Inherited Violence in Lord of the Flies

In our cultural myth scape, we often imagine children as blank slates—innocent until corrupted, pure until exposed to the adult world. But Lord of the Flies tells a different story. It suggests that children don't invent cruelty. They inherit it. And they reenact it when no one returns to show them another way.

This is not a novel about boys descending into chaos. It is about boys replicating, in miniature, the structures of a broken adult world—not because they understand them, but because they’ve absorbed them. In the absence of what I call an "appropriate adult" — a regulated, attuned, safe nervous system in human form — the boys do what orphaned systems always do: they perform care as control. They recreate hierarchy, punishment, and ritual because those are the only emotional blueprints they have.

Before the island turns feral, it begins as an echo of empire. Ralph is elected chief. The choirboys arrive in military formation under Jack's command. There is talk of rules, votes, and conches—all symbolic inheritances from British society, the very one that has sent them to flee a war of adults. The island is not a blank slate; it is a stage for imitation.

The irony is brutal: the children are trying to survive by imitating the world that failed them. Jack does not invent authoritarianism. He performs it. He consolidates power by offering safety through submission. He rewards loyalty, demands conformity, and eventually leads his tribe into sacrificial ritual and scapegoating. In this way, Jack becomes a false father — not one who protects, but one who colonizes.

Even their language betrays the inheritance: they speak of rules, of chiefs, of punishment. They chant, "Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood." That is not instinct. That is remembered ritual. They didn’t regress into animals. They regressed into something worse: a child’s idea of what adults do.

Simon, the most attuned boy, senses the truth. "Maybe it's only us," he says of the feared "beast." But his insight is too dangerous. Simon is eliminated not because he is weak, but because he sees clearly. In traumatized systems, clarity is treated as threat.

Piggy, too, represents reason and the nervous system of conscience. He is silenced, then killed. These are not just accidents of plot. They are metaphors. The island systematically eliminates every possibility of regulation, every echo of the appropriate adult. It cannot hold a presence that doesn’t punish.

And then the novel ends with a final, shattering irony. A naval officer appears, shocked by the savagery. But he is a soldier—a man of war, part of a global system waging its own ritualized violence. The boys have mimicked him perfectly. They have done, on an island, what his civilization does with uniforms and flags.

Lord of the Flies is not about the loss of innocence. It is about the failure of inherited authority to protect the innocent. The boys are not evil. They are orphaned. And orphaned systems cling to power, because they never learned how to hold grief.

This is why the appropriate adult matters—the adult who does not need to dominate in order to feel safe. The one who can sit with fear without converting it into control. The one who can speak clearly, hold boundaries, and offer safety without requiring submission. Without this figure, children inherit violence. They do not question the blueprint. They build with it.

And so the real tragedy of Lord of the Flies is not that the boys became monsters. It’s that they never had a model for anything else. They were alone only in geography. Spiritually, structurally, they were surrounded. They carried their fathers’ wars in their bones.

The boys were never alone.

They were haunted.