James Wang
English 2 Advanced, per. 1
Hollison
31 October 2015
Innate Evil Nature of Society In the novel Lord of the Flies, author William Golding provides incisive insight to human behavior through allegorizing a microcosm that lacks an authoritative figure. On a deserted island filled with British schoolboys, the boys attempt to recreate the society they left behind after escaping a world war through establishing authority by electing a leader, Ralph. However, the antagonist, Jack, naturally wants power through an undignified manner and slowly allures the other boys to join his clan, where they are devolved into savages. The deterioration of the boys’ mentalities emulates Hobbes’s Enlightenment ideas that man is born cruel and selfish, and needs an absolute monarch. This conceptualizes Golding’s views that humans are inherently evil, which manifests the formation of a fragile society because the innate evil of mankind blockades themselves from creating a principled society, depicted through the barbaric characterization of the boys. On the island, the boys are first successful at establishing an organized authority…show more content… In the New York Times article “Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police”, Martin Gansberg chronicles the tragic death of a woman who was stabbed by a man three times but could have been saved by numerous witnesses. However, the witnesses did not want to help because they “didn’t want to get involved” and it was “difficult to see the street” (Gansberg par. 29) in the night. Though each witness did not commit a crime, they do reveal their selfish and inherent evil characteristics through looking at the problem in a group mentality, assuming that others will call for help. These selfish characteristics of mankind have scarred humanity, and are the bane to the evil present in