The Real Lord of the Flies: Cooperation Not Anarchy

What crisis actually does to human beings.

When disaster hits, we expect Lord of the Flies. That everyone descends into anarchy and chaos, a kind of survival of the fittest on steroids. We get selfish, focused on our power and self-preservation, everyone else be damned. It’s at the heart of nearly every Zombie or disaster movie. When societal rules fall apart, all hell breaks loose.

There’s just one problem, in the real life Lord of the Flies, it went the opposite way. In June 1965, six boys from Tonga, ages 13 to 16, borrowed a fishing boat to escape their strict Catholic boarding school. Then a storm came through that tore their sail and broke their rudder. They drifted 8 days without food or water before hitting a small uninhabited island called ‘Ata, where they were stranded for the next 15 months.

They didn’t descend into chaos. They started with a pact to limit arguments as they realized the stress could tear them apart. Then, they split up in to working in teams of two with a strict rotation of jobs. When fights did break out, they imposed time-outs to let people cool down. And they kept the ritual of starting and ending every day with song and prayer.

And unlike in the book, the fire never went out. By the time Captain Peter Warner stumbled onto the island in 1966 and rescued them, he wrote, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.”

At one point, one of the boys slipped off a cliff and broke his leg. The others climbed down, carried him back up, and set the bone with sticks and leaves. When the local doctor finally examined them 15 months later, the leg had healed perfectly.

In other words, it was the exact opposite of the novel and new Netflix show.

Even with understanding the Tongan kids heroics, it’s tempting to say…”but that’s a culture based on community, not a bunch of private school British kids…” The premise still holds based on both experience and over a century of research. When disaster strikes, most don’t descend into anarchy. We become pro-social. I’ve witnessed it first hand.

Experiencing The Day After Tomorrow

“We’ll be fine. It’s just another hurricane,” my dad said before ending the call on the night of August 25, 2017. As a native Houstonian, I’d been through my share of hurricanes. My dad had seen even more. It’s not that we discounted the impact. Some areas would flood, get major damage, and need repair. We knew where that would likely occur and how to help in the aftermath. But where both of us lived, outside of the 500-year flood zones, we knew what to expect. We’d been here before.

After a night of torrential rain and wind, I stepped outside to see water up to my driveway. The street I lived on was flooded, with only the tops of cars peeking out over the water. Thankfully, my home had been spared. As I headed out the door to survey the aftermath, I was left in disbelief. Much of the city was underwater, including parts that hadn’t flooded during any of the dozens of hurricanes and tropical storms I’d experienced in my nearly forty years of life on the Gulf Coast. The parks I regularly ran through were lakes. Highways turned into rivers. Cars rested on the side of grass embankments, presumably in a last-ditch effort by their owners to get them to higher ground before abandoning them. Parts of the city were a dozen feet under water. It was as if I’d woken up in the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow.

After the initial shock, news stations warned of chaos. It wasn’t bad enough that homes were underwater, hundreds of thousands of individuals were without power, and thousands needed rescue. Warnings of looters swarming the streets, armed robberies, and even people shooting at rescue workers began to circulate. Violence was surely coming. The mayor implemented a city-wide lockdown, setting a ten p.m. curfew in an effort to protect against “potential criminal acts.”

Whenever disasters strike, the assumption is that communities devolve into chaos, akin to the latest post-apocalyptic movie where anarchy reigns. We become selfish, lawless, and unruly. It’s written in our history. Following the 2005 Katrina hurricane, New Orleans was often portrayed as a war zone, full of looting and violence, with one former Navy Seal claiming he had to sit atop the Superdome and act as a sniper against looters. Go back a century to the great earthquake and fire that wiped out much of San Francisco in 1906, and the response was the same—fear of chaos and lawlessness. The military was even sent in to restore order. In just about every hurricane, earthquake, war, or similar disaster, the same story prevails: People will turn into selfish, lawless hooligans. Except, in just about every case, the opposite occurs.

In Houston, as reports of chaos escalated, the experience was different on the ground. As I walked around in the initial aftermath, relationships changed. The neighbors you only knew from watching them go to work or walk the dog suddenly became important. I talked to more neighbors in the days following the disaster than the previous year. In an age of isolation and disconnection, you saw people, instead of seeing through them. If you had power or water, you opened up your home. There was a pull to help others, not to greedily hoard. Every day people grabbed their boats and set up a makeshift rescue community, navigating through flooded streets to pick up people trapped in their homes. In the days and weeks that followed, the urge to volunteer, to donate, to do something positive skyrocketed. There’s a sense of community, not despair but gratitude.

In New Orleans, it took time, but eventually, everyone from the news to the military admitted that the lawless chaos was mostly exaggerated nonsense. Sure, it occurred in pockets. But the vast majority of people were more selfless and orderly than selfish and lawless. The same held true for the San Francisco fires. The founder of American psychology, William James, told us as much over a century ago in his essay On some mental effects of the earthquake. He noted two critical observations: “The rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos” and “the universal equanimity…I have always believed, that the pathetic way of feeling great disasters belongs rather to the point of view of people at a distance than to the immediate actions.” James described a cheerful or at least steadfast tone that took over most of the city, and posited that while suffering was present, it was shared. And sharing the suffering decreased the insidious loneliness that often leads to despair.

It was the same during World War 2. The prevailing thought in Western militaries was that bombing a city would demoralize citizens, pushing them toward depression and despair. As the British prepared for London to be bombed by the German Luftwaffe, they were afraid of the psychological impact. Panic was the expectation. One military planner reported, “London for several days will be one vast raving bedlam. The hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be a pandemonium.”

Yet, as London suffered months of devastating bombing, panic and despair didn’t take over. Hospitalizations for mental health problems didn’t increase. Instead, morale, resolve, and a sense of community grew. Modern research backs this up. In a study of over 33,000 individuals, psychologists found that those who had experienced heavy wartime bombing were less likely to display neurotic traits and scored higher on levels of resilience. As Edgar Jones and colleagues concluded in a review, “civilians proved more resilient than planners had predicted, largely because they had underestimated their adaptability and resourcefulness, and because the lengthy conflict had involved so many in constructive participant roles.” One of the pioneering disaster researchers, Charles Fritz, who got his start in answering the question on whether bombing causes listlessness or despair, summarized: “Disasters provide a temporary liberation from the worries, inhibitions and anxieties associated with the past and future because they force people to concentrate their full attention on immediate moment-to-moment, day-to-day needs within the context of the present reality.”

There’s a paradox in the research on disasters. While they bring enormous stress and can push some to the brink, for a brief period, they bring clarity and purpose. They detach us from superficial worries, amplifying actual concerns. The petty squabbles and differences fade away. This paradox is hard to understand, and it doesn’t always last. (Think: COVID, where we moved from support to isolation to division). But this trend shows up consistently throughout history, from hurricanes to wars to famines. In her book Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit traced over a century of disasters. Contrary to popular belief, she concluded that the normal response to disaster isn’t selfish chaos but selflessness, generosity, purposefulness, solidarity, connection, and almost a sense of joy.

Disasters are the ultimate disruptor. They knock our expectations and experience for a loop. They can free us up, temporarily causing us to let go of what we thought mattered and open us up to seeing the world through a different light. We re-align on what is truly important. In a way, disasters free us from a superficial paradigm and allow us to turn to our deep inner needs.

This isn’t some romantic notion, a call for us to experience disasters. It’s just a realization that from the outside looking in we often think the worst of humanity. But reality is when stripped to our core, we fall back on the core of our common humanity, at least for a little while.

-Steve

P.S. This was excerpted from my recent book Win the Inside Game.