Old book was wrong

The nature of human beings, fiction that might have misled, and 7 other things worth your time.

Good news: We've been misled all these years!

Background: The year was 1965, and a half dozen boys at a strict boarding school in Polynesia grew tired of things being so authoritarian. They got the bright idea to steal a small fishing boat and sail to Fiji, maybe even New Zealand.

Bad idea. Total disaster. Their sail was shredded, their rudder broke, and after eight days adrift they landed on a tiny, uninhabited Tongan atoll called Ata. They were marooned for fifteen months, given up for lost. Their families held funerals.

As you’d expect, they descended into darkness. They tore each other apart, fighting instead of cooperating—because at the core of humanity is a pit of despair that we can only truly experience when we're stripped bare enough to experience it.

No! No, that's not at all what happened!

That's instead what happened in the novel Lord of the Flies, a work of pure fiction, which has sold millions of copies and been included on middle school reading lists for decades.

It's ente…