The Nature of the Beast

Rereading the 1954 novel Lord of the Flies as an adult is a little like catching your reflection in a department-store mirror under those fluorescent lights that render every pore an abyss: you see details you wish you hadn’t. (Anyone else remember when there were department stores?)

What’s worse is realizing that author William Golding’s island — this sunstruck, small-scale apocalypse — no longer feels like fiction shading into allegory. Not here at the intersection of Dr. Evil and Pete Hegseth.

The novel, the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature winner’s first, feels like a documentary shot seven decades ahead of schedule. And if you squint, the American political landscape starts to look less like a nation of 330 million adults and more like an island of stranded boys who’ve convinced themselves that they’re the last flickering remnant of “civilization,” even as they sharpen their wiener roast sticks.

What’s most disturbing in the novel isn’t the violence, rather pedestrian by contemporary standards — it’s how eagerly the boys engineer the conditions that justify it. Fear isn’t something that descends on them like bad weather; it’s something they cultivate, nourish, protect.

The lost boys tend the fantastical myth of a minacious beast they’ve dreamed up with the kind of devotion usually reserved for religion, perhaps because fear provides meaning when nothing else does. And if this doesn’t sound uncomfortably close to the way American political narratives get built on both the left and the right these days — this perpetual manufacturing of menace, this exquisite craft of demonology — then you haven’t been paying attention to the six o’clock news.

Americans don’t just react to threats; they curate them, personalize them, polish them until they glow with that sickly aura of righteous terror. It goes without saying that those same instincts are being honed, along with the pointy sticks, in far too many quarters up here in the 51st state.

The parallels get uglier. Golding’s boys don’t split into factions because of competing policy visions or differing interpretations of the fire code. They split because division offers identity, and identity offers permission.

Once you’re in a camp, the world makes sense again: us and them, good and bad, white and illegal alien, hunters and meat.

In deepest, darkest Trumpistan, that logic has metastasized. They’ve built entire media ecosystems dedicated not to information but to belonging — echo chambers that function more like campsites around which everyone gathers to stoke fear of the other camp’s fire. And the sad truth is that many people find this comforting. There is a serenity to surrendering to a tribe, especially when the tribe gives you a mask to hide behind.

Let’s back up a bit in case you’ve forgotten the story. In Lord of the Flies, a bunch of prepubescent British schoolboys are stranded on an unihabited island with no adult presence (until, spoiler alert: their rescue at the end). The boys eventually divide into two groups under different leaders, with the more violent, superstitious, cruel and MAGA-level irrational group gaining more members and more power.

The weaker group — oh, I don’t know, let’s call its members the Dems — seeks to survive by being the civil, reasonable, decent alternative to crudity, perfidy and blatant corruption. This doesn’t work, of course, and in the end, both sides are complicit in a descent into barbarity, then a decay into savagery.

Golding’s none-too-subtle moral: Civilization is a frail invention that dies quickly, especially when people are made to feel unsafe.

As any sports fan or gang member can tell you, painting your face with ideological colours is a shortcut to certainty, and certainty is the cheapest opioid ever invented. It’s us against them and let’s root, root, root for the home side.

Or else.

Certainty silences ambiguity, suffocates doubt. It tells you exactly who deserves empathy and who deserves to be poked in the eye with that stick. The island boys embrace brutality not out of malice but out of exhaustion — order takes constant maintenance; chaos is self-sustaining.

One of the most chilling moments in Lord of the Flies occurs when the other boys kill the affable, rational Simon — the only one among them who saw the beast for what it was: a trumped-up hallucination of their own terror.

They don’t dispatch Simon because he poses a threat to them. Not directly, anyway. They kill him because he threatened the myth. Just like those reporters Trump keeps maligning as stupid for asking pertinent questions. “Quiet, Piggy.”

Piggy is a character in the novel, by the way. Only an evil genius could make this stuff up. Or possibly Karoline Leavitt.

Hell, only an evil genius could make up Karoline Leavitt.

