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Evil In Lord Of The Flies

Decent Essays

As history tells us that people have been evil, and society blame those people, like Hitler or Stalin, for what they did. But what if the reason they did those horrible things is because they could not hold back this evil that is in all of us. Mankind could be able to do what they did. Yet some of us know how to hold this evil back, humans are strong enough to not let it take control of us. William Golding has implied that society is inherently evil in his book Lord of the Flies; this idea of an inherently evil human nature has also been examined in the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment. For the most part human nature in the eyes of William Goldings is revealed in Lord of the Flies which depicts an inherently evil human …show more content…

In the Milgram Experiment, scientists would ask someone in an electric chair, who was an actor, questions and when he would get them wrong the subject would have to give him a shock. The shocks started low but they increased each time a question was missed. When the actor had missed a certain amount of questions the subject would have to shock them with 450 volts, and “around two-thirds of people went on to give the maximum 450 volts three times in a row” (“I am really…right thing” 1). Two-thirds of this society would choose to be inherently evil when they are asked to do something malicious. The Stanford Prison Experiment was to see what would happen if average boys were given roles of guards or inmates and see what would happen. A couple of days into the experiment problems started to occur and “as the guards ratcheted up their psychological aggression, the prisoners began having emotional breakdowns--real ones” (Mechanic 1). The guards became more violent and evil when the inmates had done nothing wrong, because they are just boys who were just ordinary civilians, but the guards treated them as actual prisoners and it made the prisoners have emotional breakdowns. These people would choose to harm someone for no reason. These subjects were ordinary people, but when they were a part of the experiment most of them chose to be evil and savage, and deep down everyone is

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