Are Humans Good Or Evil Analysis

Through the progression of William Golding's Lord of the Flies and the article, “Are Humans Good or Evil” by Clancy Martin and Alan Strudler, a multitude of undeniable evidence is provided to prove that humans are in fact inherently wicked. In Lord of the Flies, a human being’s savage nature and primal instincts are effectively portrayed through the development of Jack, the lead hunter in a group that gets meat for the boys. Little Jack Merridew, who seems to be nothing but a naive and obnoxious chorister, becomes one of the most malicious and violent boys on the island. Jack's wilder side shows itself the most when he goes hunting. Making one his first kills brought such exhilaration, satisfaction, and pure bloodlust, that it drove him to insane limits,

Moreover, the symbolism of the face paint they wore while killing the pig exemplifies the gradual acceptance of each boy’s malevolent nature. The chant as a whole proves Golding's idea that humans are inherently evil through the simple joy the boys got in grotesquely taking another life with no second thought. While Lord of the Flies looks at savagery on a higher scale as that of murder, the nonfiction article “Are Humans Good or Evil from “Harper's Magazine” looks at the debate between philosophers Alan Strudler and Clancy Martin. Strudler believes that humans are evil in nature, while Martin opposes him. To support Golding’s idea in Lord of the Flies, Strudler mentions a famous psychology experiment, in which subjects coming out of a phone booth had the choice to help pick up papers scattered across the ground for a woman who had just dropped them. Inevitably there was some that helped her and others who preferred not to. However, whether the subjects helped this woman or not strongly depended on whether they had found a coin that was planted in the phonebooth