The memories of junior high English class are dominated by a statuesque brunette teacher and her tight sweaters. My love of books along with the wide-eyed innocence of adolescence and raging hormones motivated me to pay strict attention in her classroom.

That was where I met the legendary works of William Golding, Harper Lee and George Orwell. These books are dark, so we only delved into Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird and 1984 to a depth safe enough to understand them as simplistic, black-and-white fables.

The truth is that these three masterworks, written by two Englishmen and an American woman who lived vastly different lives, all arrive at the same terrifying conclusion: Civilization is a fragile veneer, truth is highly vulnerable, and innocence is a casualty of man’s inherent wickedness.

Decades of life experience strips away the insulation of innocent wonder. My 13-year-old niece asked for help with her reading comprehension, so I got copies of these classics for both of us and dove back in 45 years after my first reading.

The novels deal intimately with human psychology on massive dramatic stages. Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the psyche is the bedrock these stories are built upon. Each book deals with all three of the model’s components: the Id, Ego and Superego, but each centers its story on just one of these aspects.

This is why you should keep your college textbooks. Knowledge is far more valuable than a pony keg of Old Milwaukee.

Freud argued that the human mind is an ongoing battlefield between three competing forces: the Id (our primal, animalistic urges), the Superego (our moral conscience derived from societal rules), and the Ego (our conscious, reasoning mind). The books dramatize how human nature inevitably draws each of these forces into darkness.

Id: Fear of the ‘beast’

The individual psyche is laid bare in Lord of the Flies (Id). Golding maroons a group of civilized schoolboys on an island without adult guardrails. Their fear of a non-existent “Beast” drives them to savagery and murder. The horror of the book is the revelation that the evils they perpetrate are not the result of an external monster; it was inside them all along.

Superego: Churches and judges and laws

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (Superego) ramps this darkness up to the societal level by illuminating the human wickedness simmered to perfection over centuries of hate in the American South. The town of Maycomb, Ala., has churches, judges, and laws — all the things Golding’s boys lacked on their island — yet its collective citizenry still uses institutionalized cruelty to murder an innocent Black man.

Ego: Power to the party

The primal fear from the island and the institutional weaponization of hate from Maycomb are industrialized into a state apparatus in Orwell’s 1984. Inner Party member O’Brien defines true power while torturing the last vestiges of individuality, love and hope out of the book’s protagonist, Winston Smith. If the members combined their influence into one massive effort they realized they could conquer the individual.

They could eliminate … Ego.

The Inner Party understood that individual humans are weak, but shape a majority of them into one collective, terrifying organism, and they could dictate the very boundaries of reality itself by seizing control of truth, memory and history.

In 1984 the Party stole the words and their meaning — reality became whatever it said it was. The Party did not rule by democratic consensus; it ruled through terror and deliberate, brutal oppression by kicking humanity’s teeth in. The citizens could then be forced to believe that 2 + 2 = 5.

Right before our eyes

All of these novels explore the loss of innocence as an inevitable awakening. The question that I was forced to ask and answer was: Can any of this happen here and now? Suddenly I had to accept … that it is happening already.

Totalitarianism will not arrive overnight with tanks rolling through the streets of Prague.
In 2026, it slowly dissolves the institutions that keep the Beast of human cruelty at bay. The stabilizing pillars — local churches, neighborhood schools, community sports leagues, social clubs, civic organizations — are drying up and disappearing. This structure once gave us something to believe in. They taught us to trust ourselves and each other.

The beast of human wickedness thrives when church socials and bowling leagues are replaced by perpetually scrolling videos on our phones. People seek community in the darkness. They trade coaches and pastors for digital influencers. Flesh and blood neighbors are replaced by anonymous avatars in rabbit holes with no values or morals that nurture our most vile impulses.

The most jarring twist of the present that revealed itself on this journey is that no one had to force us. We surrendered our minds voluntarily. We outsourced critical thinking to algorithms designed to reward outrage, tribalism and conformity. Children hate their parents. Spouses lose their loyalty to each other. Corporations bleed profit from the veins of those who toil to support families.

Without healthy communities our worst instincts overcome us. We retreat to base tribalism while our Telescreens feed us what we want to hear and tell us what we want to think. People willfully discard empirical realities such as skyrocketing costs or crumbling infrastructure if the media system in which they reside tells them a comforting lie instead.

We feed the Beast by killing empathy.

‘Social truth’

Face paint on Golding’s island unleashed a primal savagery hidden deep within grade school boys. Modern-day boys do not need to be stranded on an island to regress into street gangs; just give them a smartphone. Social media is the ultimate face paint. Identities are hidden while avatars form online mobs fomenting violence and chanting, “Kill the pig! Cut its throat! Spill its blood!”

The objective truth was laid bare in Lee’s courtroom in Maycomb, but the jury chose a “social truth” (a white woman’s word cannot be doubted) over actual physical evidence. This complicity of cowardice feeds the beast when we stay silent in the face of workplace discrimination, cruelty, or corruption because we fear retribution from the crowd.

Whenever we cower in fear rather than speak the truth, every time we lie to ourselves to keep the peace we are saying that 2 + 2 = 5.

Far too many of us dedicate our lives to projecting an image that can be absorbed by the collective. We have come to believe that everyone is guilty so there is no one to blame at the expense of accountability and personal growth. Turn off the screen, step out of the online street gang and find the humility to face your true self. Truth is not a construct. It anchors our souls to hope.

The fragile, civilized veneer of this republic was purchased with blood. Our complicity of cowardice desecrates the graves of those who died from Gettysburg to the Middle East and many other places. It betrays the historical sacrifice of the generations of people who marched, fought and suffered trying to correct the foundational flaws that still stand in the way of loving our neighbors and true brotherhood.

It will not be external forces that defeat our civilization. We will have surrendered it to convenience and choosing the lies of the collective mob over the truth of personal integrity.