Golding first dramatises the children's Id response in the first election. When faced with choosing a leader from amongst themselves, the children choose the strongest, tallest, and most beautiful: Ralph. They impulsively do what humans do everyday; they wanted to pick the most beautiful and powerful as a means to strengthen themselves. Once a leader of the collective group, Ralph sought to bring the idealistic aspirations of civilization to the island. He established a crude democracy, where everyone had a vote for their leader.
This election by majority ensured that more than fifty percent of the boys would grant governance to Ralph, and they were willing to concede some of their freedom for the sake of the group. Like in most democracies, with a majority also comes a minority; minorities are necessary to keep the majority in check by a natural form of competition. Most were content with Ralph's leadership, but Jack despised him for it. As a concession, Ralph appointed Jack chief hunter, affirming a leader not representative of the majority but rather of his own desire, hunting. By letting Jack succumb to his Id tendencies, Ralph is creating a precedent that would eventually lead to the island's demise.
Ralph unknowingly allows Jack's desire for blood and power to grow; as Jack establishes his dominance in hunting and killing, his power becomes appealing to many of the boys. Perhaps intellectually they knew that a democratic system of self-governance was the best, but they gave in to their immediate desires and took the meat when it was offered to them. And in one fatal swoop, Jack crushes civilisation by reducing the children to animals, driven blindly by desire.
It is in these blind frenzies that desire overpowers them; when Simon bursts from the underbrush with a message from the beast, the circle of boys, surround and kill him. One gets this desire of bloodthirstiness in one’s Id. The children act according to their true inner nature but ironically, they do not realise what they have done. When the children kill Simon, it is mostly subconsciously. Freud suggests that man is a phobic animal. The children do not act because they are born good or bad. Instead the killing of Simon is a venting out of the inner aggressivity, as there is no other reason for killing him. They feel cathartic after Simon’s death.
It is a natural tendency for humans to group with the strongest; it is an inherent motivation, based on a desire for power and survival that drives us to exclude the weak and bump up the strong. The boys used Piggy's queerness to exclude him from the beginning; "For a moment the boys were a closed circuit of sympathy with Piggy on the outside." Piggy was a good hearted, rational boy who is the loser of the group. He represented the left side of the human brain. Piggy thought things through and used logical thinking. He was also fatter and shorter than the other boys were. He fitted the stereotype of a social drop out. He was self-conscious and lacked social skills. All these played against him. Piggy was excluded because the boys wanted the power of a group dynamic and he was killed as he was the natural outsider and he was in the way.
Nazis admit being sucked into the party because of the charm of its strength and willingness to crush its opposition. They were led to believe that they were a group because of their superior race and nationality; however, they could only be a more pure race because other races exist. By creating Piggy as the "other," the boys created their own exclusive group because they wanted to feel the power that exclusion brings. From the moment Jack was cast into the minority, his desire for power began to manifest itself. Jack represented the product of one’s Id. He was very cold-hearted and irrational. He represented the human characteristic of envy as well as savagery .His thirst for blood drove him to slaughter the pregnant sow; his desire to kill overpowered his common sense--killing the sow meant killing future generations.
Isolated on an island, the boys sought to imitate civilization by creating a democracy with a representative say for all. But as time passed and society drew further and further away, they began to overcome their societal norms and desire began to cloud their conscious. Their desire for meat and strength and power overcame their sensibility and they became a reckless machine, indiscriminate and destructive in their actions, and civilisation was in ruins.
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The inherited instinctive impulses of the individual, forming part of the unconscious and, in Freudian theory, interacting in the psyche with the ego and the superego.
