Men's Lifestyle May 7, 2026 0 Comments

Why Lord of the Flies Is the Ultimate Mind Game You’ve Been Misreading All This Time — Unmasking Its Raw Power for Your Mental Strength!

Is it really nature or nurture that twists a boy into the villain of his own story? Jack Thorne, the brilliant mind behind last year’s gut-wrenching series Adolescence, dives headfirst into this timeless debate with his new adaptation of Lord of the Flies. You might think it’s all about kids losing their minds on a deserted island, but Thorne flips the script—suggesting these boys aren’t born savages; they’re molded by the world they came from. In a society that’s more divided and confused than ever, where hate feels easier than love, this reinterpretation is a wake-up call. Could the chaos on the island actually be a mirror reflecting our own social failures? And more importantly, is there hope for change? Spoiler: Thorne thinks yes — and he’s got a tattoo to prove it. LEARN MORE

7 min read

Jack Thorne has been thinking a lot lately about the evil that men do. It tends to start with boys, and it’s nourished by misunderstanding. The screenwriter’s new adaptation of Lord of the Flies has much to say about both.

Thorne penned last year’s groundbreaking and devastating series Adolescence, which shocked viewers with its exploration of a 13-year-old boy accused of unspeakable violence. What leads someone so young and seemingly innocent so far astray? It’s an enduringly vital question, one that also haunted the late Lord of the Flies author William Golding, whose 1954 novel focused on a group of boys marooned on an uninhabited island after a plane crash. With no surviving adults, and no rescue in sight, the boys form a crude society that all too soon succumbs to cruelty and bloodshed.

Thorne’s four-part series just debuted on Netflix, and it’s a testament to the power of Golding’s narrative that the story still has the power to rouse controversy 70 years after its debut. Most readers believe Golding meant to highlight the innate brutality that emerges when human beings are left to their own devices in a place where there are no rules, enforcement, or morality to protect the weak from the strong. Lord of the Flies is seen as a Darwinian testament: deep down in our biology, we are savages, and we must be taught—or rewired—to behave with kindness, respect, and mercy.

Thorne believes that interpretation is nonsense. “I don’t think this is about boys in a state of nature. I don’t buy any of those sorts of arguments,” he tells Esquire.

In fact, he sees it somewhat the opposite way. “This is not about who we are when we’re at our essence,” Thorne says. “It’s about a group of kids that come with a culture and a socialization that they then reenact on the island. They are products of their parents.”

In other words, it’s nature vs nurture. The bad code that leads to mockery, meanness, and ultimately all-out war in Lord of the Flies is not embedded in the boys’ DNA. Instead, it was imprinted on them by the civilization and society they left behind. It’s still a dire warning, but one that comes with a bit more hope in it. Maybe we can change. Maybe we can do better.

J Redza/Eleven/Sony Pictures Television

Following Adolescence, creator Jack Thorne turned his attention toward a literary classic: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. “I tried to get the rights to do this 15 years ago, but I don’t think it quite would’ve had the same resonance as it does now,” he tells Esquire.

This new version of Lord of the Flies comes at a time when young people—especially boys—are feeling adrift. “I tried to get the rights to do this 15 years ago, but I don’t think it quite would’ve had the same resonance as it does now,” Thorne says. “We’re living in an age of hate—where it is easier to hate than it is to love, where it is easier to decide on difference than it is to see similarity. We are dividing ourselves and extremism is on the rise. Golding was writing about a time of unparalleled extremity.”

But he adds, hopefully: “I don’t think we’re in that place yet.”

The troubling trajectories are hard to ignore, however. Boys are learning all the wrong moves from influencers and activists. Our most prominent political leaders regard selfishness as strength, arrogance as confidence, and common sense as a joke. That isolation—think of it as an island—is reinforced by widespread dismissal of the worries, troubles, and dreams of young men rather than supporting and encouraging positive models of behavior for them to follow.

“I find it very troubling that you cannot talk about masculinity anymore without talking about toxic masculinity,” Thorne says. “It’s like the word ‘toxic’ is now continually applied to the front of it. Actually, masculinity is a prism and we need all the colors of that prism. We need to have writing that’s talking about every aspect of it because when you are growing up, like I did with this book, you need things that feel like they express aspects of you. That’s where you find safety and that’s where you find learning. And that’s where you find hope sometimes.”

lord of the flies season 1 episode 101 photo credit lisa tomasettielevensony pictures television

Lisa Tomasetti / Netflix

Lord of the Flies follows a group of boys who are stranded on an island following a plane crash. Quickly, factions form and their little society falls apart.

Thorne sees Adolescence and Lord of the Flies as companion pieces, and not just because they were written at the same time and then shot simultaneously. “These two do sit together and they do speak to each other. They’re also very different, and they’re speaking about a different stage in a boy’s development too,” he says. “One thing that was crucial to us in [Lord of the Flies] was that all the kids were pre-adolescent. That bit hadn’t happened to them yet. They were boys, real boys.”

