Lord of the Flies on Leadership (Post 1 & 2)

Being a leader is a funny thing. Most people expect leadership to amount to happiness, being liked, and an overwhelming amount of appreciation. Leadership is not all that it is cracked up to be.

"The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant." -Max Depree

Depree describes how different stages of leadership can be very opposite of each other. To me, the "in between" is when things fall apart. Each leader has a way that they want things to go. He has already defined this, and spoken to his followers about it. The success of the overall running of the proposed plan lies on the followers. After all, one person with out support, cannot over rule two people with the rest of the world backing them.

Leaders and followers are constantly competing for each others roles. They want "power". Power as described in the dictionary means the ability to do or act and the control over other people. People strive for this. The European Journal of Social Psychology describes this yearning as "strivings to increase one's sense of agency (personal power) by decreasing dependence on others, rather than by strivings to increase power over others (social power)". On page 102 of Lord of the Flies, Jack and Ralph are competing for their position in a hunt to find the beast. Jack tells Ralph "This is a hunters job." Ralph replies by saying "This is more than a hunters job, because you can't track the beast. And don't you want to be rescued?" Ralph reiterates his point many times by saying the simple line "Don't you want to be rescued?" The competition between Ralph and Jack brought strain on the island. People did not know how they were supposed to feel. Deep down inside, they wanted the power that Ralph and Jack were competing for.

On page 117 in Lord of the Flies, Ralph and Jack are faced with the dilemma to give some of their earned power to someone else named Piggy. Ralph made the decision that it was best for the group to return to the main camp and shelters rather than continue searching for the beast. If they were to have continued searching,  Piggy would have been left to watch the small children called littleluns. Piggy would have taken a small amount of control. The earned leadership was hard for Ralph and Jack to give up.

Jack spends the majority of the book fighting for power with Ralph. Jack wants to be chief: he wants the control that Ralph has. On Page 127 in Lord of the Flies, Jack says "I'm not going to play any longer. Not with you. I'm not going to be apart of Ralph's lot- I'm going off by myself. [...] Anyone who wants to hunt when I do can come too." Jack had reached a breaking point for himself. He had mixed views with Ralph on the ways that they should survive. I believe that Jack had finally thought he would be better off on his own where he could control his own impulses and rely on himself completely. This follows completely what the European Journal of Social Psychology states that the yearning for power is. He wanted to have things his way. But he wanted people to follow him and take part in what he believed. Jack was tired of relying on Ralph for guidance and trust.

The Lord of the Flies displays the competition between two similar people. We can not accept to come second as a human; we yearn to be first. It is not possible to not be dependent on other people yet we cannot accept that fact. When a person can not accept being second, power falls apart.

The Lord of the Flies models my assumption that power must fall apart completely. The children try to create a society similar to their previous one: the one that they believe is perfect. The children create rules and traditions similar to those of the normal world. Together, the children began to run a successful government. Jack's inablitiy to not have complete power destroys this government. The children are put in split decisions that none of them are capable of handling. Until they are rescued, they are in a form of war.

A blogger on the Huffington Post suggests that "A service is inaugurated today and four weeks later it already begins to lose quality and is restricted" This is what happened in the case of the children on the island; everything became normal for awhile and then it was not important. At first, the kids strived for normalcy but once it was there, they did not care about it.

As individuals, we strive for power, and for independence. In order for everyone to be happy with a society, it must fall apart. There is no place that everyone is truthfully happy. Author William Golding shows this through the main characters in the book Lord of the Flies; Ralph and Jack.

Role of Fear Vs. Role of Hope

Fear and hope play an important role in the way we live and our everyday lives. Our fears send us in a certain direction in making decisions in our lives, but so do our hopes. Fear and hope intertwine. The society that we live in, instills fears such as punishments but not only do they imply fear, hope in form of reward is always there.

Seth Godin wrote an article about the hope that the market brings us. He says that "What marketers sell is hope. The magical thing about hope is that it makes everything work better, every day get better, every project work better, every relationship feel better." In this blog post, Godin is describing the American Dream . The American Dream requires hopes for better things.This the reason why our ancestors came to America. In order for us as human beings to be happy and successful, we need to turn to hope for encouragement. Whether our encouragement is our salary, a win, a relationship, or the hope for something to not happen.

When we hope for something to not happen, we are fearing that it will happen. Nobody can be fearless. Not even heroes. In an article written by James R.Fleming about the book What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and Our Society, he describes a hero as "someone who rises above his or her fears and limitations to achieve something extraordinary." We can all be a hero. In order to achieve this mass of success, we must discover our fears, defy them, and hope that everything from that point on will come in our favor.

Even though Fear and Hope are opposite emotions in how they effect us, if we have one, we must have the other. In a discussion over the book Hiroshima, Mallory Rabehl stated that "Fear is the initial thought. Hope comes next." she said that "you act first in fear and next with hope that it will be okay." When lifeboats are put on passenger ships, the company is fearing that if there is an accident then the lives on the ship will be at risk. By putting lifeboats on the ship, they are hoping that if something bad happens, the life boats will be there to protect the people. The book Unbroken demonstrates this. This book is a story of survival Louie Zamperini. The plane that Louie is flying in, is going down in the middle of the ocean. Thankfully, the plane carried an inflatable life boat that saved his life. In this situation, everyone of the plane faced death. They hoped for survival. With a mixture of luck and perseverance, Zamperini  makes it out alive.

The world that we live in, influences the hopes and fears that we have. It manipulates our emotions. This is something that we cannot control. We can barely control our personal fears and hopes let alone defy all of them. Our hopes and fears control our personality, whether we are the hero or the bystander, whether we are looking for a positive or negative outcome (rewards, punishment), and the quick decisions that we make in a time of fear. Hopes and Fears are intertwined by all of these reasons. The emotion is unavoidable.