The main characters of Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s gripping post-war novel, were children evacuated for refuge from wartime British cities that had fallen under indiscriminate Nazi bombardment. En route, their plane, shot down by a Luftwaffe fighter, crashed on a remote and uninhabited island, killing the pilot, and leaving the young castaways alone to organize their survival and fend for themselves.
The book has sold 150 million copies since its publication in 1954 and has passed from hand to hand to captivate many millions more. High school English classes worldwide made it required reading. Theater productions and radio dramas adapted the unsettling story. A feature film appeared in 1963. Various literary award organizations named Lord of the Flies to their top 100 lists.
These readers and viewers and listeners quickly learned that things did not go at all well. The veneer of civilization wore disastrously thin as the stranded schoolboys began to fantasize that a murderous beast haunted the island. A conflict with the group’s leader, a slap across the face, shattered the glasses of the island’s resident moral conscience and intellectual, rendering him friendless and half-blind.
The group soon crossed the thin border into savagery during a hunt for a feral pig. Id forces ran loose. In the book’s most lurid scene, the boys gather around the wounded animal to chant, “Kill the pig! Cut her throat!” The killing takes on the aspect of a psychosexual rite as a spear penetrates the squealing, terrified creature. The pig’s head, impaled on a stake, then becomes an object of perverse worship, a lord, as it attracts a swarm of flies.
Golding’s message stuck. Childhood, once reliably the domain of carefree innocence, was no more immune to madness and inhumanity than was the adult world that had given itself over to murderous war. Children had fallen from grace, along with the rest.
Scruple-Less in Seattle?
The memory of Lord of the Flies haunts a well-known and often-cited social psychology investigation from 1976, the “trick-or-treat” study, that pointed to disturbing tendencies toward “de-individuation” and the weakening of moral responsibility in groups.
Here was the investigation’s design. A group of Seattle researchers set up an experiment, a kind of trap for Halloween trick-or-treaters who had been left with an inviting but unsupervised basket of candy.
Of one cohort, the host asked the children’s names, if they were from the neighborhood, and who their parents might be. She didn’t ask any question of the second group she invited inside before disappearing and leaving them with the candy but with an instruction not to take more than one piece.
An observer, hiding, noted whether the children arrived alone or in groups, and tallied the lawful trick-or-treat taking.
Guess What Happened?
Yes, guess what happened. In the unsupervised anonymous group, 6 in 10 took (stole, the researchers concluded) more than one piece. The group who had identified themselves only broke the lady’s rule one time in five. And as for those who arrived alone, they took a second piece only one time in ten.
The researchers’ conclusion? Anonymity leads to moral laxity and group perfidy. To strip away authority and supervision is to invite crime. But…
However straightforward the circumstances seem and however unequivocal the results look in this clever experiment, there is trouble there.
Crucially, the researchers to failed account for the culture of Halloween celebration, for its celebration of mischief, for the confounding effects of guising and dressing as monsters and footloose tricky spooks, and for the longstanding tradition of accepting alms. Then there is their description of taking extra Halloween candy as a crime. And worse, critics charged, weren’t these children tempted unfairly, set up to fail, and encouraged toward transgression? Ummm. Duh…
Is Halloween Unsafe?
The half-century-old study fits snugly with a simmering and perennial moral panic over trick-or-treating. Not only are the bonds of civilization loosed in stories of roaming ghosts haunting the streets in these traditions, but the practice of trick-or-treating itself was held to invite criminality.
We have heard the stories of Halloween tampering as folklore and as media misinformation and awful warning. Frightful rumors of Halloween sadism persist. The lone, devilish pervert conceals razor blades in apples. Chinese agents of disruption conceal fentanyl in wrapped candy (this one from a U.S. senator, no less).
In response, groups have organized preemptive “trunk-or-treat” parties in well-lit parking lots or brought parties indoors at churches. Police departments urging extreme caution have recruited McGruff the Crime Dog to issue eight-page “safety kits.”
The Safest Night of the Year
Yet, outside of a few, isolated, bizarre, domestic-abuse related events and some lame pranks, authorities and researchers come up empty in looking for incidents of domestic terrorism at Halloween.
To explain this anxiety and fear that attends the holiday, we will look profitably toward the manufactured fear of stranger-danger or to the all-too-real fraying of person-to-person neighborhood social life.
As for Halloween itself, in fact, because parents usually accompany gleeful Halloweeners on the dark, October evening, of the 365 nights in a year, Halloween turns out to be the safest.
Comfort From the Real World
Golding’s searing story is still with us, but there is a forgotten but instructive real-life counterexample. In 1965 a group of adventurous teenagers from Tonga, the Pacific island nation, stole a boat and set sail. They shipwrecked on an uninhabited atoll, Ata, some 60 miles distant. And there they stayed for 15 months before being rescued by the crew of an Australian fishing boat.
In the interval they did not descend into violence or succumb to a sense of irrational threat. Instead, they found fresh water, built a shelter, cultivated a garden, shared food, resolved disputes, and ended each day in song and prayer.
The Punchline
Incidentally, our household has more than once inadvertently replicated the Seattle experiment. When Halloween gatherings obliged us to be elsewhere during the witching hours, we have left an untended basket of candy on the porch. “Take one. Only one! Or the goblins will get you if you don’t watch out!” the attached mock-scary note read.
And what do you know? In this diverse, urban neighborhood of ours, we always have found candy left over when we returned home.
