William Golding's Island of Savagery

It’s interesting to compare Lord of the Flies with a real life example of children being marooned on an island: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...

The Inheritors by William Golding is the novel that lodged itself in my subconscious more deeply than any other book.

It fostered a curiosity in me about the nature of humanity, and a lingering awareness that history is written by the survivors.

Innocence is often extinguished not by evil intent, but by efficiency.

Worse still, the war also revealed an alarming side of his own character – a ‘viciousness’ and ‘cruelty’ of which he had, until then, been only dimly aware. He realised that, beneath the veneer of middle-class civility, he had the same instincts as the Nazis. And it wouldn’t take much for them to break the surface, either.

I once heard a talk by someone involved in microfinance/impact investing in poor countries. Through her work she met many people at all levels of government in the places she worked.

One thing that stuck with me was her comment that while everyone is capable of greatness and kindness, they also have the capability of becoming a "monster."

She cited the experience of one of her Rwandan contacts, who later became the Minister of Justice and was one of the senior government officials responsible for driving the genocide of hundreds of thousands of members of the Tutsi minority in the mid-1990s.

https://humanrights.ca/story/what-led-genocide-against-tutsi...

As I get older, I'm realizing that there's no such thing as 'human nature.' It's a broad spectrum. My view is that poor and average people are alright but as you get closer to power, people become increasingly corrupt and evil. Relationships become more calculated and transactional to the point that they become unpleasant; though apparently some people either don't feel this effect or maybe their hunger for power is so strong that it overrides those feelings... Or maybe it's a bit of both. In any case, by the time you get really close to power, all moderately normal people have been filtered out; both voluntarily and also because non-psychopaths generally struggle to fit in.

The psychopaths in power want to remove the moral element because it makes things unpredictable for them. They prefer everything to be kept stable and under control through blackmail and other forms of coercive leverage.

Something else I've found is that, as you get closer to power, people become much 'nicer' (superficially) but they are definitely more evil in reality if you look at their actions. It's like they make up for their evil deeds by being extra nice to people in person. Nowadays, when I meet people who are too friendly with their words, I immediately feel skeptical; I don't trust them.

Brilliant man, thx for sharing