GOLD.
As for Sawyer’s motives, I think that they (well, Kate) said it outright in the episode. He just wants people to hate him, because he hates himself. He saw himself getting too close to Kate, so he had to make sure he betrayed her trust as well. Everybody’s looking at the island as a fresh start and figuring what their role is going to be on it; he’s too stuck on his past to be able to see himself as anything other than a con man, and it scares him when he sees signs that he can be something more. Because that takes more work. He finally recognizes that he could be a hero like Jack if he just made the effort, but he can’t risk failure. So he dismisses it as his basic human nature, and says “a tiger can’t change his stripes.”
I think John Mace’s take on Locke vs. Rousseau is dead-on. To the point where it’s kind of embarrassingly obvious, what with the names and all.
Everything Locke has done is motivated by his wanting to start a society on the island; it’s in his best interest to stay, because on the island he can walk and he has the opportunity to be the person he couldn’t be in the real world. So he’s all about stability (building cradles), order (making sure the numbers get entered), and government (locking up the guns).
If the “sickness” Rousseau described isn’t some paranormal thing or caused by a Dharma Initiative Brain Ray, which would be extremely cheesy, then it’s society. In athe most extreme version of a philosophy where individuals left to their own are good, and it’s enforcing order on them that causes problems, then the only way to get perfection would be to kill everybody else and then live alone on the island and go crazy.
Which makes me wonder if the whole thing isn’t a lot more mundane than smoke monsters and angels. I wonder if the Dharma Initiative’s experiment isn’t about electromagnetic generators or anything, but a great sociological experiment. And the island is basically a giant Skinner box. What happens if you remove people from society, put them in a controlled environment (with sharks and watchers and control centers) and force them to fend for themselves? Do they tend towards order, or do they inevitably go Lord of the Flies? Do they act completely out of self-interest?
Clearly, that’s the premise of the show. But I wonder now if they’re going to pull back and say that’s the premise of the island as well. When I first started watching, I would’ve said that was a huge cop-out, but now that I’ve seen how much mileage they get out of previous histories and character archetypes and group dynamics, I think it’d be a pretty profound revelation: this is what individual people bring to a society, and this is our role in it.