When fear messes up

«The greatest ideas are the simplest. Now there was something to be done they worked with passion» Lord of the flies

Everytime we want to do something there is always a barrier that prevents us from getting things done. That obstacle is common to everyone, and it doesn’t usually come from the outside: fear. Being afraid is one of the most common signs of failure. We begin with a great idea and the sense of what we will achieve; we let ourselves go and dream until we want to put it into action, and everything fumbles when fear comes knocking at our mind. Therefore, we pretend that our dreams are nonsense and we stop right away. That is what happened in the book «Lord of the flies» where some kids are stranded on an island, all alone, and they need to take action to survive. Then, the myth comes alive to haunt our every action:

«So this is a meeting to find out what’s what. I’ll tell you what’s what. You littluns started all this, with the fear talk. Beasts! Where from? Of course we’re frightened sometimes but we put up with being frightened… «The thing is–fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream. There aren’t any beasts to be afraid of on this island.» He looked along the row of whispering littluns. «Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies! But there is no animal–» 

Consequently, we pretend that we are crazy and abort our mission thinking it is nonsense.  We give in to our deepest fears and justify our inhability to do things that we ought to do to make the most out of the situation we are in. We may not be stranded on an island, but we sure feel like it when we want to do something to make our lives easier.

«If I blow the conch and they don’t come back; then we’ve had it. We shan’t keep the fire going. We’ll be like animals. We’ll never be rescued.»  That is when «Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.»

If we want to make a change in the world or improve in a way, we must begin to act. Once we start doing things, we might be able to see the difference in ourselves, and we begin to make better choices, life becomes easier because at least we are doing something. At least with ourselves, we change our thoughts to positive ones instead of complaining about our existence.

The most fearful thing is to lose oneself in all the craziness of the world as the kids in the island. They feared for their lives as much as to lose who they really were. «They understood only too well the liberation into savagery that the concealing paint brought.» Giving in to the violence of their environment, they would lose so much more than they could be able to resist: become a beast instead of themselves.

«The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable. The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island. The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?» 

That is what William Golding pretended with this book. In any situation we are, we tend to fear the wrong thing; what we must really fear is losing ourselves and who we are. No matter where we are, we need to remember all the things that took us to be there, and that is the most precious treasure we have: ourselves.