Human Alignment and Influence
	Human beings are all, generally, born with the same alignment. We all have good and bad inside of us, but they each only reveal themselves in the correct situations. In his article “Why Boys Become Vicious,” William Golding offers his insights to human  nature, saying that everyone is innately savage and bad, and evil can only be held off, but never thwarted. He uses the brutal murder of James Bulger, age two, as an example of what the evil of boys can do. While his first thoughts may be true, there is an equal amount of good, and only under proper circumstances are these traits developed and evolved to create the human temperament.
	Golding believes that there are conditions under which evil flourishes, “chaos [being] one, fear [being] another” (Golding 2). People are clearly born with evil and the ability to harm others. If this were untrue, there would be no war, hunger, or greed in the world. People are born one way, with the capability for bad, and equally so, good. Golding seems to ignore this crucial point of humanity. If people had no innate good, they could never be anything but awful. While bad in people tends to reveal itself much more easily than good, it being much more easily spawned inside people, this does not mean people are not or cannot be good by human nature. By birth, people are apathetic.
The nature of evil itself is also looked into in the article. William Golding calls evil “far from simple,” as opposed to good, which “stands out in it’s simplicity” (Golding 1). Evil is, actually an extremely simple thing, with many facets. Evil in its simplest form is committed for survival. You can choose to be unjust or receive injustice. The same concept applies to good, with opposite choices. Savagery is a simple evil; mercy is a simple good. The darkness within people is, however, easier to access, mainly due to the reach and unavoidability of chaos. In chaos, people have nothing, and begin to “find cohesion merely in the joint fulfillment of their darkest impulses” (Golding 3). Golding himself points out how easy and simple chaos is, telling readers that “when people are afraid they discover the violence within them and when they are afraid together they discover that the violence within them can be almost bottomless” (Golding 3).
While William Golding may have had the correct ideas in “Why Boys Become Vicious”, he fails to acknowledge many key points of the matter of the debate. While what happened to James Bulger is certainly not simple, evil itself is, as is good. Each has many faces and degrees, but each one is merely a choice and a matter of influence. Who people are is defined by their experience, how they handle various events, and people in their lives. Everyone has the potential to be good or bad, but in the end, people just have different paths and different lives.