If Lord of the Flies was about kids with aspergers...

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would it have ended in a witch hunt?

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Last edited by purchase on 18 Jan 2012, 5:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

No, it made perfect sense.

We read this book in English class my senior year. Somehow during class discussion they all got on the topic of which character in the book each member of the class would be. They said that I would be Simon, and they all tittered and giggled like that was supposed to be funny.

This was the same class I was sitting in when my Ritalin kicked in for the first time. It was not on the same day as the LOTF discussion, but it was some other equally distasteful discussion. I already knew these people were stupid and detestable, but hearing them talk while I was on Ritalin brought that fact into much sharper focus as I could finally pay attention to every little thing they were saying, rather than just having it drift in and out of my awareness like a bad dream. This was one of many reasons why I realized that taking drugs to be able to listen to this kind of talk was a waste of my liver.

This book describes the extremes of NT social behavior perfectly. The girls in my class (it was almost all girls) instinctively recognized this and they actually took gleeful pleasure in comparing themselves to the most hostile, murderous, manipulative characters. And they immediately set on me as the most obvious comparison to Simon, because it fit the way they perceived my social status in relation to them. They were oblivious to the implications of their own ignorance in their analysis. They just thought the kids who killed other kids, were the ones who came out on top and they wanted to be those kids.

The point of the book is that social conventions and civility only serve to mask the reality of human behavior. It is inconceivable to recast the story with autistic characters, because it would lose the entire message.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia article about the book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies .

I think it's very unlikely. Witch hunts are something that happens when a bunch of NTs start going for groupthink and just snowballing ideas and beliefs between them until they get way more intense than they ever were before. That's a good thing when there's a real enemy to fight because it lets them overcome their fear and charge whatever's threatening them; but it's not so good when--as in Lord of the Flies--there's no enemy to fight but yourself.

Let's assume that the boys are autistic, but capable of taking care of their own basic needs; or else that few enough of them needed intensive help that others could have provided it. In that case, autistics might have lasted longer; but they would have had lots of trouble cooperating. There would have been a lot of obstacles toward being able to solve problems together--to do things that required more than one or two boys. There would have been no clear leader for a long while. The less scrupulous of the boys might have decided to steal from others. In the long run, they would probably have been picked off one-by-one by disease or accidents because they would not have been able to act as a group to remove threats and take on large projects. Being able to hunt together would have been a difficult skill to acquire for them, and so in the long run the lack of meat would have made them weaker, unless a savant were able to invent tools allowing for solitary hunters.

As far as I can tell--I think they would have survived to rescue, if they had been autistic. But they could not have formed a coherent society to survive long-term.

The ideal configuration is probably a mix of autistic and non-autistic, and a middle group of eccentrics, artists, scientists, etc., to communicate between them. The autistics provide intensive, repetitive labor; single-focused invention and investigation; and some of the creative innovation. The middle group translates between the autistics and the NTs and guides the autistics toward useful projects; the NTs provide cohesion, group action, and leadership. Actually, I think the Lord of the Flies boys might have survived better if there had been more autistics and broader-autistic-phenotype people among them, not just one "designated out-group member" for the witch hunt. Diversity in a group is an advantage not just because it allows access to a larger skill set, but also because it prevents any one group from gaining too much power.

Considering that aspies tend to have more wiring over all I think it would be technically wrong to say they have less of the social wiring, it's just the wiring is worse for social thinking.

Why does it always come down to NT's versus Aspies with you people?

If Lord Of The Flies had been about kids with autism but everything else remained the same then I suspect it would have ended the same way: a bunch of immature kids become barbarians and everything gets out of hand as groupthink takes over.

Witch hunt? Sounds about right. I've been thinking about aspergers and autism throughout history, since it was only discovered relatively recently, what would a 12th century aspie be treated like? I wouldn't put it past society to have us dunked, exorcised, burnt or if we were lucky, locked away. Since lord of the flies was based around kids I'm sure they would have ganged up on the weakest, the smartest or the strangest. Kids always do.