This is a pretty cool story. I wondered about the difference between Golding’s Lord of the Flies and the six boys stranded on Ata. How much of the tragedy in Lord of the Flies is more art imitating life, as William Golding appears to be a douchebag when relating to youth? How much of the success on Ata was related to having enough of the essentials? In the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Golding’s early life mentions, “ When he(Golding) was a teenager he attempted to rape a 15 year old girl.[10] ”. The Guardian article notes that Golding also beat his kids. The boys on Ata, I would like to think, would have kept civil in any other related stranding situation, but maybe they did well due to having ample resources to get by. Not always did they have a surplus of water or food, but they also never did need to resort to cannibalism or trade lives for resources. They had just enough and maybe that’s why it never went completely sideways on them.
Twitter was recently dragging Orwell, pointing out that Animal Farm and 1984 are awful books in which people are mean and evil because people are mean and evil. Orwell definitely had an axe to grind: the hippies lost the Spanish Civil War and the proles refused to honor the monarchy. "Bad people are bad" is a mathematical identity of our collective human monomyth. It makes for easier stories. "Conquistadors wiped out South America because they are bad" is much simpler than "privateers and adventurers with no treaty authority overreacted violently to an overwhelming military force desiring to sacrifice them for faction cachet within their own civil war". Our moral teachers cannot make their point if you start from the standpoint that everyone is a hero in their own movie.
Twitter can drag anything, and there will be a guaranteed quorum to go along with the dragging. The unfortunate things about twitter is that it has made joining the screaming masses as easy as pushing a button. There was a big blowup the other day about a dude taking a selfie with a giant machine gun slung over his shoulder. It didn't matter a single whit that the gun was easily identifiable as a prop by the fact that wood grain was visible even at low res. The mob was rabbling and it can only wear itself out like a screaming 2 year old after that. It's hard to blame Orwell for being a cynic. He was caught between ideals and reality like only a socialist of the Stalin era could have been. Koestler was another of those who turned himself in knots to hate Stalinism while trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Darkness at Noon could have been a really good book if it were written by Orwell instead of Koestler, as it focuses entirely on the concept of the Show Trial in the time of Stalin. I think, despite its boring prose, it's a really good book for our time and place (as is The Joke), because they highlight the extent to which political/ideological extremism is dependent on devouring its own, once it has vanquished external enemies (Kundera was another guy that got dragged on the internet a couple years ago--guess it happens to everyone eventually). I'm unconvinced after reading this piece, Golding's personality notwithstanding, that this story and Lord of the Flies are mutually exclusive. I think there's a big time math problem that arises quickly when numbers of people get big. Basically we're all playing a game of tit-for-tat, and when there are only 6 players, there may not be many defections, not enough to ruin group trust, anyway. A few bad acts or bad days can be just thought of as a few bad acts or bad days. When the numbers start to get bigger, the chances of having one true piece of shit in the groups become likely, and then when they get to maybe 50 or 100 individuals, it's probably a certainly. It doesn't take a genius game theorist to figure out how badly one bad actor can bend the game entirely to his will, since the whole exercise is entirely dependent on mutual trust. One Golding among the boys is enough to go from harmony to human sacrifice in short order.
I wonder too, how much their heritage/culture played a part. I've known many Tongans, and they are some of the most warm, selfless, and kind people I've known. They're very communal by tradition, and that lends itself well to a collaborative survival situation.
They are also very devout religious people. I know a LOT of Pacific Islanders because they love rugby, are particularly gifted at the sport, and there is a large community of them here in Seattle. They are genuine in their Christianity, unlike most self-proclaimed Christians I know. I suspect that played a role in their behaviour as well.
The Miracle of the Andes and the Donner Party are similar stories.