Argumentative Essay On Lord Of The Flies

“You get to very bad places one step at a time, so you’ve got to watch those steps” Jordan Peterson says that people grow evil very slowly, and it’s a slippery slope. When you take one step off the path then the next step doesn’t seem as bad. Golding shows this very clearly in his book Lord of the Flies, especially through the character Jack when he and the other boys are stuck on the deserted island for a long period of time. When the boys first got stranded on the island they didn’t know what to do so Ralph took charge, he essentially created a civilization on the island and they voted for who was going to be chief. Things were running pretty smoothly for having 12 year olds take care of themselves. What really shows the difference of how

Once Jack starts getting restless and isn’t liking the way that things are going because the boys are turning to Ralph instead of him, he decides to take charge and go by himself with a few other boys. Jack's group ends up collecting almost all the other boys and they turn into savages. It got so bad that when Ralph and the 3 other boys tried to get fire from the others to make a signal so that they could be rescued the savages launched a rock and killed Piggy, one of the boys, and kidnapped the other two. Ralph then finds out that night from the kidnapped boys that “‘they hate you, Ralph. They’re going to do you.’ ‘They’re going to hunt you tomorrow.’” The group of boys have gone so off the rails and become so evil that they literally decide that they are going to kill one of their friends just because he doesn’t want to join their group. This really showcases the absolute 180 that those boys took from not even wanting to kill a pig for food, to hunting and killing their friends because of a difference of

It was a gradual step to get there. It started with the uncertainty of their surroundings and the fear of the beast. Because of that it caused them to not think rationally all the time. Then because they were killing the pigs constantly caused them to not be so reluctant to kill something. It was a necessary thing but it caused them to be desensitized. Then when they hunted the sow and they took the head of it and put it on the stick as an offering to the beast to keep it on their good side, that was a step that caused them to be more savage like. A big part of what pushed them to do such bad things was mob think. Mob think is what happens when you’re in a big group and something bad starts happening but instead of others stopping it and recognizing it’s bad it just feeds it because everyone’s energy is building on each other. This happened when they were doing the dance just after the savages separated from the main group and they ended up killing Simon. The boys went one step at a time and it caused them to be evil