You know that guy at the grocery store whose shopping cart was dangling in the exact center of the frozen food aisle, and he was so oblivious that he wouldn’t move it out of your way even though you were clearly in his peripheral vision? Have you ever wondered what stopped you from grabbing the nearest bag of frozen pizza rolls and hitting him over the head with it? Your conscience? An innate sense of right and wrong? Maybe. But then again, maybe not.

In Lord of the Flies, William Golding explores the theme of our animal drives. Our society is so structured – there are so many rules and regulations – that it is hard to see how we could act if our natural instincts were not so repressed and our revised behavior so shaped by instruction.

In his book, Golding places a group of youngsters on an unsupervised island and lets them run free. In fact, ‘wild’ is exactly what they become. His actions become brutally sadistic and seem to lose much of what we tend to label as our ‘humanity’. But would this really happen? Could a group of previously civilized individuals really go down that fast?

As you might learn in an AP Psychology class, humans have something called ‘brain plasticity.’ Aside from this meaning that your brain can be recycled (be sure to leave it in the blue bin across the street when you’re done), brain plasticity implies that our minds can adapt and change to our environment and given set of circumstances. So even if you’re dealing with a bunch of smart, polite, good-hearted kids, once they’re thrust into a dire situation and forced to take drastic measures to preserve their lives, they can turn into quite different creatures in a moment. very short period of time.

In fact, a psychology professor named Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment in 1971 that proved something similar, concluding that humanity can indeed rapidly degenerate into callous, lawless beasts when placed in positions of authority. in unfavorable conditions. Of course, Zimbardo tested him on college students, and the way his subjects behaved during the experiment was nothing short of stripping a freshman naked and chaining him to the door of the dean’s office. So I guess we should take it with a grain of salt.

Golding paints a terrifying portrait of a world with no sense of morality, and hopefully none of us will have to experience anything like it. However, if you think about it, being stranded on an island wouldn’t be all bad. At least you’d have a good excuse to avoid doing your ACT prep.