Nature Vs Nurture Lord Of The Flies Essay

Human beings are born to be evil. They come naturally to the face of violence and brutality, and this belief was held by numerous throughout many a time. One namely is William Golding; the author of the well renowned novel The Lord of the Flies; and he expressed it well in his work. That everyone, if the situation calls for it, has the ability to commit horrific atrocities. And then there are those that made their own beliefs known; that everyone is naturally good until pushed otherwise, which itself was demonstrated by a Jean Jacques Rousseau during the Enlightenment. This argument is otherwise known as nature versus nurture. But that will be investigated later on. For now, the reasons for the instinctual persona of everybody to do bad.
The
His claim is that it is the surrounding society that defines what kind of a person they are. The belief he held is “man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” (Locke) As his more famous quotes, he states that humans are born to be caring and can live in harmony and freely with others. It is only later on with societal interaction that make people selfish and distrustful. And the performance of violence can most certainly be observed, as shown in the famous Bobo Doll experiment- where children learnt to mistreat a toy and become rough. Although, it has been shown in other experiments, such as the Stanford Prison experiment- conducted by Philip Zimbardo-, that people could easily take on the roles of a barbarous being. A group of regular college students were volunteered and put into a penitentiary like setting, given the roles of warden and prisoner. Very quickly, the wardens took advantage of their position and started abusing the prisoners. This included making them do a series of tasks such as mock weddings between Frankenstein’s monster and his wife, doing push ups for insubordination, putting sacks over their heads to perform a ‘walk of shame,’ and other. All of this without further cause than personal enjoyment. “The experiment showed that one third of the guards began to show an extreme and imbedded streak of sadism, and Zimbardo