Opinion Editorial February, 2025: Lords of the Flies
I find it interesting that in his 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, William Golding borrowed the name of one of his central characters, Piggy. The character represents the rational, fact-based approach to problems. If the novel were written today, it might be a stretch to believe that any young boy would be capable of that approach. In a contemporary rewrite, the beast would perhaps become the deep state. But even with access to social media, the boys would still be unsure whether it were real. After all, as we learned last month, fact checking social media content is too difficult.
One theme in Lord of the Flies is an examination of the means by which individuals become leaders. A second is how those leaders can abuse the power they derive from their position. Although the titular character is a pig's head, I prefer to think of Ralph and Jack as being the lords of the flies.
If the novel were written today, then, we all know who the lords of the flies would represent. They would be today's crop of oligarchs, plutocrats and autocrats.
One of Golding's main motivations was his questioning of the assumed moral superiority of British colonizers over indigenous peoples. Given that, it is no coincidence that a key theme is the boys' progressive descendancy into the kinds of behavior stereotypically associated with indigenous people. When the descendants of those colonizers challenged the citizenship of the indigenous peoples' descendants in the United States last month, we knew that Golding was right to question his childhood brainwashing.
Seventeen years after the novel's publication, social psychologist Philip Zimbardo attempted the Stanford Prison Experiment. I use the word "attempted" because it was in fact a study (not a real experiment), it was procedurally flawed and it was abandoned before running its intended course. However, Zimbardo did observe instances of his "prison guard" subjects behaving similarly to Golding's boys after they were told they had power.
Piggy's character also represents weakness. Twenty-five years after the novel's publication, comparative psychologists Baldwin and Meese published a seminal paper after they had tested (in a real experiment) the assumed weakness of small pigs against the assumed strength of large pigs. It did not take long for small pigs to find large pigs' weakness and to devise a strategy to counter it: They simply withdrew their cooperation in obtaining food. They exploited the large pigs' weakness to their advantage and thereby refused to be dominated.
That strategy is the same one that Novak Djokovic used at the Australian Open tennis tournament last month. After he felt that the local TV broadcaster had insulted him and his fans, he simply withdrew his cooperation in being interviewed by them. It immediately won him an apology. It is also the same strategy that DeepSeek used last month — undermine the assumed strength of artificial intelligence leaders and exploit it as a weakness to wrest power from them.
I photographed these pigeons recently after observing their behavior from the perspective of a comparative psychologist. They appeared to understand that neither would win the battle for food if each tried to dominate the other. So, they cooperated instead with each taking its turn to eat and then relinquishing to the other.
Some indigenous cultures have worshipped serpents and some have feared them. On balance, though, in folklore, art and literature, snakes are portrayed negatively. Although we are now officially in the year of the snake, we have been unofficially in the years of the snakes for a very long time.
Golding uses a conch to represent democracy and in the end the boys destroy it. Certainly, democracy is being destroyed around the world today. Perhaps we should not adhere to Chinese zodiac tradition to delay major life decisions for another year. Perhaps, instead, we should find the weaknesses of the oligarchs, plutocrats and autocrats, turn them to our advantage and refuse to be dominated. Otherwise, they may take democracy, our planet and all those born in this year of the snake into oblivion with them.
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