human nature

Tristan da Cunha: The utopia that worked

From Freedom News UK

When I was a teenage frequenter of espresso bars the arguments about ‘anarchy – would it work’ enlivened the wait for the bus home from school. I held my ground – ‘yes it would’ – till that bloody film Lord of the Flies came out. Then I was subject to derision and the gleeful scorn of ‘I told you so – human nature’s not like that’ and without authority life would be ‘nasty, brutish and short’. “If it wasn’t for that PC Plod down the road,’ opined my best mate, ‘you’d kill us all for the next Coke’. I didn’t really see it like that but alas so it seemed as I read about massacres and mayhem on remote islands like Pitcairn and Clipperton. Maybe human nature wasn’t as benign and co-operative as I supposed and anarchy might not work after all.

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