Inherited Violence in Lord of the Flies

Haunted Islands: What Lord of the Flies Really Teaches Us About Children and Violence

In the myths we tell about ourselves, childhood is sacred. We like to imagine children as blank slates—innocent until corrupted, pure until exposed to the dangers of the adult world. It is comforting to believe that evil is something that happens to children from the outside, not something that lives quietly inside them from the start. But Lord of the Flies tells a harder truth. Children are not blank. They are sponges. They absorb the nuance of the culture around them—its fears, its hierarchies, its hidden violence—regardless of our best intentions. They memorize the tone of the world they grow up in, often without even realizing it. History bears this out: from child soldiers conscripted into brutal wars, to the violent initiations of elite boarding schools, young people have often reenacted the cruelties they were taught to survive. What we call savagery is not a break from civilization. It is an inheritance.

Golding’s boys do not invent savagery on their island. They are remembering it. This is not a novel about boys descending into chaos. It is about boys replicating, in miniature, the broken structures of the adult world—not because they fully understand them, but because they have absorbed them into their bones. In the absence of what we might call an appropriate adult—a regulated, attuned, safe nervous system in human form—the boys do what orphaned systems always do: they perform care as control. They recreate hierarchy, punishment, and ritual because those are the only emotional blueprints they know. The island does not begin as a blank canvas. It begins as an echo of empire. Ralph is elected chief by a vote, the choirboys arrive in military formation under Jack’s command, the boys speak of rules, of councils, of conches—all relics of the British society that has sent them fleeing from a larger war. Even their first instincts are not wild but ceremonial. They do not invent the need for order and domination. They mimic it.

The deeper tragedy is that they are trying to survive by imitating the very world that abandoned them. Jack does not invent authoritarianism. He performs it, almost unconsciously, slipping into the rhythms of power he has seen modeled around him. He understands that in an orphaned system, safety is confused with submission. He offers protection through allegiance, rewards conformity, punishes dissent. Over time, his leadership mutates into something almost sacred—a cult of fear masked as a form of belonging. Jack becomes a false father—not a protector, but a colonizer, demanding that the boys surrender their freedom in exchange for safety that is never quite guaranteed. His power does not grow because it is new. It grows because it feels familiar.

Their language betrays the inheritance even before their actions do. They speak of chiefs, of rules, of punishments and enemies. They chant, "Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood." That is not instinct. That is ritual. It is not the language of animals. It is the language of empire, of conquest, of ceremony masked as survival. They are not losing civilization. They are reenacting it, distorted and exposed, without the polished disguises that adults wrap it in. They have regressed, but not into beasts. They have regressed into children’s versions of adults.

There are those among them who sense a different truth. Simon, the most intuitive, the most attuned to the emotional undercurrents running beneath the island’s fragile order, tries to name it. When the others speak of a beast lurking on the island, Simon says, “Maybe it’s only us.” It is the most important line in the book, the quiet, devastating insight that the monster is not something external stalking them through the trees. It is something they have carried with them all along, hidden in the codes and expectations of the world that raised them. But in orphaned systems, clarity is dangerous. Truth threatens the fragile arrangements built to manage fear. Simon is not eliminated because he is weak. He is eliminated because he sees too clearly. In communities built around unspoken fear, insight is punished as betrayal. Simon does not survive because the system cannot allow him to survive. Piggy, too, carries the quiet nervous system of conscience. He believes in fairness, in dialogue, in rational thought. For this, he is mocked, marginalized, finally silenced. The island systematically purges every possibility of regulation, every echo of an appropriate adult. It cannot hold a presence that does not dominate. It cannot tolerate a voice that does not control.

When rescue finally comes, it is not salvation. It is another ghost. A naval officer appears, starched and armed, expressing shock at the boys’ descent into savagery. But he himself is a servant of a world waging organized violence on a global scale. His uniform is no different from Jack’s war paint. His authority is just a larger, more formal version of Jack’s false rule. The boys have not betrayed civilization. They have mirrored it. They have fulfilled it. The island was not a break from their culture. It was a stage for its unmasked repetition.

Lord of the Flies is not a story about the loss of innocence. It is a story about the failure of inherited authority to protect the innocent. The boys are not evil. They are orphaned, structurally and spiritually. And orphaned systems do not drift naturally toward freedom. They cling to power, because they have never been taught how to hold grief. They have been shown that fear must be managed through domination. They have been taught that safety comes only through control. They have learned that the world is a place where someone must always be holding the whip.

This is why the appropriate adult matters—not the adult who dominates to feel powerful, but the one who can sit with fear without converting it into violence. The adult who can hold boundaries without demanding submission. The adult whose nervous system offers safety not as a prize for obedience, but as a birthright. Without this model, children inherit violence without knowing there was ever another choice. They do not question the blueprint. They build with it, faithfully, sometimes lovingly, always tragically.

The real tragedy of Lord of the Flies is not that the boys became monsters. It is that they never had a model for anything else. They were alone only in geography. Spiritually, structurally, they were surrounded. Every ritual they built, every punishment they delivered, every bloody chant that rose up into the island night was not a break from civilization. It was its natural consequence. They carried their fathers’ wars in their bones. When they built fires, when they raised spears, when they painted their faces and cried for blood, they were not inventing evil. They were remembering it. They were not empty. They were full of ghosts. The boys were never alone. They were haunted.