In American political culture today, the greatest heresy is not cruelty but doubt. Anyone who complicates the narrative, who suggests that maybe the beast isn’t lurking behind the bushes (or on a Venezuelan fishing boat) but inside the right-thinking camp itself, is treated as a kind of unforgivable heretic or apostate.

Nuance becomes treason. Empathy becomes weakness. The son of Marjorie Traitor Greene receives death threats.

The truth becomes whatever keeps the bonfire roaring.

And the darkest part — the part Golding never sugarcoats — is that the boys are actually relieved after Simon’s death. There is a perverse calm that comes when you cross a moral threshold and realize the sky doesn’t fall.

Evil is rarely a sudden descent; it’s a quiet acclimation, a creeping comfort with your own capacity for harm. It’s astonishingly easy to get used to the glow of a smouldering island forest — or the burning of alleged Venezuelan drug-trafficking boats shot to hell by MQ-9 Reaper drones — if you can convince yourself that the smoke signals are the point. Catch an episode of Fox & Friends if you doubt this.

American politics has entered a phase where the collapse of norms feels less like an emergency and more like a lifestyle. The island conch gets shattered, and instead of horror, there’s a gleeful shrug by a complaisant Congress and the corrupt majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. Of course the conch broke; who uses conches anymore? Who has faith in medical science or conscientious media?

Of course the rules dissolved; rules are for the other tribe. The island becomes a place where procedural order isn’t just failing but irrelevant, swallowed by the more primal logic of spectacle and vengeance, bread and circuses. The rule of law gives way to the pusillanimous pledging of a society’s troth to autocrats, oligarchical tech bros and the desolation they bequeath: stolen forests, poisonous oceans, soils and rivers ruined.

Flinching from confronting such existential challenges makes the foolhardy denialism of the “climate change is a scam” crowd an easy way out. Quiescently succumbing to a pervasive sense of helplessness as the whole shit show unfolds is worse than negligence or apathy; it’s paying fealty to Trump and his circle — a classic ouroboros, the mythical snake that eats its own rotten, stinking tail. This is how democracies die.

Wouldn’t it be pretty to believe that adults are fundamentally different from Golding’s totem-worshipping children — that maturity confers some immunity to group madness? But that’s the lesson at the heart of Lord of the Flies: the obvious implication that “adulthood” is just broader and longer clothing on the same animal.

I’ve been reading James Baldwin lately. Over the course of a three-decade-plus writing career that began in the 1950s, the African American author and civil rights activist went from arguing that white Americans eventually would have to change in the name of racial justice to sadly concluding that, no, white Americans are incapable of change.

Overly pessimistic and censorious? Maybe. But that was his mid-century experience. And one could certainly make a case that Baldwin’s thesis is being borne out by a temerarious American regime intent on repealing not only the Sixties but every inch of progress made in the entire 20th century.

Maybe an almost immutable ossification is the fundamental flaw of humanity, a species so easily swayed by prejudice, hearsay, ill-placed anger and the absence of objectivity when its perceived self-interest is on the line.

The jungle isn’t external; it’s structural, embedded in the inspissated human psyche like a dormant infection that lies in wait for the right climate to emerge, while all about it reel shadows of indignant desert birds.

OK. No need to drag poor Yeats into this. But it’s undeniable that the climate, at least politically, has been getting steadily more tropical. More humid. More conducive to the growth of vines that choke the last fragile remnants of civilized institutional scaffolding, especially at a time when all of humanity is crouching, as Philip Larkin once observed, “below extinction’s alp.”

If the Lord of the Flies comparison strikes you as an over-the-top exaggeration, consider the address of Trump’s pitiless immigration czar, Stephen Miller, at the Turning Point USA memorial for slain evangelist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 21 in Glendale, Arizona:

We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion. … You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing. … You have no idea the dragon you have awakened.

Nice touch at a Christian memorial, by the way. Just the way Jesus would have put it ... if Jesus were Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Pretty sure he wasn’t, unless you go by what’s being routinely done in his name down there in the maleficent dragon’s den.

As Simon endeavoured in vain to warn his fellow castaways: “Maybe there is a beast … maybe it’s only us.”