The Catcher In The Rye and Lord of The Flies

I give high school level literature / mandated reading a lot of shit for a lot of reasons.

One of them is that - more often than not - the English teachers who mandate the reading of every assigned book either do not care about the material, or they misunderstand the material.

I read both "The Catcher In The Rye" and "Lord of The Flies" in Sophomore and Junior year respectively. I had the same teacher both years, and he was the kind of guy who would give out participation grades for everything.

I digress.

He hyped up "The Catcher In The Rye" as a big, controversial, novel that was at the center of discussions about how far "too far" was for high schoolers - in doing this he really showed his age.

For reference, a few people 50 years ago went off their rocker and shot some people and a superficial commonality between them was that they had read "The Catcher In The Rye".

I'll keep this brief, the entire story is about a man named "Holden Caulfield". He's young, he's directionless, and he's depressive. Nothing makes him happy, not drinking, not taking trips down memory lane - at one point he goes to the dingy side of town and gets a hooker, primarily because he's lonely, and he doesn't have sex with her and instead just tries talking to her. The pimp shows up, demands the rest of the money he owes her - for a job she didn't do in full, mind you - beats him up and robs him when he doesn't pay.

The title comes from an idea that he has about a group of kids playing in a rye field next to a cliff. He seems them running towards the cliff, and he wishes that he could be "The Catcher In The Rye" to save them from going over.

To make a long story shorter - the story is about a man who either refuses to grow up, or cannot in some way mature, and his desire for some kind of companionship in this self-destructive lifestyle.

He sees adulthood as "going over the cliff".

I view "The Catcher In The Rye" as a sort of proto-depression porn for boomers. For the record, I know it wasn't written by a boomer, and I know that the boomers were very young when it was first published - but it gained popularity when they were in their prime. I digress.

I'd like to take a quick tangent and tie in "Lord of The Flies" to all this.

The book's premise is simple - a group of boys wind up marooned on an island, and quickly revert to a more primitive type of society where they are both brutal and childlike in their day to day lives. A rigid hierarchy forms where the boy who provides them with meat is hailed as a hero, and anyone who opposes his will is marked as an enemy. Eventually, this all spirals into an event where one of the boys - Piggy - gets killed.

The book, at it's base, is about how fragile society is and how quickly we could revert to a chaotic, caveman-esque, lifestyle - complete with the violence inherent to it - if enough people were to reject the small responsibilities we take for granted which keep society civil.

I wish to tie both of these in to talk about a through line in both of them that many people seem to miss.

Societies can only ever function in the long term if the children eventually become adults.

On it's face, that's obvious - but we see herein - in this present day and age - a great problem with man-children (and as well - woman-children) proliferating in excess.

Adults who do not see themselves as adults, or conduct themselves as adults, is a civilizational threat.

What does "conducting one's self as an adult" even mean?

It means understanding that the ball MUST be rolled forward, and that it's one's duty to start pushing in any way, shape, or form.

All of society was built on the backs of those who came before - it's this sort of momentum that allowed such exponential growths in technological capabilities in the 1900's. It was less than 70 years between the first flight in North Carolina, and the Moon Landing. Realistically speaking, had that momentum been maintained, we would've already had permanent lunar bases, and likely at least one generation of Lunar-Americans already born and thriving.

But the boomers stopped pushing, and then Gen X wasn't told to start pushing, and then pushing became "uncool", and now we're all here - and many people in our generation (myself included) wish that they had kept pushing.

The generations which had the reigns before the boomers did everything they could to carve out a good life for themselves and their families. They made safe neighborhoods, kept land in the family, saved up for generations to elevate their offspring out of poverty, and did everything to keep families together.

Then the boomers got their turn, they sold the farm, fried their brains on acid, turned cities into shitholes full of crime, and belittled the later generations for not wanting to clean up their mess.

All of this is to say - the boomers are ultimately a childish generation, and that has caused most of the problems our modern society faces.

Much of this boils down to the need to define childhood as a time when one does not feel the weight and burden of serious responsibilities - or at least, a time when they shouldn't feel that weight - and defining adulthood as a time when one MUST be made to shoulder that weight and carry that burden of serious responsibilities - lest one become a "man-child" or a "woman-child".

Moving forward with this in mind, it paints a different picture than the one most put forward when reading "The Catcher In The Rye". Holden may be a sympathetic character - he's depressed and longs for simpler times when the trees were still tall and he was care free - but his continued pattern of childish self destruction - as well as his deep-seated want to prevent others from growing up (because "Misery loves company") is a negative societal force which has the capability of making everything worse for everyone else. His ideas and lifestyle breed stagnation and societal decay.

In this sense, it's the mentality that Holden has in "The Catcher In The Rye" which would inevitably lead to a backslide into childish barbarism - like the sort we see in "Lord of The Flies".

In this, Holden takes on a sort of villainous framing in my mind.

I'll end this off with as short of a thought experiment as I can.

If I were to live the sort of life I wanted to live when I was 11 - I would gorge myself on hyper-processed slop and junk food daily, I would sleep in, stay up late, never get any work done, I would probably only shower when I had mud or other substances on me, I would never do laundry, I would never get a job, and I would have two televisions on constantly - one for South Park and video games - and the other for porn.

That is the kind of decadence that leads to total civilizational collapse in less than a week if adopted on a wide enough scale.

There are far worse fates than "growing up".