Barbarians In Lord Of The Flies

To be barbaric or savage like, we as humans would have to lay aside our morals and our human side, in order to act like the boy’s in the book Lord of the Flies. However, there could be more than one cause as to why some people are barbarians. William Golding clearly expresses in his book Lord of the Flies that there are more factors that cause someone to act like a savage. He also emphasizes on the struggle with the boys on the island between being, savages, humane, and keeping order among all of the boys. As the story progresses, William Golding continued to show the reader the struggle between the humane side of a person and their barbarian side of them, when there is no structure and order held within a society. After reading William Goldings

The person administering the shocks was there to get four dollars in exchange for one hour of their time, and back in 1961 four dollars was quite a bit of money. Stanley Milgram placed a person in a white lab coat in the room to conduct the experiment, the test subject believed that the person in the white lab coat was of higher authority, and didn’t know what that person would do if they stopped doing the experiment. The test subject was placed under a stressful situation, which they thought what they were doing was right in order to keep the money, and to survive. Power of situation is strong, Stanley Milgram made them believe that they were in a serious enough situation they needed to abandon all logic and continue the experiment. Also the room the test subject was in was rather intimidating, “which [was] in worse shape than the sidewalk that led [them there], walls flaking, [and] naked pipes in a complex mesh-work on the ceiling” (Slater 32). However, Stanley Milgram’s test subjects mirror the actions of the boys on the Island in William Golding book by how the situation and environment are a key factor on how someone is going to act, and dictates the choices they are going to have to

Not every situation leads to a bad outcome, or cause someone to do something irrational, I see it all the time when someone is caught in a nasty situation, but they don’t let it get the best of them. In Lord of the Flies the character, Piggy is the prime example, he was the one who held onto his morals while on the island and he didn’t abandon reason in any situation. Piggy in extreme situations throughout the book always “bore… a sort of humble of patience” (Golding 10). He never let his savage side take control of him, like the other boys allowed. He was the one who used reason and logic to get through situations, but the other boys didn’t listen to Piggy because of the barbaric mindset, which was brought out in them through the environment, and situations they were thrown into. Another prime example would be in Lauren Slater’s book Opening Skinner’s Box, when she writes about David Rosenhan’s experiment on how he “decided to test how well psychiatrist were able to distinguish the “sane” from the “insane,” which he then devised a plan to go in an insane asylum and test the psychiatrist on their ability to diagnose people. He decided to throw himself and some of his friends into a place which would only allow them to use logic and reason to stay sane because the place they entered