“The Rules Are All We’ve Got”

            We have all heard senior members of our society make comments such as “Back in the day…” or “When I was your age…” to show how much of today’s youth often disregard values and tradition and take advantage of more liberal views. This feeling can also be carried over to the ways rules may currently affect our society. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a 1950s island survival novel, and Sidney H. Schanberg’s article, “The Rules Are All We’ve Got”, featured in the New York Times, both exhibit how ignorant adolescents continue to take no notice of regulations. In Lord of the Flies, young boys are ejected from a plane and stranded on an uninhabited island. As time rolls on and the hope of rescue wears down, the boys rely less on the taboo of civilization and become more savage. They even resort to murder in order to solve grievances amongst one another. Schanberg uses factual evidence to demonstrate the current high crime rates because perpetrators simply do not care about the laws that restrict them from doing wrong. Regardless of the time in which they take place or whether they are factual or fictitious, both Lord of the Flies and “The Rules Are All We’ve Got” show us that without a deviation from our current path, chaos will prove dominant in society due to the fact that there is little regard for the rules and regulations necessary to keep order.

            Throughout Golding’s novel, the behavior of his characters becomes increasingly disorderly. Day by day, the boys forget their values and the ways of living in an organized society. The boys begin innocent, still following all rules that they were brought up with. Jack in the beginning is unable to kill a piglet that stands right in front of him. Due to a “blood hunger” experienced by some of the older boys, killing pigs soon becomes a method of obtaining food, as well as a source of entertainment and excitement. Although it is only an animal, the change in perception of death has clearly changed for the worse. This was shown clearly after the hunter’s first kill when Golding says “[Jack’s] mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink” (70). Later this violence becomes even more disturbing, as the killing of the sow is vividly compared to rape. Soon after, the killing of animals for food turns to the killing of people. The first victim of this week society is Simon. Attempting to help the other residents of the island, this simple and quiet boy was beaten to his death, and even Piggy and Ralph, who represented the stronger boys able to retain the rules of society, wanted a piece of the violence. “Piggy and Ralph, under the threat of the sky, found themselves eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society. They were glad to touch the brown backs of the fence that hemmed in the terror and made it governable” (152). Clearly, if Golding felt that Ralph and Piggy could at one point choose to ignore the rules they were accustomed to, he would agree with Schanberg that the rules and regulations of old are no longer taken as seriously. Piggy is later killed for no reason, agreeing with a quote from Schanberg’s article where a witness from a murder said “They did it to have fun,” and another said “They had nothing better to do.” Finally, the vicious killing spree of these boys ends as the boys are discovered while attempting to kill Ralph. Golding’s novel takes society and scales it down to a small group of boys. Rather than it taking years for rules to be established and then slowly ignored, it all takes place within the course of a few months. Golding demonstrates in his novel that without strict discipline and supervision, rules will begin to be ignored and order will eventually be lost.

            Schanberg’s article uses facts and real life examples to prove Golding’s idea about how rules are becoming less important to people. Not only serious laws concerning murder, but Schanberg also describes traffic laws as “an annoyance”. He also refers to the Good Samaritan laws by saying, “The law-breaker and the witness who looks away may not be the same person, but eventually they begin to merge.” Golding provides examples of this in the cases of Samneric, the commoners who do not fight against Roger and Jack when they hear of his plans for evil, and when Piggy and Ralph standby and witness Simon’s murder without helping. Even though these boys did not disregard the rules of society themselves, they still did not attempt to prevent crimes that did. Schanberg brings up the point that no one really knows how to prevent this deterioration of respect for laws and authority. “Even getting caught is no big deal. [Lawbreakers] know they’ll serve their time and get out again.”

            These two works show how people have begun to disregard rules and regulations that keep order and control in our society. Without them, there will be chaos and unorganized and destructive behavior. In order to maintain a state of order, we must find a way to prevent this situation from getting any worse and reestablish a sense of rules and values in young people today.