With the 2020s halfway over, the past seems painful yet tangible, the present chaotic, and the future… well, perhaps just an exercise in retaining the core of humanity’s soul in a world increasingly like that of Lord of the Flies. For many, emotional trauma seems to be life’s painful act of branding — hollowing out or ending lives long before the nursing home. Xbox and TikTok satisfy the loneliness that nostalgia cannot cure, while another brutal school shooting becomes just another headline.
Traumatic experiences tend to leave no physical scars, even though many of us would gladly trade temporary physical pain for a lifetime of mental anguish. Sometimes, turning to the past provides us with that much-needed blueprint for where it all went wrong, and artists like William Golding (1911-1993) were sounding alarms about today’s groupthink barbarism decades ago. While it is easy to dismiss 1954’s Lord of the Flies as tame today, how this story torched UK innocence in the immediate aftermath of British imperialism still echoes.
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Golding’s Island Despises Order and Chaos in Equal Measure
Lord of the Flies wants to decimate order in favor of chaos, and its island setting, far from Britain’s Royal Coat of Arms, allows one-half of Golding’s youth to indulge their bloodlust freely. The other side, the civil group, wants to maintain the status quo, even though Ralph sometimes enjoys the thrill of Jack’s primal urges. Ralph and Piggy cling to the ideals of law and civility, while Jack’s tribe gives itself to bloodlust and pleasure.
Through a post-colonial lens, the novel’s central struggle reveals more profound anxieties about empire, and Golding’s final statements on colonialism, while enlightening, are not without their problems. As Stefan Hawlin notes, Golding’s narrative at times leans into the old empire mythos, restating “the misrepresentations of white enlightenment and black savagery.”
Yet Lord of the Flies resists being pinned down as a simple endorsement of imperial thinking. Despite some objectionable language, particularly racial slurs voiced by the characters, the novel offers a far more critical look at British superiority than authors like Kipling ever dared. Golding’s cast — entirely white, largely middle-class — unravels into barbarity not because of outside forces, but because of instincts buried deep within their so-called “civilized” psyches. In this way, Golding prefigures a postmodern understanding of identity: even the “purest” societies harbor the seeds of their undoing.
The island itself becomes a fractured society, with Ralph’s group fighting to make British order great again, while Jack’s tribe openly embraces power, dominance, and a will to conquer. Through Ralph’s eyes, Jack’s descent into savagery feels monstrous — a mirror of how colonial Britain once justified conquest by portraying indigenous peoples as irredeemably Other. This framing becomes especially complicated from a post-colonial perspective: are Jack’s tribe and their violence meant to represent the colonized as savages? Or does Lord of the Flies show how easily the so-called civilized fall into the same brutal instincts they once projected onto others?
As Golding suggests, the answer may lie somewhere in the uncomfortable gray. Ralph and Piggy’s tribe fights to impose their vision of order—a vision rooted in the same mode of thinking that once fueled imperial conquest. Jack’s chaotic and bloody rebellion reflects both the resentment of the colonized and the violent birth of new orders.
Ultimately, Lord of the Flies forces readers to reckon with the uncomfortable idea that civilization is not an antidote to savagery. It is merely another mask we are all too quick to apply — one that prefers to neuter our darkest impulses with the quickest dopamine hit available on the road to hypocrisy.
Ralph vs. Jack
Golding’s island quickly becomes more than just a setting — it’s a stand-in for British society, stripped of adult supervision but not of its values. As the boys split into two competing tribes, their motivations mirror a deeper struggle between inherited order and untamed instinct. Ralph and Piggy’s group, self-appointed stewards of civility, aim to preserve the rules of home: fire, shelter, and discourse.
That civility, however, comes with baggage. Their mission to contain Jack’s tribe — to rein in what they see as chaos — echoes Britain’s historical justification for empire: the idea that conquest was necessary to impose order on those deemed less civilized.
Ralph’s tribe, while often cast as the protagonists, begins to “other” Jack’s group in much the same way imperial Britain othered the people it colonized. If Jack and his tribe are framed as savages, what does that imply about the real-world victims of empire?
Still, the roles aren’t fixed. With his hunger for control, Jack becomes Lord of the Flies’ clearest symbol of aggression. His descent into violence, culminating in the murder of Piggy (democracy), draws a chilling parallel to how colonizing powers, including Britain, silenced indigenous leaders across Africa and beyond.
In this light, Jack isn’t just the villain. He becomes the embodiment of empire itself, the proverbial rot behind the crowns, thrones, and scepters. Therefore, Ralph and his tribe are, ironically, the colonized—forced into hiding, stripped of power, and hunted.
The boys’ descent also lays bare a more primal theme: the struggle for superiority. This isn’t just about who gets to speak at the conch circle. It’s about whose worldview survives. Ralph believes in his group’s moral high ground: fire, order, responsibility. Jack believes in dominance and the pleasure of rule. Both claim legitimacy, and both seek to impose their will.
