There is something almost impolite about rereading Lord of the Flies in 2026. The book no longer feels allegorical. It feels documentary. What once appeared to be a grim parable about civilization’s thin veneer now reads like a cable-news panel trapped on an island with no moderator and unlimited testosterone supplements. The conch is drowned out by rage. Piggy is mocked for expertise. Jack wins because spectacle always beats procedure.
So it makes perfect sense that Jack Thorne wants to revisit Golding’s story for television now, in the age of grievance politics, algorithmic fury, and the global export of MAGA-style cultural warfare. Not because the story needs updating, exactly, but because the audience does. Golding wrote for a century still haunted by fascism and world war. Thorne is adapting for a world where people livestream the mob while insisting they are its victim.
The temptation with modern adaptations is usually to over-explain. Contemporary television often distrusts symbolism unless it arrives carrying a diagnostic report and three flashbacks. But Golding’s genius was always his refusal to flatter the reader. The boys are not corrupted by the island. They are revealed by it. Civilization, in Golding’s view, is less a moral achievement than a temporary administrative arrangement. Remove consequences and social shame, and people do not descend into barbarism so much as rediscover its pleasures.
That insight feels disturbingly current. The modern political atmosphere, particularly in the populist nationalist movements orbiting Donald Trump, thrives on the same emotional mechanics that animate Jack Merridew’s tribe: loyalty over truth, performance over governance, domination as identity. The chant matters more than the policy. The enemy matters more than the future. Fear is converted into entertainment and then sold back as purpose.
What Golding understood and what many liberal institutions still fail to grasp, is that people do not always want order. Sometimes they want permission. Permission to sneer, to simplify, to punish, to belong without reflection. The boys in Lord of the Flies do not merely abandon democracy; they become exhilarated by its collapse. The violence gives them coherence.
And yet the story’s enduring power lies in its refusal to pretend evil belongs only to one ideology or class. The island is not conservative or progressive. It is human. That is why every generation rediscovers the novel and believes it was secretly written about them.
A smart adaptation today would resist the urge to turn the boys into neat political avatars. No red hats. No tedious contemporary references. The point is subtler and more frightening than that. Social breakdown now rarely arrives as apocalypse. It arrives as aesthetics, memes, chants, tribal language, ironic cruelty metastasizing into actual cruelty. Democracies erode less from invasion than from exhaustion.
Golding’s island once seemed remote. Now it resembles the comment section beneath almost everything.
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