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Essay / Immoral behavior in Lord of the Flies - 1342
William Golding, the author of the highly acclaimed book, Lord of the Flies took the reader to a world where underage boys live on an uncharted island with no adults or others. human contact; just themselves and find ways to survive and get off the island. However, this is not an easy task. Golding shed revolutionary light on how boys will actually act without authority in their lives and the phrase “boys will be boys” will appear. The boys were placed in a situation where they were forced to act a certain way by nature and condition. Accordingly, the wild and immoral behavior of the boys must be attributed to situational and environmental factors. For new readers who begin reading the book, they see the boys in a sort of conch shell. The conch was the only thing that held the boys with moral glue to know what their limit was. Golding declares the power the conch once had over boys: "Conch! Conch!" Jack shouted. "We don't need the conch shell anymore. We know who should say things. What use was Simon, or Bill, or Walter for speaking? It's time some people knew that they should shut up and leave to decide things." to the rest of us” (139). The order they had previously broken into small pieces, the conch had no meaning to the rest of the boys and they could do whatever they wanted. The conch kept the order in which it had the power the boys needed to get along; did this also mean that together, when the conch is destroyed, is it left with the boys? The boys no longer have order and become wild. To add to their downfall, Piggy's death, he was the voice of reasoning that he tried to reason with everyone about what would be the right thing to do; even though no one paid attention to what he had to say, but they listened to him. As a result, without the voice of reasoning on the island, there is no control over what might happen alongside the boys, it is gratuitous. The boys adopted a character they didn't know and had to adapt to a character they weren't familiar with. familiar with such a hunter and/or gatherer. A person they were meant to become. I recently read a book called The Tournesol by Simon Wisenthal. Wisenthal remembers his time in the concentration camp and a dying SS soldier asking him and his people to forgive him for the actions he had committed towards the Jewish population. The story of the SS soldier is that he did not grow up in a Nazi killing machine, but in reality, he grew up as a good student, very academic in his activities and raised in a Catholic family. As a result, the SS soldier had to become this Nazi character in order to fill whatever demented illness he had to sweat. With adaptable behavior, this refers to B.F. Skinner's rat experiment on how he had to adapt and learn to pull the lever an excessive number of times in order to receive the food pellet. Slater says: “He found that these rats quickly learned to press a lever if they were rewarded with food. This time, you don't bother to press once with your pink padded foot. You press three times. Reinforcement contingencies change the way the animal responds” (Slater 10-11). The rat studied and knew how to press the level already knew how many lever presses it took to get food.