ORWELLIAN EXPERIMENTS

George Orwell's novel, 1984, sounded an alarm against a government dystopia run by Big Brother. Cameras were spying on citizens. Armed police forces kept citizens in line. There was a single groupthink.

The rigid society was made by taking away everyone’s free will with the power of fear.

That seems to be the basic formula for the island.

And since Dharma has tenets of militarism at its roots, one could assume that the island was set up for various experiments on behalf of the government, or its power elite.

Elections are messy things. Sometimes an outsider wins. Elections are expenses. Politicians feel it is beneath their stature to beg for campaign donations. If you can make the election process more of a show than a real democracy, by imposing a strict code of conduct on everyone, the authoritarian leaders will win.

But how do authoritarians go about crushing the independence of their people, especially in countries like the United States were individualism is treated as a sacred value? You start experimenting on human subjects on how to reshape their thinking to conform with a new order.

You prey on the weakest links in society: the loners, the malcontents, the criminally inclined anti-social types who do not fit into the parameters of the American Dream. LOST's main character list is filled with these types of people.

You take the disenchanted and disenfranchised individuals and make them believe that the "group" is their new family. That was what Locke was searching for his entire life. In some respects, Ben was also searching for a "better" family unit. Kate was running away from her family. Sawyer was trying to avenge his lost family innocence. 

So the island was a series of human experimentation programs. Room 23 was clearly a mind control station. Another station just spied on the other stations - - - using paranoia and information to manipulate others. 

But the biggest motivator on the island was fear. The unpleasant, highly charged emotion of dread and pain is known to be an easy way to change a person's attitude or behavior.

If anything could be said about the LOST ending, in the context of reshaping the individuals to identify and relate to the group of island survivors proves the point that the island can bring different people together, change their principles, free will, associations and connections into one happy family unit.