Egyptian ponderings and Skinneristic MIB by Universe

“They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt”

We see at some point after 1845 the Black rock nearing the Island. So MIB is referring to the fact that all the fighting, destroying, corrupting has already happened. Obviously there was more to come but I wonder just who were all these other people. How many of them and from how many time periods and by what means did they arrive.

There is a heavy Egyptian historical element on the Island, but it seems the Egyptians must have lived on the Island for quite some time. They constructed a huge underground labyrinth of tunnels and chambers, possibly the temple and the statue were also built by them. So does that correlate with fighters, destroyers, corrupters?

By comparison, our 815ers, some of whom are ‘supposedly’ important don’t seem to have built very much at all other than a beach camp and a church frame. The building of the statue must have been a colossal task indeed; hardly the sort of construction project that even the 815ers & the others combined could ever have done. So there must have been a large population resident there at some point, possibly slave-labour even. I have always assumed the Egyptians found or were brought to the Island like everybody else, but the more I think about it, in terms of what I have written here, that’s a hell of a lot of people to bring.

Perhaps some catastrophe did happen to them, perhaps they lost it and destroyed themselves, but I get the feeling from the scale of their building, they lived there for quite some time.
The engraving above the smokey-grate, clearly is a reference to the fact that people had been coming to be ‘judged’ there for quite some time. We know something happened to their civilisation because they are not around anymore, and we know that over time Jacob has been bringing people to the Island against the wishes of MIB.

Let’s just imagine for a moment that the Island is a tool of sorts for whatever experiment they have in mind "It only ends once" and that Jacob/MIB are the two custodians as such. Jacob believes in free will "You have a choice" whereas MIB prefers scare tactics and fear.
So I wonder if MIB was ‘lording it up’ literally over the Egyptians, coercing their conformity through fear, and perhaps this seriously impeded Jacob’s method i.e. to let people choose for themselves.

The references to B.F.Skinner in the orientation video may give us a clue to this. From Lostpedia:
“Freedom and free will in the common sense do not exist. Rather, freedom is a state where humans do not feel the controls that are being exerted over them and their behavior. He saw the perceived social problems (drug abuse, gambling, protests) of his day as due to mismanagement of the systems of control in society.

MIB would probably agree with Skinner, that the only way to obtain conformity and social control is by doing it for them and doing it in a way where they don’t fully understand the system of control you are using. He would see Jacobs methods as serious mismanagement with resutling social destruction.

Jacob would probably disagree with Skinner, and would say that the only way to obtain true conformity is to let them achieve it by their own choices. He gives them incentives. When he heard Hurley talking about seeing the dead as a DIS-incentive he said to him:
“You get to talk to the people you’ve Lost, seems like a pretty wonderful thing to me”

Seeing your lost loved ones is a very good incentive if you’re able to sense/realise that you are blessed with an opportunity and not cursed. That is obviously part of the test.
If wouldn’t be much of a test if you told people, as Jacob told Hurley, but I think it’s fair to say that Jacob needed Hurley to come back and that was reason enough to tell him.

So I think it’s possible that humanity is being judged for worthiness in the same vein as the plot-devices in Star-Trek 4 or The Day the Earth stood still, both featuring external judges who deem whether humanity survives or not. The reasons or storyline for why it’s happening could be manifold and I won’t attempt to guess it; but I think MIB’s Skinnerian methods were the source of his downfall and ever since that time, Jacob has been trying his non-Skinnerian methods.

From MIB’s point of view, he believes his method was correct and has had to suffer possibly thousands of years of Jacob bringing group after group to the Island and it has failed each and every time. "Still trying to prove me wrong" "It always ends the same"

Jacob is not deterred by the constant failures and whilst he had the upper hand over MIB he continued to bring people in his belief that humanity has it within them to make the right choice. "It only ends once and anything before that is just progres" "It takes a long time when you’re making a thread; I guess that’s the point."

I think it’s also very telling that MIB says:
“How did they find the Island?...You brought them here”

He doesn’t like or want people coming to the Island. So before Jacob was in charge, does that mean that NO-ONE came to the Island. Perhaps they already had their test-subjects/guinea pigs i.e. The Egyptians and THAT was supposed to be the gig. I think that could tie in with the fact the Egyptians seemed to be there for so long.

It’s Jacob who brings what MIB would consider ‘outsiders’ to the Island. No doubt this started after MIB’s fall from grace.

Finally, in a way, Ben murdering Jacob is almost like an overall metaphor for the battle between Jacob and MIB; Jacob’s method…to remind Ben he has free-will, a choice to make, but MIB’s method is to coerce through fear. I would have liked to have heard the following line from Ben:
“How do I have a choice when if I don’t do what he says I’ll be hunted down and destroyed”
I imagine the Egyptians thought much the same thing.

I think after MIB's fall, the Egyptians probably did fight and destroy and corrupt, the result of unfettered free will. With the Skinnerian control gone their choices became less inhibited.

So maybe in the end it's not that MIB is bad or that Jacob is good, but more fundamentally that humanity is flawed; it does have the ability to achieve in the face of adveristy and it's own weaknesses but there are 2 different views on how they can achieve this.