When torturing someone, my understanding is that one technique is to get the subject of the torture to ‘break’ in some psychological manner–telling something personal about themselves or to agree to a lie.
In the book 1984, there was the 4/5 fingers where the bad guys are holding up four fingers and Winston is supposed to say there are five (for additional quotes from 1984, see Old NFO’s blog here).
They did a pretty awesome take-off on this in the episode ‘Chain of Command, Part II’ in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Highly recommend watching it–Patrick Stewart master-classed it and whoever it was playing the torturer was amazing, even behind all that makeup.
Let’s take it a step further. Suppose the Big Bads want to use 1984 as a manual. The first step would be to make the world at least give lip service to something that they know is false, right?
- That keeping six feet away from someone will keep you safe
- That being outside in the fresh air and sunshine is unhealthy
- That if you haven’t had a shot, you can harm someone who has
- That keeping children masked and out of school is good
- That a man clearly suffering from advanced dementia is capable of, and is actually running our country
- That people not falling in line are demonized, marginalized, fired
- That installing a candidate that no-one voted for is ‘saving democracy’
- That racism only exists if a person’s skin color is on a certain spectrum
- That a man slapping on some lipstick and a skirt should be deferred to and called a woman
- That those men should be allowed to compete against women or enter women’s only spaces
- That using covid style lockdowns on British citizens who are protesting the takeover of their country is okay
2+2=4There are four lights.
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