The presumption that groups deprived of authority descend into cruelty.
Golding's 1954 novel is fiction, and is widely treated as evidence. Six Tongan boys stranded on 'Ata from 1965 to 1966 cooperated, built a garden and kept a fire alight for fifteen months.
In practice
- A planner designing for a long power cut assumes looting and budgets for security; the neighbourhood spends the evening knocking on the doors of the elderly.
- A company drafting its remote-work policy assumes nobody works unwatched, installs monitoring, and has its first resignation within a fortnight.
- Standing
- Fiction widely treated as evidence; documented real cases of stranded groups, notably the 1965 Tongan castaways, went the other way.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change