Adolescence is about the warping effect of the Internet, social media, phones, and other technological influences that deliver noxious messages into young minds and their out-of-sight guardians. None of that exists in Lord of the Flies, but Thorne notes that the stranded boys’ story “is speaking to a certain rage and to a certain confusion” that is the same.

“The two do sit in a similar bracket in terms of trying to capture how difficult it is to be a boy, how complicated it is to be a boy, which is something that will always fascinate me,” Thorne says.

Lord of the Flies director Marc Munden (The Sympathizer, The Secret Garden) confirms Thorne’s theory that kids of that age already understand a lot from what they’ve absorbed in their short lives. He had to manage over thirty of them—all between the ages of 5 and 12—during the production.

“They came to it and all of them understood that sort of playground bullying,” Munden says. “They all understood who these characters were, who these archetypes were anyway, before they put their own stamp on it.”

The director says this wasn’t something he had to impart. The kids already knew it “just from life, from being.”

Munden agrees with Thorne’s belief that Lord of the Flies has been misinterpreted over the years as an indictment of humanity as inherently corrupt. “I think boys have the capacity for violence and bad behavior, but they also have the capacity for reason and good,” the director says. “I don’t believe that this is an exploration of toxic masculinity in a nascent form. This does have a tragic timelessness, but it’s about selfishness and bullying running unchecked. It’s about misplaced loyalty. It’s about all the things you see in the world today in a perfect storm. It’s not an inevitable result of a bunch of boys coming together.”

J Redza/Netflix

Lord of the Flies director Marc Munden (above), who managed over 30 child actors on an island to film the Netflix limited series.

When Thorne is asked how Lord of the Flies might be different if it were about a group of girls stranded on an island instead, the writer just laughs. “They’ve done it—Yellowjackets!” he says. Fair enough. Say what you will about Golding’s boys—they didn’t succumb to cannibalism.

Thorne believes the presence of only boys or girls does make a difference in behavior. “Single-sex is very important, and I don’t quite know why,” he says. “The fact that it’s one gender, it changes things. But it’s also about this specific group of boys that Golding’s writing about. If it was a different set of boys or girls at a different time, if these kids had grown up in the ’60s or the ’70s, would they behave in this way?”

He notes that people love to dispute Golding’s story by noting that a group of boys from Tonga became stranded on an uninhabited Polynesian island in 1965 and managed to survive just fine for more than a year until their rescue. “They are continually suggesting these Tongan boys on this island proved that Golding’s story was wrong,” says Thorne. “They managed to make a beautiful society and they actually got on really well through the whole experience. But how they were socialized is very different to how a group of British boys were socialized in the ’50s.”

It’s very different still from the messages boys are sent today. Stories like Lord of the Flies and Adolescence are sounding an alarm. “We should be asking ourselves what the hell are we going to do for this new generation that are under more economic threat than any generation has been in for a long time?” Thorne says.

“They’re struggling to get jobs,” he adds. “Environmentally, they’re in difficulty. And we’ve socialized them using phones and the Internet. How we help them navigate their way out of that, so that they make a world better than the shitty one we’ve made, is an ongoing problem that I hope we find answers to.”

J Redza/Netflix

“We should be asking ourselves what the hell are we going to do for this new generation that are under more economic threat than any generation has been in for a long time?” Thorne tells Esquire.

So what counts as good reinforcement? If the children of Lord of the Flies absorbed their warlike natures through cultural osmosis, and the boy in Adolescence is warped by misogynistic rage bait delivered via algorithm, what are the positive influences that can help a young person grow up honorably?

It turns out, those stories exist too. You just have to find them, share them, and talk about them. As Thorne sees it, the unlikely third companion piece to Lord of the Flies and Adolescence is a movie from 1982 about another isolated boy who chooses to model kindness and caring—even though he is starved for it himself.

“E.T. changed my life,” Thorne says. “I was a lonely kid and Elliott was a lonely kid. It’s a beautiful portrait of loneliness.”

Even as a boy, he says he recognized in Steven Spielberg’s film “the idea that there might be someone out there that could see me and feel the feelings that I felt.” That’s the amazing thing about E.T., he says. “E.T. doesn’t just become his friend—he becomes someone that feels as Elliott feels. And when you are as intensely lonely as Elliott and I were, the idea that there’s someone that might feel the same way is such a powerful idea.”

That’s called empathy, and it’s something that everyone expects but almost no one teaches. There are many such stories that can show kids, especially boys, how to reorient their points of view by imagining what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes. “That’s the stuff that I want to reach for,” Thorne says. “And that’s the stuff that I love consuming myself.”

He holds up his wrist to show a tattoo of E.T.’s parting words: “Be Good.”

It’s a simplification, maybe. But for the boys from Adolescence and Lord of the Flies, the power of those two words could have changed everything.