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APRIL 2020 BOTM - Lord of the Flies
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Today is the half-way mark for our BOTM. It has been a lot of fun reading your comments and watching them blossom into discussions. But aside from the novel, I want to know more about you.
Where do you read when you're reading this book or any book? Do you find yourself reading in different spots as a result of the quarantine?
I rearranged all the furniture in the master bedroom a couple days ago. I moved my small recliner in front of a window that overlooks the biggest tree in the common area. I usually read in my office, but now I read upstairs— in better view of the tree.
I used to read quite a bit whilst commuting to and from work - I don't miss the commute but I miss the time spent with a book. I read a bit every evening in bed before sleep and in the morning in bed on the weekends. Other than that I am at my desk (dining table) at home with a book in my hand and one eye on my emails in case any work comes in! We call that working from home.
Where do I read? I read ebooks at any moment when I am not occupied with something else. They are great for when I have to stand in line somewhere. I listen to audio books only when they are poetry since poetry is meant to be read out loud, and I read physical books anywhere around the house. My favorite places are on my deck which overlooks a marina and is generally comfortable and shaded in the summer and, of course, I read in bed before sleeping.
Reading physical books at bedtime is the best way for me to get a good night’s sleep.
One of the reasons I am always reading 3 books at once is because I select a different book for each area where I do most of my reading. The physical book sits next to my bed.
On my deck, I may read either a physical book or an ebook, but not the same one that is near my bed.
I listen to audiobooks and podcasts when doing activities outside such as walking or, in happier times, going to the beach. Of course, these are also good for when I am driving, but I am seldom in the car.
Lately, I have been pretty slow to finish books because so many of my recent choices have been quite long, but also because I have acquired a taste for podcasts about books, reading and literature.
Another, better reason, though, is that I am heavily into poetry right now. In fact, my “shelter at home” strategy for trying to do something thoughtful for others who are also confined is to select a poem to send them every morning. Generally, I add a few remarks about it (and frequently a little instruction, I was an English Major). This has been great for me because it causes me to review favorite poems and think about what draws me to them. It has been great for my friends and relatives who can, of course, merely delete my emails, but who instead have asked me to send the poems to other people they know.
As a “shelter at home” strategy this has also been rewarding because the people I send the poems to often call me to talk about them. These are much more enjoyable conversations that talking about the latest fatality tolls.
Sylvia wrote: "Warning - Lengthy Post: I'm a high school English teacher, and I have taught this book many times. My first (naive) year of teaching, I introduced this book to my 9th graders (ages 13-14) with the..."
I really like this idea! The students are still in a controlled environment, and the "experiement" takes place over just minutes...what a shame you had to discontinue it.
Well I'm finished. I think it could have been a bit longer to ramp up the tention. I also think that Rolph should have died. But, it was fascinating to see how the social situation degraded and how a new social structure, far more primative was put in place. It was definitely a disturbing book. I will never see tropical islands in the same way again! I listened to the audio version and it was read by William Golding himself which was a real treat. At the end he says that everyone must put their own ideas together on what the book is about. I'm really glad I got to read this book at last. :)
Ralph should have died!?? Harsh Kathryn, harsh! LOL!I agree with you that perhaps a little bit longer at the end to really ramp up the tension would have been good.
Really pleased I finally got around to reading this book too, if it hadn't been for this club god only knows when or if I would have finally got around to picking this up.
Mod
Kathryn, I felt the climax was extended as far as it could go, which is something you want in a novel. Of all the cast of characters, I loathed Ralph the most. The guy who wanted the utmost respect was the first to dish out insults—Piggy. I felt Golding needed to keep him alive so he could live with the guilt from his own mammoth epiphany. Imagine the lives of these kids after the rescue. Jack is a jerk and will always be a jerk. He will put on his metaphorical war paint again and again and march into adulthood, forging a successful life as a CEO or some other high position. I believe Ralph will live in a state of PTSD. I'll be surprised if he makes it to 18.
I'm just a sucker for a lot of tension. :) I definitely think you're right, Jack will be a CEO, gaining the most power possible. I also hated Reolph that's why I wish death on him. But, your idea of long torture is also welcome. I really feel sorry for the little kids, can you imagine attempting to go back to normal life. And I always felt sorry for the piglets, since Jack and his hunters kept killing the sows. I wonder if that is some sort of symbolism, like they are the children of war, left bereft of parents or something.
