Why BBC Lord Of The Flies myth about human barbarity is so wrong

However, the mood of congratulation around this latest dramatisation was briefly punctured this week, when 2025 Reith lecturer Rutger Bregman took to social media to utter a small bat-squeak of protest.

Bregman, you see, believes that Golding’s book – while powerfully written – promotes a false view of human nature, not corroborated by real-life incidents of the kind portrayed in the story. He also thinks there is far too much of this kind of negativity about human nature around – indeed his book Humankind is dedicated to debunking many of our favourite myths and beliefs about how awful human beings are.

And this matters because entrenched views about human nature underpin almost all political ideologies – including those of people who claim that they have no ideology at all, and merely accept current orthodoxy as “common sense”.

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What that “common sense” has often told us, over the last half century, is that human beings are primarily a competitive and selfish, rather than a co-operative and altruistic, species; that those who pretend to any other motives are hypocrites; and that we should therefore trust no one, and adopt a stance of rugged individualism founded on the idea that we can survive entirely by our own will and effort, and by “looking out for number one”.

Yet all of this is nonsense, and a philosophy of fools; and here’s why. In the first place, it is nasty and life-denying in itself; it invites people to close their hearts and minds to others, to learn nothing, feel little, and live in a tedious mental cul de sac, both intellectually and emotionally.

Secondly, it is deeply anti-democratic. It dismisses most people as worthless, probably unworthy of the vote, and therefore opens its adherents to all the time-dishonoured “strong man” arguments for top-down authoritarian government.

It is, likewise, intrinsically discriminatory, in seriously ugly ways. Even the most entrenched would-be believers in the general foulness of humanity will tend to make exceptions for themselves and their nearest and dearest; of course ‘we’ are not like that, they will say, although everyone else is.

The whole belief-system, in other words, is an open invitation to the worst kinds of splitting and ‘othering’ and, for example, to the foul language used by the British far-right about small-boat migrants, stereotyping them all as “criminals”, and generally ascribing to them greedy and nefarious motives which often sound more like projections than credible accusations.

And this brings us to the final aspect of this negative attitude to humanity and its potential; which is its profound and incapacitating divisiveness, at every level. At one level, it’s a belief system that promotes toxic individualism that can and does contribute to a growing mental health crisis, and also, far from incidentally, serves the interest of those social media billionaires whose profits depend on maximising our solitary screen time at the expense of real-life social interactions.

And at the societal level, it not only makes it easy to sow division between groups and communities, but tends, over time, to undermine all of the collective institutions and endeavours that make up the stuff of human civilisation, from the basic provision of water and sewage services, to libraries, and universities. Most serious economists understand that social trust is a form of capital, and that a willingness to invest in collective goods for the benefit of all is a key driver of long-term economic growth.

It follows that by embracing beliefs about human nature which undermine that trust, and diminish our willingness to act collectively to enhance our common life, we eventually impoverish ourselves, not only intellectually and emotionally, but also in the most practical economic terms.

And now, even more seriously, we have reached a stage in history where our very survival as a species may depend on our positive belief in ourselves, and our ability to think, invent and co-operate our way towards a more sustainable future.

Negative, reductive, divisive or hopeless views of humanity are profoundly disempowering when it comes to tackling the huge issues of war and peace, security, environmental breakdown, and human suffering we now face; and the indispensable first step to escaping our sense of powerlessness in the face of those horrors, is to therefore to ditch those views, once and for all.

So the next time some miserable character invites you to dismiss humankind as a busted flush, or to direct your hostility at some vulnerable group, or to assume that everyone around you is a thief or a grifter not to be trusted, press a pause button before agreeing. That the dark side of human nature exists is not in question; it is currently on display across the planet, in some of its most cruel, flagrant and disgusting forms.

The idea, though, that such horrors are dominant in our history, and must triumph, is simply a lie; history demonstrates its falsehood, as does every truly joyful achievement of humanity, from the founding of the NHS to the invention of free-form jazz, and every other kind of creative endeavour.

It is beyond time, in other words, to leave behind this age of self-disgust and self-flagellation, and to begin to build trust and hope wherever we can, in however small a way. And above all, it’s time to stop listening to the siren voices of those whose power depends on our division and fragmentation, and on the belief that we will never learn, or will collectively forget, just how much our remarkable species can achieve, when we finally decide to act together, for good.