Kids Killing Each Other, Power, Fear, Fantasy, and Lies

All those stupid lies we keep believing.

22 August 2026

For some godforsaken reason I’ve been on a bit of a prepubescent violence bender recently. Why I am reading fiction at the moment is beyond me; my rather obsessive personality tendencies usually mean that all my mental faculties are completely gobbled up the moment I find something rather compelling. Which isn’t great when you’re at a pivotal moment in your career, wading through a prolonged intellectual pilgrimage culminating with the gift of a get-well-soon card and a lottery ticket, which most call a PhD. But here we are. Lord of the Flies — the William Golding book and the recent BBC adaptationWhich was really good if you don’t have the attention span of a gnat and the sensitivity of a dead fish — although I have spoken to rare individuals who didn’t like it for a litany of very well reasoned causes. — as well as the Sci-Fi classic Ender’s Game, which is about genius twelve-year-olds trying to kill each other in the showers, among other less important things. In space, it’s all very Sparta apparently. Some things never change, perhaps? Supposedly, violent tendencies in human nature start quite young…? Yeah or nah?

I agree. As a former twelve year old boyAdmittedly I was rather sheltered, but I was also neither naïve nor unobservant. and as a twenty five year old (still boy FYI) at present, the boon of wisdom my old bones grant me provides no reason to think otherwise. I do also understand wanting to believe that people, children especially, are good and kind-hearted as the factory defaults. In fact, I do (mostly) believe that. I just don’t believe that it overrides all the other stuff that we are. Good and bad aren’t mutually exclusive, and I’m not even sure that they can exist without one another.

Regardless, I keep seeing comments here and there rejecting the thesis of Lord of the Flies, citing a rather similar situation that took place around Tonga, complete with an island and a group of boys. This true tale is often cited as a refutation of Lord of the Flies’ supposedly misanthropic depiction of human nature. See? In reality we get along — lord of the flies is just the result of a sick and twisted imagination. While I take issue with the way that the term savagery is haphazardly thrown around here,Word police lefty alert! Sue me. I do think that the essence of what the story reveals is a bit more potent and harder to fit into one word: our stupid human motivations and the lies we tell ourselves organically and inexorably mutate into something monstrous when nurtured within a power vacuum. People who ‘smell opportunity’ in such scenarios must have a poor sense of smell; fear, pain, envy, pride, and hunger all have such a strong stench that you can taste the smell right where your tongue stops and throat begins. To sense opportunity among the muck of all that is a sign of either callous hate or wilful ignorance. In terms of ‘savagery,’ the things that people do in service of the motivations coaxed out are what I will happily characterise as savage — irrational and remorseless.

But I digress; if someone were to read even just the Wikipedia page about the Tongan castaways themselves, it becomes self-evident that, while the two situations are cosmetically similar, perhaps even aesthetically similar if you were to paint a rather viscerally dire situation in a soft, hazy, romantic light, the circumstances that matter are very fucking different.“Tongan castaways,” Wikipedia, July 27, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways. So:

tropical island, check;
all boys because violence or something, check;
story of survival, check.

Of course, the Tongan castaways survived and managed to do so without squishing some poor kid with a boulder. It’s really awesome that they managed to get through that situation, but I don’t feel the need to congratulate them on not killing each other, because that was never really on the cards. You see, all of the Tongan boys were escaping the Anglican boarding school they were in, using a stolen boat. A real call-to-adventure right there — sounds like the start of a novella. All of the boys had planned to escape together beforehand — which is how they ended up washed up on an abandoned island. Another important deviation is that there were only five of them. The Lord of the Flies thesis is basically null here, because the story’s most important ideas — which are about people and how we see and organise ourselves in groups — are a non-starter. Doing murders was a non-starter. And I don’t know who needs to hear this, but in almost every situation out there, doing murders is also a non-starter. In Lord of the Flies, there are factions; the boys don’t know each other well; there are differences in culture, levels of maturity, etc. I imagine that if they all knew each other, got along well, and had more know-how, then the story would be much more boring. The circumstances crafted for Lord of the Flies are like a sourdough starter for baking a loaf of blood and cracked skulls. The author was making quite a specific statement about the variables, and the phenomena described in the allegory simply don’t manifest.

The vilification of authors writing serious, dark texts as nasty little critters with filthy little imaginations is an unfortunate quirk of human psychology that cuts away at the importance of such literature if lent too much credence. Much more lurid examples with more transparent motivations are some of the responses to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. A truly distressing affair, The Handmaid’s Tale is something that everyone should find terrifying, because its grounding in reality is artfully joined with a harrowing, harsh world. Gracefully parrying the accusation of having a nasty imagination, Atwood directly draws upon historical events, attitudes, and the like to construct the world and narrative; she has precedent.Simply observing the current character of the United States should lend further credibility to her worldbuilding. The real, historical world is a nasty, grim shitstorm. Sometimes. Not all the time, but neither good nor bad is the default setting for people. It is a much more convincing depiction than in Lord of the Flies; the supporting argument for its thesis is robust and rather visceral. Yet, there are some who reject the premise that we, as a collective of social primates, could do such a thing! An opinion strongly held despite the evidence.

A stark contrast in setting, Ender’s Game is a space opera, set in a world far away from Lord of the Flies and The Handmaid’s Tale: quasi-Spartan zero-gravity child soldiers, hiveminds, fleets of spaceships, a distant future where the world is connected by the nets (a wonderful 1985 envisioning of the internet), the Warsaw Pact 2.0, genius children, Spanish honour, and a truly important geopolitical tension: the French refusing to teach English before French in their education system. It’s not going to land in the same way that Lord of the Flies, The Handmaid’s Tale, and so on do. Fascinatingly, I think that the distance between the reader and the reality is what makes us able to feel it so strongly, but not have an emotional hangover that spills into how we see the world around us afterwards. An example of the opposite side of the distancing-realism counterpoint is the work of Sarah Kane. Kane’s plays — specifically Blasted — induce a similar response, despite taking a much more expressionist, non-literal approach to constructing a world and narrative — perhaps because the play conveys the sense of a shattered and desecrated internal world. Perhaps because everything that happens in the narrative is just fucking vile — “a disgusting feast of filth.”Jack Tinker, Daily Mail, 1995; I decided that this was going to be my chosen extra text for high school Extension 1 English, but couldn’t stomach writing about it. Which is a shame because it would have been an excellent text in terms of demonstrating knowledge. It’s a truly harrowing depiction of strife, warfare, exploitation, and a particularly sickening indulgence in the weakness of those tied up in that maelstrom. But ultimately it’s an allegory, and the surreal nature of the play keeps it at a fuzzy distance. It’s just a bit too weird to carry away with you in a grounded sense. Too abstract. You get left with a very bad, bitter taste, but it doesn’t linger too long, except in the form of a poignant aesthetic experience. It isn’t an existential threat to one’s own psychological tolerance or limits.

When terrible, horrific things become real, when it becomes a bit familiar, too close to home, we just don’t want to think about it. Psychologically, I would argue that we have a tendency to bury our heads in the sand. Which is just so deeply ironic to me, because the denialism is the very same psychological mechanism that stokes the decrepit flames we’re so eager to wish away. This tendency is a psychological mechanism intrinsic to the emergence of social regimes of terror, pried open and abused by domineering, anti-social personalities. Strive for the best, but don’t be foolish. Think, don’t wish. Don’t seek half-assed feel-good answers (by which, of course, I am referencing the ‘real Lord of the Flies’ farce that irritated me in the first place). Because, sometimes, kids kill each other — something about access to firearms and education.