And I am done! Like Cheryl I probably would not have read this book but for this group but am glad i did. It is one I will not forget any time soon. This book has given me much to think about.My view of the characters difers from some of you. Kathryn, Cheryl and Daniel I would love for you to expand on your feelings about Ralph. Yes he did betray Piggy's trust in beginning, but their were many times he was Piggy's voice when let's face it no one was listening to him. I felt bad when Piggy was killed but it was his idea not Ralph's to go to Castle Rock. Piggy was so innocent in his belief that people would do what was right, just because it was right.
My real hate is reserved for Roger. Jack was a bully and mean to the bone but Roger, maybe not at the beginning but during the book evolved into a cruel, malicious character.
Anyway such are my thoughts, and thanks to whoever suggested this book it was a great read. And bonus he is a Nobel prize winner and I have joined a challenge to read 10 this year.
Paul wrote: "Where do I read? I read ebooks at any moment when I am not occupied with something else. They are great for when I have to stand in line somewhere. I listen to audio books only when they are poetr..."
Paul I love what you are doing with poetry. Such a wonderful way to share your love and you are right we all need something else to think of during these times.
My days are filled with words to a great extent. Like you I always have at least three books on the go in different formats, am taking professional development courses while I am being paid but unable to go to work as an educational Assistant, and also signed up for an extension course about gardening from Penn U. I recently turned my treadmill around to face the computer to get a bit more exercise in as isn't gardening season yet where I live. Oh and almost forgot my community's literary festival was to start April 17th and are going to have several sessions broadcast over facebook so by the end of this stay at home period a think I will need a break from the computer.
I want to wade into the Ralph comments here - I really liked Ralph, I felt he was the one character I could get behind. He might have been mean at he start (they are just children after all) but I felt he grew up over the course of this book and matured into someone who was essentially good and had a conscience. I also, like Connie, hated Roger. I hated Jack too, but Roger slightly more, he came across as a psychopath by the end of the book, he just wanted to hurt for the sake of it - true evil in my opinion.
Agree with what you said Daniel, sadly Jack would be at the top of his game as a big CEO in the future!
Daniel wrote: "Hello bookish community!Today is the half-way mark for our BOTM. It has been a lot of fun reading your comments and watching them blossom into discussions. But aside from the novel, I want to kno..."
One day my children, small but already curious and reflective, asked me "Mom, is there any place you don't read?"
I, too, will write anywhere.
Lately, I have been lucky with the weather and the freedom to not commute and dress for different occasions, so am free to read outside when it is sunny. I get to set my self up in front of my house above the town with its southern facing view over the Channel. The Easterly winds sidesweep the usual wind breaks of the common westerly winds and breezes. I have metal chairs a table which stay put in the stiffest of winds though the creeping sag of the terrain has set everything a bit tilted. Pens roll off, and papers flit away. Tea in a pot, mug at my side I read and annotate and enjoy or hassle with content as if with a friend or difficult interlocuter. Or read in the front room under the window in a low derelict arm chair that came with the house when we moved in. At the window in my room upstairs looking out over the town again but in any light and weather. In bed I do not read books, unless I 'used' a dense philosophy book to send me off in reverie and reflection to sleep. Now, I have taken to listening to an audio book as I drift off. I will have to learn to set the timer so I do not have to turn it off when I wake up and search for where I was before I faded.
I do not need to read in the toilet room anymore, though some reading material is there. My last venture there was the Constance Garner's translation of Bro.K which aggravated me to the point of researching why. I rectified this experience listening enthralled to Magarshack's translation in audio book. So, I read sitting, or lolling, or crouched in library aisles, or walking listening, or on a bus or train with kindle, or waiting for people, or in the space of being early for an appointment, or having found myself with a large block of time suddenly at hand as some event has shifted away..... Anywhere
I was very interested in Sylvia’s post about the lesson covering this book. That lesson and the lesson Sylvia got from teaching it has been around for years and has always been controversial. When I was Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction in a medium sized school district, I met often with various departments at our secondary schools. Once, a high school English Department actually discussed this project and this book. (Notice, it was the HIGH School). The reputation of this lesson, largely because it is SO intense and realistic, convinced them not to do it. As Assistant Superintendent, I was very happy that THEY made the decision and I did not have to intervene.
