I believe that children are the future. As Marx said, we need to teach them well and let them lead the way, show them all the beauty they possess inside. Maybe it was Hayek who said that.
One way or another, this sentiment is the basis of the BBC’s most recent social experiment, Lord of the Flies (BBC One, Sunday), an attempt to build an all-child community on a remote island.
It’s certainly worth a shot. It’s an experiment in screen-free, free-range parenting. And it’s quite idyllic, really: not a phone in sight, just young people living in the moment while being watched by judgmental insects and birds, and the occasional corpse of an adult.
The hero is clearly Jack, an imperious young toff who arrives with a phalanx of strapping uniformed supporters. (They’re part of a choir.) Jack understands that power is there for the taking and that it’s in his very nature to rule.
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Look, who else is going to do it? A bunch of slack-jawed toddlers who are clearly meant to be a metaphor for the common man and who spend most of the time just loafing around the seaside?
Yes, Jack will surely be crowned Lord of the Flies once the show comes to an end. (I’m a little unsure of how the format works.) He has the vision thing and a commanding presence. He’s not great on the fine detail, but, in fairness to him, that’s all very boring.
That’s the preserve of another character, called Piggy, who is constantly going on about how they should collect food and signal for help and ensure good sanitation and find water blah-blah-blah. You won’t believe how much he goes on.
“The important thing is we care for the littluns,” he says at one point.
“Why should we care for the littluns?” Jack replies, reasonably – and indeed it’s clear to me, even from this distance, that some of the littluns have good eatin’ on them and that Piggy should mind his own business and not get in the way of Jack’s “littluns farm” or whatever else the market might have planned for them.
At another point Piggy waffles on about how the pilot of their crashed plane, whose corpse they find atop a mountain, deserves a Christian burial. Jack has the body flung from the mountain instead. Jack gets things done and tells it like it is. He’s the sort of child you can imagine having a pint with.
Nor does Piggy understand that the form of centralised command economy he wants to establish died with the last century. Now is the time of thrusting entrepreneurs like Jack. If we bring Piggy’s proposed reforms and regulations to the island (or indeed to this island) it will prevent growth and disincentivise wealth creators like Jack.
Oh, there’s also a character called Ralph, who is a centrist. That’s all you need to know about Ralph, really. He lives slap bang in the middle of the Overton window at all times, and he gets to pretend he’s in charge because Jack (the army) and Piggy (the civil service) let him.
His personality is what you get when you add Jack and Piggy’s personalities together and split the difference. That’s basically how centrism works. (At the start of each week, we members of Ireland’s centrism planning committee split the difference between all sorts of positions and then distribute the results to the nation’s pundits and policymakers.)
Before long everyone is ferally chasing and trying to murder a baby pig (I thought fondly of my own nephews), and the littluns start spreading a rumour about a monster in the forest. (You can’t prove there isn’t a monster, so as a centrist I have to take this seriously.)
By the end of the episode the boys are lighting a fire in order to attract the attention of passing rescuers. Piggy keeps saying they shouldn’t be making the fire too big, because they’re so near the tree-line, and that they shouldn’t be using rotten branches, because they spark blah-blah. You know what he’s like.
Anyway, soon the whole forest is on fire through no fault of anyone’s, and the bigger boys have to protect the littluns from the flames (which feels like interference in the market to me).
Then Piggy starts obsessing over the fact that they can’t find one of the littluns. He’s certainly not going to win Lord of the Flies with that attitude. He should be focusing on the positive, on all the littluns who didn’t disappear. He needs to stop talking down the island’s burgeoning economy. The market is, in fact, on fire right now.
I have just realised that, from another perspective, Lord of the Flies is not a scripted reality social experiment at all but a Jack Thorne drama adapted from William Golding’s dystopian novel about marooned schoolboys.
Thorne, who wrote Adolescence, is once more exploring the boundaries between civilisation and chaos, and Marc Munden, the series’ director, marshals a very talented young cast and a gorgeous location. The storytelling is slow and lyrical and the cinematography is beautiful.
On reflection, it’s possible that socially conscious, kind, working-class Piggy is the hero of this story not cold, aristocratic, grasping Jack, who is, I now see, ruining everything with his entitlement and greed. They don’t really write allegorical stories like this so much any more. It feels a bit painfully on the nose, to be honest.
Speaking of aristocrats on strange islands, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s less famous brother Charles, a king by trade, has a documentary on Prime Video. It’s called Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision, and it’s all about the British monarch’s ongoing interest in environmental issues. It’s the latest in a wave of documentaries controlled by their subjects, so it has all the energy of a beautifully produced corporate video. The documentary team quite literally stan a king.
Narrated by Kate Winslet, it examines Charles’ forays into ecological activism and organic farming from Dumfries to Afghanistan. These are all worthwhile projects that closely involve local communities, but it’s hard to shake the whiff of top-down noblesse oblige from the whole endeavour.
Charles’ alternative to capitalism’s wanton destruction seems to be a form of benign feudalism and not, for example, an autonomous workers’ collective. This shouldn’t be surprising. He is a king. And as far as I know he hasn’t yet gifted the land he owns to the people living on it.
In fact, on some level I suspect he cares about the environment exactly because he owns so much of it. I also suspect that a few more compelling documentaries about Charles’ family are in the works.
