> suggesting that humans can't be that terrible
No, he's suggesting that children usually aren't that terrible. That a real scenario of ~50 unsupervised children (or adults), 99 out of 100 times, wouldn't play out that way. That something is possible does not mean it is the norm, and only those that can't grasp numbers (such as English majors) think otherwise. With such significant caveats, can one really say that the novel is about human nature in general?
You are pulling equally fictitious numbers out of your hat to defend your comfortable worldview, without even the benefit of extensive exposure to children as a schoolmaster, so how is your argument on any better level than Golding's?
> You are pulling equally fictitious numbers out of your hat
Am I? Ignoring the natural experiment the Guardian article retells, how often do self-supervised human societies descend into savagery or war among themselves? How often when they are smaller than 100 members (Lord of Flies is about a group of 50)?
Even without the <100 member criterion, only the most violent outliers of human societies reach a 1% yearly violent death rate [1]. So my "fictitious numbers out of my hat to defend my comfortable worldview" are actually the worst humanity is capable of (the average for the 20th century, with all the world wars, was 0.06%). Yet I'm not getting a Nobel prize despite being closer to the truth. I guess that's why he got it in literature, not a scientific field.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...