Daniel wrote: "How is everyone doing so far? I finished the book yesterday, and I totally blanked on the ending. I read this in middle school, and that was a long time ago. But I loved it, especially the last few..."Thanks for asking this question!
The parts where Piggy resonated the most for me was when they take his glasses or his "specs". I have pretty terrible eyesight and can barely see 5 inches in front of me. Reading about Piggy not being able to see and relying on Ralph to help him walk made me so uncomfortable. At one point when they are leading Piggy and he can't see he says "Am I safe?" gahhh! I felt that! A sense of panic not knowing what is around you...
My copy of Lord of the Flies has an afterword written by Lois Lowry, author of "The Giver" and "Number the Stars". I found her words were also published in the NY Times if anyone is interested: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/bo...Here was an interesting excerpt from the afterword:
"I am left with only one character whom I loathe, and will always. He appears only briefly — I leave you to find him on your own — and he above all the others makes me question what civilization actually means: a spotless uniform, a dignified posture and a set of elaborate rules? How dare he?"
Thoughts?
The quote by Lois Lowry that Victoria sighted is very insightful, yet I think it missed the point about the character she was describing ("I leave you to find him on your own"). That character (once found) is wonderful and I really think Lowry missed the point. That character displays the particular characteristics Lowry loathes is actually extremely well drawn! He represents the way a society manages to gloss over and deny its deeper social shames. Just as Jack's "tribe" represents everything that is reprehensible in society when it surrenders to a group mentality, it is a parallel to what leads to good men murdering other good men because they are wearing a uniform and are called 'soldiers' (or colored mud and called 'tribesmen'). Soldiers and pseudo-patriots have surrendered their own individual personal morality to become participants in wars.The so-called "patriots" are those who surrender to the rhetoric and flag waving that leads to stupid wars when led by men in "spotless uniforms and dignified postures." Those "spotless uniforms" lead to societies' greatest stupidities: wars.
How did Lowry miss that? That part of the book is a very, very skillful but short piece of social commentary by an author who knew full well what he was doing. It is not 'loathsome,' it is genius!
I only read audio books. So we have a massive study and in my corner is a huge desk with my laptop and other things on it, next to it is a recliner. This is where I sit and knit and listen to books. I didn't like Ralph because of firstly his treatment of Piggy. Then because he looks like the golden boy, he gets picked as leader. He has no idea what on earth to do with that responsibility and let's others dictate to him. Even the last stand when they went to castle rock was Piggy's idea, not Ralph's. Through out the book, he would put Piggy down and rather side with others against him when Piggy was his only true friend. I just found Ralph to be a weak character.
I totally agree about Rodger...a little psychopath in the making.
As I think my review of this book reflects ,I am really glad that I have read this book for this second time. It is far better than it was the first time through. In the first reading, I focused on the plot and storyline. (I think a lot of 5 star reviews are based on these factors rather than more sophisticated ones). On this re-read of the book, I was almost overwhelmed by the skill of Golding as a writer. He understood psychology, sociology, individual conscience and social conscience and how people behave in the absence of laws.
He also understood the differences in forms of leadership. The form Ralph showed was leadership, helping followers see a better vision and a final goal. He tried to get the boys to build shelters and keep a signal fire going because these were things that would be needed over time.
The kind of "leadership" Jack showed was actually "management," the pursuit of short term objectives addressing immediate needs sometimes at the expense of the greater long range goal.
Golding put all of his dealer and most sophisticated perceptions into a very brief and very powerful novel.
Recently, I waded through a 1300 page book entitled 1Q84 that offered none of the insight and brilliance of this small, short novel.
In "real life", our greatest lessons come from the brief but clear messages rather than the longer expositions. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address says in a few words what the other speakers that day could not say in hours; the 23rd Psalm pretty much sums up the very essence of the entire Bible story; our own Constitution says in few words what shelves upon shelves of law books fail to say in barrels of ink and tons of paper.
In re-reading this book, I have once again understood the value of re-reading really great books as a better use of time than reading new, unfamiliar and probably quickly forgotten lesser, more current books.
Mod
In the first reading, I focused o..."
I agree with Paul on the impact of these short but powerful narratives. Personally, it's always a sentence that bounces around in my head and lingers around long after the book is finished.
