ThE MESSENGER - Franco-American School of New York

6
The Beast Lies Within
By Maddie King
“The Afternoon wore on, hazy
and dreadfu(…; the sow staggered her way
ahead of them, bleeding and mad, and the
hunters followed, wedded to her in lust,
excited by the long chase and the dropped
blood.…. They were just behind her when
she staggered into an open space where …
butterflies danced round each other and the
air was… still. Here, struck down by the
heat, the sow fell and the hunters hurled
themselves at her.…Then Jack found the
throat and the hot blood sprouted over his
hands. The sow collapsed under them. At
last the immediacy of the kill subsided. The
boys drew back, and Jack stood, holding
out his hands.
“Look”
He giggled and flicked them while
the boys laughed at his reeking palms.(…)
Roger began to withdraw his spear (…).
Robert stabilized the thing in a phrase that
was received uproariously.
“Right up her ass!”
(…)
This time Robert and Maurice
acted the two parts; and Maurice’s acting
of the pig’s efforts to avoid the advancing
spear was so funny that the boys cried with
laughter.(…) The butterflies still danced,
preoccupied in the center of the clearing.”
--Lord of the Flies
For a bunch of twelve-year-old kids, the
behavior shown in this passage from
Lord of the Flies is not only unexpected,
but frighteningly eerie. Set during
World War II, the book recounts the
strange evolution of a group of young
British boys after their plane crashes
onto an uncharted island. While, in the
beginning, the boys, aged 6-12, continue
to act with a “civilized” conscience
and sense of responsibility, they soon
embrace a life of savagery.
This conduct can be viewed in
two different ways: either as a mental
regression into a more primitive state,
or the emergence of evil from the very
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depth of the human nature.
It could even be a correlation
of both. The author’s
autobiography suggests that
violent tendencies as a teenager
was one of the greatest
elements that inspired him
to write the book. The time
period is no coincidence either.
In his memoir, William
Golding, the author,
admits: “World War II was
the turning point for me.
I began to see what people
were capable of doing. Anyone
who moved through
those years without understanding
that man produces
evil as a bee produces honey must have
been blind or wrong in the head.” Some
suggest that the book is actually an allegory
of the war: the boys start out as
friends, brothers, even, yet are divided
once some are unwilling to submit to
those who are by that time insane with
power and barbarism.
Many psychological tests were
made in the second half of the century
concerning this type of radical behavior
change. In 1971, Philip Zimbardo
conducted his famous Stanford prison
experiment. The procedure’s goal was
to study the psychological reaction of
seventy-five perfectly normal men when
given the role of either a prison guard or
a prisoner.
The results were shocking. After
only two days, the prison guards started
to psychologically and physically abuse
the prisoners. Various forms of humiliation
were handed out as punishment for
bad behavior while the obedient were
rewarded with better cells, meals and
supplies. Six days in, the experiment
shut down. The men’s reactions were
even more extreme than Zimbardo had
predicted: many of the guards seemed to
have developed true sadistic tendencies,
and the prisoners were, of course, traumatized,
and grew to internalize their
prisoner role as a result. One prisoner
even had to be removed from the mock
prison after 36 hours on account of violent
crying, bouts of anger and screaming.
In the end, Zimbardo concluded
that the participants’ behaviors were
more due to the intense situation rather
than their individual personalities. He
even wrote a book entitled The Lucifer
Effect, which questions whether we can
ever be sure we are inherently good.
Numerous critics challenged
Zimabardo’s verdict. Erich Fromm, notably,
defended a different theory: that
violent behavior such as this is unalterably
due to character traits. He argued
that the experiment carried out by Zimbardo
was incorrectly and unjustly executed,
and even referenced the Nazi
concentration camps to support his
views.
Also, in a more recent context,
soldiers in enemy territory have been
known to have had similar irrationally
violent behaviors. Abhorrent pictures
of the military posing in insulting positions
with Iraqi prisoners and corpses
have frequently been turning up in the
media. We have viewed these pictures
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Editors-in-Chief: Emanuelle Rizk, Julian Salz
Managing Editors: Armand Latreille, Olivier Weiss
with disgust and horror, and, uncomprehending,
we have either assumed
that these people were the “bad apples”
of the bunch or attributed their actions
to pure traumatic insanity.
But can it be more than that?
The truth is, a hostile environment
brings out the worst in us. With a license
to kill (or in the case of Lord of the Flies,
a license to survive), people are capable
of things they would not have fathomed
doing when they had ethically and socially
imposed boundaries. In studying
Lord of the Flies, we observe that the
boys begin to lose it not when they start
murdering each other, but way before
that: when they slaughter their first pig.
Could this be the root of our
problem? If, in your mind, you are able
to kill, then you are able to harm. If you
are able to harm, you are able to torture.
And once you are able to torture, then
there is very little separating you from
utter sadism. Now say you were in a
position in which you were personally
handed a gun and told you had to kill
the people in front of you if you and
your people wanted to survive. What
would happen then? Would you release
the beast within?
VOL. IX NO. V
Middle School Editor: Margaux Salz Sports Editor: Paul Castaybert Design Editor: Clémence Wassen Copy Editor: Emma Guyot
Drawings by Louis LeJamtel and Emanuel Wickenburg.
Reporting Staff: Michael Anderson, Victor Counillon, Joaquin Delmar, Jurnivah Désir, Thomas De Villemejane,
Amelia Getahun-Hawkins, Nicolas Granato, David Guyot, Zoé Guyot, Guillaume Horikawa, Emilie Kehm,
Maddie King, Cedric Nakashima, Sophia Nee, Yuri Nessen, Elizabeth O’csay, Mathieu Rizk,
Oumou Sarr, Jacqueline Sarro, Emanuel Wickenburg, Camile Williams, Irène Woo.
Faculty Advisors: Mrs. Anne K. Culhane, Mr. Tom Faure
Special thanks to Ms. Creteur, Mr. Guyot, Ms. Lopez, and Mr. Taylor
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