Put a few children on an island with no adults to supervise them. Watch from a distance what they do. In no time you will have to intervene in order to save them from themselves. William Golding wrote a novel on that theme. Lord of the Flies , the novel by the Nobel laureate, tells the story of some children who were marooned on an island. Soon savagery dominates their life. The benign Ralph loses to the bullying Jack. Evil triumphs. There is no childhood innocence. There is only the savagery that marks humanity essentially. Three years before Lord of the Flies was published, American literature was blessed with J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1954) which told the story of a 16 year-old boy, Holden Caulfield, whose dream was to preserve children’s innocence from the necessary corruption of adults. Holden ends up in the loony bin. One has to lose innocence if one is to remain sane in the human world. Growing up is necessarily to embrace evil or at least
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