Mod
Victoria, I was secretly hoping for someone to bring up their experience wearing glasses. My vision—knock on wood—has always been 20/20, and I am very fortunate. I think Golding's writing shines through the most during those passages about Piggy's blindness. I am not discrediting his talent of fleshing out societal parallelisms but from a writing standpoint, he is a master at showing helplessness on the page.
Mod
Thank you for making this a memorable experience for me. I will not look back at April and think only toilet paper, masks, and sickness. Literature forces us to look outside our current situation, and that's a powerful thing. Reading is crucial right now, and book clubs help facilitate it. Next month, I encourage you to join Ian for A Tale of Two Cities.
For those of us still reading, post your thoughts in the thread. For those who have finished, continue to reflect and do the same. William Golding left the conversation open for a reason.
Hello everyone, I finished the book yesterday, so I guess I got the conch.
First of all, I'd like to point out how intense I thought this book was. When first reading it, I didn't notice how vivid and visual some of the scenes were. Was anyone else impressed by how fluid the story was? (I'm thinking especially about the last chapters, when they go to Castle Rock, and the final scene when Ralph is being chased while the Island is on fire - ironically creating the smoke he longed for throughout the book)
About the characters, I actually liked Ralph. Yes, he doesn't have a lot of leader's qualities, and yes he was rude to Piggy sometimes, but one most not forget that he is a child, who has been taken from his rich-kid life (I presumed, from the flashbacks he had), and has to deal with terrible situations, and eventually murder.
I don't think it would be easy for this kids to grow up after the experience they had. They definitely have life-lasting trauma.
Simon's death was the hardest part to read for me. I knew it was coming, and still I postponed reading that chapter for a while.
The death scenes portrait human nature very well: deep down, they all knew what had just happened, but they tell themselves it didn't happen, in order to continue living their "normal" lives, and pretend everything's fine.
Lastly I want to say that I really enjoyed reading this book with the group. I feel like I've learned much more than I'd have if I read it alone!
P.s: "The officer nodded helpfully.
- I know. Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island.” -- Genius
Thanks Vera, glad to see we have another member on Team Ralph! :o)I agree with a lot of your comments, and also about reading this book in a group, I got a lot more out of it than I otherwise would have done. Thanks to everyone for that.
This book made me sad and afraid when I read it at a young age. Golding like Hobbes was tortured by his conditioning in his times of horrids events of war. My review is instead an article from The Guardian. "The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 monthshttps://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman
Interview: ‘Our secret superpower is our ability to cooperate’
Sat 9 May 2020
For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other.
When I started writing a book about this more hopeful view, I knew there was one story I would have to address. It takes place on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. A plane has just gone down. The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can’t believe their good fortune. Nothing but beach, shells and water for miles. And better yet: no grownups.
On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, is elected to be the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is simple: 1) Have fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make smoke signals for passing ships. Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. The boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Before long, they have begun painting their faces. Casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.
By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island is a smouldering wasteland. Three of the children are dead. “I should have thought,” the officer says, “that a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.” At this, Ralph bursts into tears. “Ralph wept for the end of innocence,” we read, and for “the darkness of man’s heart”.
Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. This story never happened. An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 – his novel Lord of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more than 30 languages and hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century. In hindsight, the secret to the book’s success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?
I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.
I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? I wrote an article on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summer camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies. After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip ... Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”
Rutger Bregman: 'Our secret superpower is our ability to cooperate'
The article did not provide any sources. But sometimes all it takes is a stroke of luck. Sifting through a newspaper archive one day, I typed a year incorrectly and there it was. The reference to 1977 turned out to have been a typo. In the 6 October 1966 edition of Australian newspaper The Age, a headline jumped out at me: “Sunday showing for Tongan castaways”. The story concerned six boys who had been found three weeks earlier on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of ‘Ata for more than a year. According to the article, the captain had even got a television station to film a re-enactment of the boys’ adventure.
I was bursting with questions. Were the boys still alive? And could I find the television footage? Most importantly, though, I had a lead: the captain’s name was Peter Warner. When I searched for him, I had another stroke of luck. In a recent issue of a tiny local paper from Mackay, Australia, I came across the headline: “Mates share 50-year bond”. Printed alongside was a small photograph of two men, smiling, one with his arm slung around the other. The article began: “Deep in a banana plantation at Tullera, near Lismore, sit an unlikely pair of mates ... The elder is 83 years old, the son of a wealthy industrialist. The younger, 67, was, literally, a child of nature.” Their names? Peter Warner and Mano Totau. And where had they met? On a deserted island.