In this sense, the island becomes a microcosm for global power struggles, where neither side is entirely innocent, and not everyone wants to pick a side. Some of the boys, like those mocked or ignored by Jack’s tribe, simply want to survive the madness without taking part; they serve as a quiet echo of the many civilians caught between empires, with no voice in the violence surrounding them.
Hero Worship Disintegration
Jack’s tribe doesn’t just reject civilization; they embrace the raw pleasure of power. Their authority isn’t built on justice or reason but on the thrill of domination, no matter the pain they inflict. Ralph, by contrast, sees his group as morally superior because they resist these primal urges. Yet Golding complicates that binary. Ralph’s insistence on order mirrors the imperial logic the British once used to justify their colonial conquests. He isn’t just trying to maintain civilization; he’s enforcing a narrow definition that excludes any alternative worldview.
Even Piggy, the symbol of reason and rationality, operates within this framework. He and Ralph represent a kind of well-meaning imperialism: the belief that their version of order is the only right one. Naturally, Jack resents it. His tribe pushes back, not just against the rules but against the worldview those rules uphold. Golding exposes the resentment that festers when one group tries to impose its cultural vision on another, a resentment deeply familiar to anyone on the receiving end of empire or cult of personality.
Jack’s descent into brutality also taps into something deeper than rebellion. He channels instincts that civilizations have always wrestled with: the enjoyment of destruction. These impulses may be disturbing, but they’re also part of what shaped empires in the first place. Golding seems to warn that even Britain, fresh from its stand against fascism in World War II, wasn’t immune to these drives. As scholar Stefan Hawlin notes, the novel quietly explores how easily the roles of liberator and oppressor can flip.
Ultimately, Lord of the Flies offers no clear heroes. Ralph and Piggy stand for logic and law, but their moral certainty veers toward cultural supremacy. Jack’s tribe indulges in chaos, but their rebellion also rejects domination. The result is a society split not just by power, but by vision: one side demanding order, the other demanding freedom, however brutal, and let the chips fall where they may. In that clash, Golding gives us a haunting allegory for the long, uneasy legacy of empire… trauma begetting trauma.
Desert Islands (Discord Servers)
The gnawing pit in the center of the stomach during grief doesn’t always correspond to death, as many survivors of emotional and even physical trauma can lay claim to. Instead, that hollowed-out feeling can also accompany the loss of innocence.
Survivors of traumatic experiences during adolescence have both a curse and a blessing to battle as they drift through life’s bittersweet corridors. Youth trauma plays out every minute of the day across every society in the world, just as it did for Golding’s stranded boys, and the young victims of empire forced to shift their cultures and identities. The real terror in Lord of the Flies isn’t that civilization breaks down: it’s that the tools of empire (dominance, ideology, forced conformity) remain alive and well, even in children.
Golding may not have named post-colonialism, but his story captures its haunted outline: the internal war between who we are and what power tells us we should be. That war hasn’t ended. It just keeps changing form. Ralph, Jack, and the other survivors have a long road of emotional conflict ahead, made more unfortunate by an era that preferred such feelings to be bottled.
As the decades coalesced into the AI-driven wasteland of the collective solitude we have today, arson, spears, and violence have shifted to the numbing artifice of remote self-absorption. Today’s youth carry the scars of a different type of conquest: the enslavement of the soul for the contemporaneous gain of those in power.
Yes, We Still Need Allegories
Commenting on the mostly panned 1990 remake of the original 1963 film version of Lord of the Flies, Roger Ebert said, “At the time of its publication (1954) attempts were made to find political messages in it, but today it seems more like a sad prophecy of what is happening in neighborhoods ruled by drugs. What week goes by without another story of a Ralph gunned down by a Jack?” That assessment may be a bit harsh, as it can be said that Golding’s boys were a parable for liberalism vs. commerce long before drugs destroyed untapped potential.
What lingers most in Lord of the Flies isn’t just its commentary on empire or ideology; it’s the raw emotional wreckage left behind. Golding wasn’t only writing about civilization or conquest in a tidy parable; he was writing about children forced to navigate terror, alienation, and loss without the scaffolding of adult protection. The violence between Jack and Ralph’s tribes is just as much psychological as it is physical, a brutal initiation into trauma that strips away identity and lets the primordial ego and pleasure principle run amok.
That’s why Lord of the Flies still resonates. In an age when young people face constant pressure to conform, perform, and pick sides — whether online or in real-world social hierarchies — the breakdown on Golding’s Island feels painfully familiar. The fear of being cast out, the seduction of belonging at any cost, the ease with which violence becomes a form of power — these aren’t relics of colonial history. They’re part of the emotional architecture that today’s young people still must navigate.
By the time the rescue arrives, there’s little left to save. The boys aren’t who they were, and they can’t go back, much like the youth destroyed by the grinding arches of the bloodthirsty British Crown (the primal ego that only wants to protect the status quo).
That’s the true heartbreak at the center of Lord of the Flies: not just what civilization lost, but what childhoods across numerous cultures never had a chance to hold on to.