Henry walked at a distance from the palms and the shade because he was too young to keep himself out of the sun. He went down the beach and busied himself at the water’s edge. The great Pacific tide was coming in and every few seconds the relatively still water of the lagoon heaved forwards an inch. There were creatures that lived in this last fling of the sea, tiny transparencies that came questing in with the water over the hot, dry sand.
This was fascinating to Henry. He poked about with a bit of stick, that itself was wave-worn and whitened and a vagrant, and tried to control the motions of the scavengers. He made little runnels that the tide filled and tried to crowd them with creatures. He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.
Lord of The Flies(Pg. 56-58) – William Golding.
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Humanity has an innate need for control. A controlled environment creates order which is what we need, even if what we want is chaos. Order can be built upon linearly where chaos cannot. The path to order is often inspired by chaos, although it tends to be less violent when the chaos is controlled.
Lord of the Flies is a book published in 1954 about a plane crash where the only survivors are children. It’s an older book worth reading today. There are also two versions of the movie, one made in 1963, and another in 1990. Almost immediately, after the plane crashes, the children begin creating a hierarchy(establishing order), and then they begin labeling some children as ‘others’. This is an innate human trait.
Piggy saw the smile and misinterpreted it as friendliness. There had grown up tacitly among the biguns the opinion that Piggy was an outsider, not only by accent, which did not matter, but by fat, and ass-mar, and specs, and a certain disinclination for manual labor.
Lord of The Flies(Pg. 60) – William Golding
By calling him “Piggy”, he was made something other than human. You never learn the boy’s real name.
Piggy was an outsider in multiple dimensions. His weight, his ass-mar(asthma), and his disinclination for manual labor, which made him an anchor to the boys’ hierarchy that must be carried or cut away.
When you label others as outsiders, you dehumanize them. The hierarchy rewards those at the top and punishes those at the bottom. Those at the bottom are sometimes treated worse than outsiders who are not part of “our hierarchy”.
The middle tends to fall in with whatever group represents their wants and beliefs. Often the “want” for avoiding violence decides who the middlers join. This does not apply just to children who are stranded on an island. This is human hierarchy.
The creation of an ‘other’ demands the creation of tribes and reinforces mistrust against the ‘other’.
The hierarchy is a solution to chaos.
Humanity is a pyramid. Those at the bottom support those at the top. Humans build pyramids to reinforce their positions within their hierarchy.
Jack had meant to leave him in doubt, as an assertion of power; but Piggy by advertising his omission made more cruelty necessary. “You didn’t hunt.”
Lord of The Flies(Pg. 69) – William Golding
If humanity could find a way to race to build one pyramid we could travel the stars. Emotions like anger won’t let us.
Internal Control and Mastery
Humanity seeks to absolve chaos and does so using primitive methods because the mind is primitive without thorough and persistent efforts to master it.
Society has evolved faster than the natural mind can evolve on its own. There is a solution for this: we make our minds exceptional through training.
The need for external control is stronger than internal control because our eyes are part of our brain so vision dominates our senses without training. Yet, it’s more important to control the internal, which includes your perception to the external, which grants far more power as you get to decide how you perceive the universe.
Having an internal locus of control means that you control the events effecting you, which put another way you could say you are controlling your perception so it may be useful to you.
A focus on external control is the “destroy the enemy” focus. To feel safe, I must destroy what makes me feel unsafe. However the enemies from this focus are usually self-created as opposed to vessels of pure evil that have no incentive other than destruction. This was the point of the book Starship Troopers written by Robert A. Heinlein in 1959, completely different from the movie.
A focus on internal control allows you to master yourself and determine how you interact with the universe, instead of reacting to external events outside of your control, or worse, reacting to your emotions.
Becoming grounded, reaching zen, or obtaining general control of your body, mind, and spirit, gives you the power to decide how you want to interact with the universe.
Action instead of reaction.
From this position you can identify threats and opportunities and address them in the means that most suit your objectives. This is much more difficult if you are not in control of your body, mind, and spirit(BMS).
By seeking to master the self, you lose interest in the other, while they gain interest in you. The individual who choses internal strength instead of external fear as their focal point is a pariah that can inspire, or induce additional fear in those controlled by their external fears.
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