My wife Maartje and I rented a car in Brisbane and some three hours later arrived at our destination, a spot in the middle of nowhere that stumped Google Maps. Yet there he was, sitting out in front of a low-slung house off the dirt road: the man who rescued six lost boys 50 years ago, Captain Peter Warner.
Peter was the youngest son of Arthur Warner, once one of the richest and most powerful men in Australia. Back in the 1930s, Arthur ruled over a vast empire called Electronic Industries, which dominated the country’s radio market at the time. Peter was groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead, at the age of 17, he ran away to sea in search of adventure and spent the next few years sailing from Hong Kong to Stockholm, Shanghai to St Petersburg. When he finally returned five years later, the prodigal son proudly presented his father with a Swedish captain’s certificate. Unimpressed, Warner Sr demanded his son learn a useful profession. “What’s easiest?” Peter asked. “Accountancy,” Arthur lied.
Peter went to work for his father’s company, yet the sea still beckoned, and whenever he could he went to Tasmania, where he kept his own fishing fleet. It was this that brought him to Tonga in the winter of 1966. On the way home he took a little detour and that’s when he saw it: a minuscule island in the azure sea, ‘Ata. The island had been inhabited once, until one dark day in 1863, when a slave ship appeared on the horizon and sailed off with the natives. Since then, ‘Ata had been deserted – cursed and forgotten.
It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. 'My name is Stephen,' he cried. 'We've been here 15 months.' But Peter noticed something odd. Peering through his binoculars, he saw burned patches on the green cliffs. “In the tropics it’s unusual for fires to start spontaneously,” he told us, a half century later. Then he saw a boy. Naked. Hair down to his shoulders. This wild creature leaped from the cliffside and plunged into the water. Suddenly more boys followed, screaming at the top of their lungs. It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. “My name is Stephen,” he cried in perfect English. “There are six of us and we reckon we’ve been here 15 months.”
The boys, once aboard, claimed they were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the Tongan capital. Sick of school meals, they had decided to take a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm. Likely story, Peter thought. Using his two-way radio, he called in to Nuku‘alofa. “I’ve got six kids here,” he told the operator. “Stand by,” came the response. Twenty minutes ticked by. (As Peter tells this part of the story, he gets a little misty-eyed.) Finally, a very tearful operator came on the radio, and said: “You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it’s them, this is a miracle!”
In the months that followed I tried to reconstruct as precisely as possible what had happened on ‘Ata. Peter’s memory turned out to be excellent. Even at the age of 90, everything he recounted was consistent with my foremost other source, Mano, 15 years old at the time and now pushing 70, who lived just a few hours’ drive from him. The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were six boys – Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand.
There was only one obstacle. None of them owned a boat, so they decided to “borrow” one from Mr Taniela Uhila, a fisherman they all disliked. The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. Two sacks of bananas, a few coconuts and a small gas burner were all the supplies they packed. It didn’t occur to any of them to bring a map, let alone a compass.
The boys had set up a commune with food garden, gym, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire No one noticed the small craft leaving the harbour that evening. Skies were fair; only a mild breeze ruffled the calm sea. But that night the boys made a grave error. They fell asleep. A few hours later they awoke to water crashing down over their heads. It was dark. They hoisted the sail, which the wind promptly tore to shreds. Next to break was the rudder. “We drifted for eight days,” Mano told me. “Without food. Without water.” The boys tried catching fish. They managed to collect some rainwater in hollowed-out coconut shells and shared it equally between them, each taking a sip in the morning and another in the evening. Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean. These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.
The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with
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After the fire goes out, Ralph discovers that leadership is not about power but about responsibility. The power of leadership comes from trust, which often is given easily but then must be earned to be maintained, and teamwork in which the leader surrounds himself with people who compensate for his own weaknesses.
Leaders serve their groups, they don't control them. Managers control. Leaders emerge, managers are appointed. Leaders work from "personal power," managers work from "position power." Leaders share power. Managers exert power.
Jack exerts power using control. Control is a form of bullying and bullying sustains itself only if it intensifies.
Occasionally, Leaders need managers under them who control through bullying in order to save a sinking ship, but that alliance is doomed either to fail as an alliance or to fail as a savior. It can succeed only if short term.