two big brothers would enable them to share that work and the community work of tending the fire and hunting. (The way two parents share the work of child-rearing and income-earning?)
Ultimately, despite Ralph's attempts to create a social order, the boys' downfall is that, in some of them, the evil part of them (which exists in all of us, thanks to original sin) overcomes friendship and cooperation and leads to selfishness and pride and fear and jealousy and hate and senseless violence.
It becomes a world without rules, without authority; a world where everyone does what they want without considering the long-term consequences; a violent tragedy.
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Many years after reading this book, the violent images and storyline are still in my memory.
Recent medical research has found that as youth head into adolescence, the surge in hormones and brain remodeling that goes on is directly related to impaired judgment and maturity. So while this is going on, the older boys may or may not be struggling to remember traces of social order from their home lives. Further, due to the social ways of interacting with other males that they probably absorbed better, forming nuturing, family like units would be quite tough, especially with the less violent boys' prexisting need to protect themselves.
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