Rated 4.0 / 5 from 1 log on Katalog
Finished: A bunch of boys aged about 7-12 are stranded on a tropical island. While waiting for rescue, they assign roles and collaborate... until they don't. It's impossible not to relate it to basically every aspect of our society, it's on-the-nose allegory and I don't mind it at all, for example: on which basis do we choose leaders? Why do we seem to collectively not only tolerate, but willingly submit to authority of bullies and abusers? Why does violence so often prevail over reason? And why are the reasonable more harshly punished for mistakes? There is a terrifying part on groupthink (thin is the line between a community and a mob), mass hysteria and ease with which people can participate in collective violence, and subsequent collective amnesia. In Golding's own words, who wrote this debut at 43 (initially rejected and labelled "absurd, rubbish & dull... pointless"), after many years of teaching (philosophy and other subjects) and experiencing ww2 atrocities first-hand in the navy: "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable." I could now write an entire essay on this quote and why I am very much against the simplification of individualism = selfishness and collective = selflessness, and how dangerous it is to tie either to specific political systems, but maybe now's not the time. There is also a lot more, for example, on what a text accompanying my edition calls "a denial of freedom as source of perversion", the subconscious, dynamics eerily reminding of the Stanford experiment, despite written almost 20 years before it, colonialism and challenging the idea of British as "civilised society", which was the main reason he wrote the book in the first place. As simple as it may appear at first, (and it is, as in, it's not difficult to read), I do think it's important and relevant. ---------------------------------------------------- Started: Every time I think I should finish a book, I start another one, it’s like a curse. But there’s logic to it, each of the currently 4 or 5 books I’m reading has its place. This one, for example, I read on kindle as I’m falling asleep. My kindle has a convenient cover so I don’t need to hold it, and then I drift to sleep while endlessly re-reading a description of a jungle on a deserted island. It’s like hypnosis, it’s nice (for now)
