Our Stained Tabula Rasa

As I re-read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in my later years, while I also struggle to make sense of our current moment, it no longer reads like a disturbing parable about stranded schoolboys on a distant island. Instead, it strikes with an uncomfortable sense of self-recognition—like a mirror.

Nearly a century ago, America pushed state-sanctioned executions behind gray prison walls, recognizing that a society that turns human death into a public carnival degrades its own soul. Yet here we are, standing at the edge of a digital colosseum where the machinery of state violence is once again being packaged for public broadcast.

We like to think we have evolved far past the savage bloodlust of those boys on the island or the ancient brutality of the tribe. But the digital colosseum proves we haven’t outgrown our origins; we’ve simply automated them. Long before Jack seized the conch with a sharpened stick, humanity found its original rhythm at the watering hole: discovering that a tool designed to secure survival could be weaponized to dominate, terrify, and destroy.

I. The Myth of the Tabula Rasa and the “Original Sin”

In the beginning, William Golding’s boys on their pristine island—much like the unspoiled earth we inherited—are treated as a blank slate. We comfort ourselves with the romantic illusion of the tabula rasa, the idea that human potential and the natural world arrive unblemished, corrupted only later by the artificial machinery of society.

The tragedy of Lord of the Flies, however, is how swiftly that pristine slate is smeared. The boys stranded there do not need to be taught cruelty; they inherit it.

We cling fiercely to the comforting myth of absolute innocence at birth—the secular faith that every human arrives pure. If you talk to theologians about “Original Sin,” however, they will point instead to an inherited condition of moral corruption, spiritual alienation, and a natural inclination toward wrongdoing.

I’m reminded we don’t necessarily need abstract dogma to see how this plays out; we can also look at it as a brilliant cinematic thought experiment. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey offers a secular, narrative model of this exact descent. At the prehistoric watering hole, all animals are equal, sharing the scarce resources of the earth in a fragile, brute equilibrium—until the Homininae discover the power they can wield with the jawbone of a tapir.

At first, it is a tool of procurement: a means to gain a better position for drinking. But the realization flashes across the hominid’s eyes, and across the screen, that the exact same instrument can be used to intimidate rivals, break bones, and shatter lives. Suddenly, terror becomes a currency. By stepping across that line—moving from shared survival to prescient calculation, manipulation, and ultimately slaughter—they set themselves violently above all other creatures, claiming dominion through blood as gods.

It is my belief that this specific threshold in human evolution is the true original sin of humanity: the moment we achieved prescience and chose to achieve mastery through violence. It leaves the world a permanently stained tabula rasa.

II. Ascent or Ruin

On Golding’s island, that prehistoric jawbone reappears in miniature. The conch shell represents the fragile attempt to establish social contract, a voice given structure by rule of law. But the conch is no match for the spear sharpened at both ends.

When Jack and his hunters paint their faces, they are not merely adopting a theatrical disguise; they are shedding the cognitive burden of individual conscience. The painted mask allows the human animal to return to the watering hole dynamic—to merge into a tribal hive-mind where violence is sanctified by belonging, proving that the weapon first raised against rivals can just as easily master our own.

We see this exact psychological architecture scaling up into our current cultural and political landscape. The transition from traditional thought and institutional leadership to high-octane, authoritarian spectacle is happening all around us. In recent years, we have watched the slow-motion collapse of institutional guardrails, replaced by populist strongmen who understand what Jack understood: that people do not ultimately want freedom through parliamentary debate; they want the intoxicating, tribal clarity of us versus them.

And just as the hominid in 2001 flung the bone triumphantly into the sky—transforming it seamlessly from a prehistoric weapon into an orbiting nuclear platform of the future—our modern tribes continue to fling their instruments of power upward. We see this most clearly in our work to weaponize artificial intelligence, creating a black box whose unknown mind both benefits and terrifies us. Whether we look at HAL 9000—that cold, calculating silicon rebirth of the hominid at the watering hole, programmed with our own human paranoia and instinct for self-preservation—or our own anxieties over modern automated systems, we fear what AI might do with the jawbone simply because we recognize the hand that coded it.

Because our foundational operating system remains rooted in the evolutionary mechanics of mastery-through-violence—leaving us to wonder if this descent into original sin was the tragic price of our ascent to secular salvation, or merely a self-delusion ensuring our inevitable ruin—we do not think twice to use our technology, our politics, and our industrial might to bring the Earth itself to ruin for our own short-term gain, while secretly fearing that our tools will someday do the exact same thing to us. The island was never just an island; it was a living metaphor for our species, reflecting the [de] evolution of our species as well as the tools [and weapons] we create and use.

