The Lord of the Flies

[Melle]

I'm not a Christian, but I believe in original sin.

Recently I had occasion to take a long van ride with a singer & a bass player, and we were talking about our elementary school days. I was surprised to find them shocked by the reckless cruelty of gradeschool life in the Seattle public schools. Was my childhood unusual, or fairly typical? Read & weigh in:

I was a little bastard, and all the other kids were just as bad. A few examples: at my school we had openly race-based brawls on the playground, white kids vs. black kids, or sometimes "boat people" vs. homegrown, that ended with the losing side being beaten as brutally as 7-year-olds could manage to beat each other. Other times, a group of kids would gang up on one misfit, eventually slamming him to the ground and kicking him until he bled. I once beat up a kid because he talked like a sissy and it "served him right"---I realize now that he was gay, but we were little kids & I didn't even know what "gay" was---I just couldn't stand him, and my classmates cheered me on, and I didn't feel the least bit bad about it. When I was in first grade, an older kid once punched me in the stomach in the lunch line and knocked the wind out of me, for no reason, and my response (after I'd recovered) was to find a kindergartner and do the same to him. One way to decisively win a fight was to slam the other kid's head into the edge at the bottom of the slide. One fun thing to do was to smack the back of a kid's head, hard, when he was drinking at the water fountain. Another was to climb up the side of the bathroom stall, balance against the wall, and piss on whoever was sitting on the toilet below. I could go on & on. Shit like this was the rule, not the exception, of my gradeschool experience.

It actually makes me feel sick to remember this stuff, but what's weird is it sometimes made me feel sick then too---just not all the time. Sometimes I felt empathy. Sometimes I would actually stick up for the kid who was getting beaten, and wind up getting my ass kicked too. And when that happened I felt terrible. But other times I just felt aggressive and bloodthirsty. I remember it very well: aggression felt as natural as hunger. I haven't fought anyone in many years, but I had to be trained out of it. And I was not a particularly aggressive student at my schools (relatively speaking).

Like I said, my bandmates were surprised at this stuff. I told them, "Hell yes, it was fucked, I was constantly scared and on edge. It was like Seinfeld said, the recess bell rings and it's Lord of the Flies."

For this reason more than any other, the "Lord of the Flies" view of human nature makes sense to me. More sense than the "Catcher in the Rye" view (even though I like Catcher better as a book.) South Park also takes this view, that kids can be mean little shits. David Lynch pegged the world of human beings as being "wild at heart." Then there's the whole Christian tradition of original sin. I am convinced that people are partly bad, & that we will always have to contend with this fact.

What do you think? Were your early years the most violent, fearful, and animalistic of your life? Or were me & my classmates just a bunch of freaks? What light, if any, does this shed on human nature? Does the idea of the "sinful nature of Man" make sense to you?

[Ballard Pimp]

This isn't a religious issue; it's medical. For reference, I went straight through Seattle Public Schools, K-12 without any incidents like that. You were a bully. That means that more likely than not, you have a form of mental illness called a personality disorder. What you have described is not normal behavior; it verges on the psychotic.

Just my 2 cents.

[Abulafia]

I agree not religious, perhaps psychological. Baby animals play at being big animals, and some of that play (most of it) involves developing survival skills. Some of these survival skills involve attacking the weak, maneuvering into positions of power and safety. Normal stuff. Healthy stuff. Just as little kids play at being 'mommy and daddy' and play at 'cops and robbers' (do they still?), they play at 'loathesome hoodlum' and 'alpha male.'

Your story of being punched in the gut and then finding a littler one to similarly slug reminded me of nothing so much as being a waitron years back and having bitter mid-level business folks come in for drinks or dinner after work and treat me like the shit they'd been treated by their bosses all day long. It was so painfully predictable and obvious, it made me cringe (even as I had to grit my teeth at their loathesome rudeness); because I am a sucker, I often felt sad for them rather than angry at their behavior. What horrible lives. Alpha male kicks beta male in the balls; beta male looks for gamma male. Kick, kick, kick. It's called the pecking order, and finding one's place on it is an important survival skill, esp for the betas, gammas, and deltas.

It's all normal, then, for kids to practice such.

To an extent. I have to say, however, that what you described, Melle, was not only nothing like what I experienced as a child (also pub school, though not here), but was really horrifying to read. Had I a school aged child, I'd be considering homeschooling. I experienced teasing, pettiness, threats of violence (I countered with threats of litigation), spiteful cliques, hurtful rumors, rude (if, in retrospect, funny) vandalism and graffitti, but nothing of the order you describe.

Sounds like you were terrified not to hurt people, probably because you were terrified of being hurt. Reading your post made me as sad as I felt when nasty little business shits came into my restaurant with their shitty patronizing little insults and complaints.

I'm sorry you had such a shitty experience. I hated school with a passion, and I consider a great deal of it to have been a complete waste of time, but I certainly never experienced anything of the sort you described.

Do I think people are inherently sinful? I have neither a theological nor philosophical concept of 'sin' that fits into that rubric. I think people are inherently human, and as such have the capacity for great good and great evil. I don't think you or your posse were especially evil, but you sure do sound as thought you were exceptionally scared.

[Melle]

Abs, I can relate. I waited tables for 3 years. Fortunately I had long since outgrown the "pecking order" mentality & didn't take it out on the busboy. To me that "pecking order" urge is exactly the problem with humanity. It doesn't matter whether you think of it as "sin" or not, but I find that if I read the Gospels etc. and use this as my conception of Sin, Christianity becomes much more intelligible.

BallardPimp: I think the word you're looking for is "psychopathic," not "psychotic." Big difference. Anyway, antisocial personality disorder did occur to me, but on closer examination it doesn't fit: I had a conscience; I was emotionally affected by events; also I didn't torture animals or do anything else young psychopaths do. (BTW, I wasn't a "bully": I took much more than I gave.)

EDIT: I was writing from the perspective that yesterday's religion is today's science, & assuming everyone shared this perspective. I guess that's not the case. But it's pretty useful to view the "spiritual" and the "psychological" as more or less the same thing. (Some hackneyed points: casting out demons was primitive therapy; the office of confession was primitive analysis. The history of the word "psyche" is also illuminating.)