III. The Fallacy of Duality

If the island metaphor stops at the face-painted savagery of Jack, we miss the deeper, more unsettling warning embedded in Golding’s text. In its final, polished version, Lord of the Flies favors neither the charismatic authoritarianism of Jack nor the measured, institutional authority of Ralph.

Ralph is the keeper of the conch—the apostle of rules, assemblies, and procedural democracy. Yet his leadership is fundamentally bloodless. It is detached from the primal emotional currents of the boys, incapable of holding their attention against the high-octane spectacle of the hunt, and ultimately powerless to prevent the descent into chaos. Ralph’s tragedy is the tragedy of liberal institutionalism: it assumes that if you just build a better meeting agenda, human beings will naturally choose order over ecstasy.

It occurs to me that we are trapped in this exact, exhausting duality today. Our cultural and political discourse forces us into a suffocating choice: submit to hollow, technocratic systems that feel entirely disconnected from human hunger and community, or surrender to the seductive, tribal spectacle of strongmen who promise absolute belonging at the cost of absolute conformity.

Golding’s masterstroke is his refusal to offer a clean answer or exit. Think of the chilling final scene: the naval officer who steps ashore to rescue the boys—representing the adult world, the rule of law, and the height of civilization—is himself standing on a warship engaged in a global slaughter. Ralph and Jack are not opposites; they are points on the exact same continuum. The adult world is simply the island writ large, and the rescue is nothing more than an invitation to a larger war.

IV. Simon in the Woods and the Ecological Reckoning

Where, then, does truth live in a world governed by the lifted bone, painted face and conch?

While the other boys are consumed by the scramble for political control or the frenzied bloodlust of the hunt, Simon retreats into the forest. It is Simon who discovers the dead parachutist—the grim, rotting relic of the adult war overhead—and who famously confronts the “Lord of the Flies,” the pig’s head impaled on a stake.

In that hallucinatory dialogue, the beast makes its terrifying confession: it is not something external to be hunted, captured, or killed with a sharper spear. It is inside them. It is part of them.

Simon’s realization is fundamentally spiritual, but it is also ecological. He understands that our war against each other and our war against the natural world are one and the same. While the rest of the island burns and the forest is reduced to ash to fuel the tribe’s temporary supremacy, Simon recognizes the sacred, living balance of the jungle.

And what do we do with our modern Simons? We marginalize them, mock them as unwelcome fringe elements, or relegate them to the dark while caught up in the frenzy of our collective delusions. Because we have built our civilization on treating each other and the Earth as territory to be conquered rather than a home to be tended, we reflexively wield our modern tools to bring both to ruin. We look at the mounting ecological crises, the warming oceans, and the collapsing ecosystems, and we respond by sharpening our spears, looking for someone—anyone—to blame, completely blind to the fact that the monster is of our own making.

V. Owning the Shadow

When the rescue ship finally arrives at the end of Lord of the Flies, it does not bring salvation; it brings an escalation. The naval officer looks down in polite, disappointed disbelief at the dirty, savage children, utterly blind to the fact that his own massive grey warship waiting offshore is merely the adult iteration of the childish skirmish playing out across the island.

We smile at the irony, comforting ourselves with the distance between childhood fiction and adult reality. Yet, as we step back into the glaring light of our own contemporary moment, that distance vanishes.

When state-sanctioned violence is pulled from the shadows and packaged once more for public consumption—when public execution ceases to be a dark relic of history and re-emerges as a digitized spectacle—we are proving that the island has swallowed the globe. The digital screens in our hands have become the modern painted faces. The algorithms that feed our endless, polarizing tribalism are the conch shells we smash to pieces every single day. And the looming ecological collapse of our planet along with the rise of the black box is simply the final, fiery reckoning of the bone lifted at the watering hole so very long ago.

Golding offers no utopian roadmap, and Kubrick cuts to black before redemption can be scripted. There is no clean legislative fix for the shadow that lives inside us, nor can we vote away the history written into our tools of power.

True cultural maturity, it seems to me, doesn’t begin by pretending we can engineer a spotless world through procedural rules, nor by surrendering our souls to the intoxicating roar of the tribal mob. It begins in the quiet, terrifying humility of Simon’s realization in the dark forest: looking at the wreckage of our own making, dropping our weapons, and finally having the courage to name the beast in the mirror.