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I kind of feel that I ought to do some kind of write up of Level 5 (http://lvl5.org/), which I was at last weekend.
My usual approach is proving quite difficult here, though; the context and setup are important as well as the in-character elements, and I'm struggling to find the right song or prompt for telling the story of the event.
So. I've been referring to Level 5 as 'the crazy artlarp thing', which was pretty accurate. There was a lecture beforehand on 'stuff the artist has done before' and 'how crazy Scandawegian LARP is better than yours'; whilst there was some traditional Bizarre Modern Installation Art in the artist's portfolio, the LARP pictures from the time they trolled a sculpture exhibition by inhabiting it with a tribe of LARPers worshipping the other sculptures as ritual foci were quite entertaining, along with the primitive tribe LARP pics. The section on crazy Scandawegian LARP rules / methods was nothing I hadn't heard before, but I tend to follow that sort of stuff reasonably closely anyway.
After the public lecture there was a participant workshop, which had a range of slightly insane drama-school bonding / fake-intimacy-creating methods interspersed with some character creation exercises. I love this kind of stuff, because it gives me plenty of excuses to talk about myself, listen to other people talk about interesting bits of their lives, and make too much eye contact with and hug strangers; people who are more prone to being uncomfortable in weird artificial social situations might have differed...
The character I'd created and done research for before the event turned out to be a non-starter because it transpired that the event was actually set in the modern day, although based on 70s seminars and with kit appropriate to the 70s period, so I took up their suggested character theme which was 'make a character that is the person you would have been if your life had gone the other way at a point of divergence; base their name on someone who has been a great influence in your life'. So Maria Rose (points available for spotting the reference) went to Oxford to do Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and then went into the Civil Service.
This basically gave me an opportunity to exaggerate my rational, picky, intolerant and determined sides, which turned out to be an excellent match with the game. We also had to come up with a hook for why we were determined to see through this seminar; as Maria didn't believe she had any issues she needed to sort out, which was the standard reason for showing up, I manufactured an acquaintance of hers, Jacob Begley (fewer points for identifying those references), who was an atheist mathematician that had entered into a wager with her - if she attended and made it through the seminar, he would attend an Alpha course.
The other funky mechanic in this LARP (other than the fact it was being filmed by cameraman who were IC employed by the seminar organisers to get footage of the event, and streamed live to an unseen audience in the art venue we were doing this in) was the Logbook. We were all issued with a small red-covered exercise-book style notebook, in which we were instructed to write down in dull moments our character's thoughts, our thoughts about our character, and our general thoughts, marked as 1, 2 and 3 respectively. There was meant to be a moment at which our characters were meant to get an insight from our number 2 category comments, but for some reason this didn't actually happen in the end (or I missed it!).
There were also supposed to be 'five focuses' which we would be reminded of at certain times to move the story along - the first two was 'what does your character wants to be percieved as' and 'what do you perceive your character as'. I don't remember the others, and only those first two were actually invoked that I noticed.
Anyhow, now I'm going to drop into my more usual event report style for the actual IC action bit. The bits outside the 'seminar room' were in more or less public areas of the art venue we were hosted in (mixing LARPers playing characters with the unsuspecting public being another stylistic hallmark of one of the organisers), which might explain a couple of bits. Trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence and various other kinds of abuse including parental abuse.
----
Arrived in plenty of time. So much plenty of time that there wasn't even anyone out to greet us. I'm sure the original invitations said nine o'clock; by the time the last mailing said nine thirty instead, travel plans were already made. Never mind. No idea which of these people are here for the seminar; not sure I want to introduce myself to them out of the blue anyway. There'll surely be plenty of Hello My Name Is in the course of the day.
Plenty of art in the area, on the walls, to look and read through like I'm just at any kind of gallery or museum; place is a bit run down though, chipped paint and bare concrete in places, and... well, that is an interesting design of lock on the toilets. Loop on the outside; much harder to see if it's in properly from the inside to undo it on the outside... but I should get over myself already.
Almost read everything in the vicinity before the tannoy sounds, not even got actual greeters down here like they said they would, but fortunately some of the crowd seem to know the way up to the seminar area. Here's the tea, coffee, biscuits, and the inevitable consent forms. Yes, yes, no eating or drinking in the seminar room, no smoking... oh, and they've got the traditional knee-jerk anti-science 'we recommend you aren't taking any medications' nonsense. Couple of bits in a rather fascist tone, too; like being back at school, doctors notes for everything, no getting up from your seat or passing notes without permission, hah.
Breezily sign everything, attempt to draw a couple of the more receptive looking participants out of their shell over some biscuits, but nobody's biting. Some kind of exhibit on the walls to read, at least; the saga of some kind of local monument that got taken down and trashed. Newspaper articles, it's an outrage, blah blah blah. Eventually the room's set up and we are finally admitted to the hallowed inner sanctum, or whatever. Bags by the door. At least we don't have to leave them downstairs in the lockers. I like to have my bag nearby, thank you.
Seats in neat rows, and the cameras already installed, oh joy. We'd been warned, of course, but seeing them there automatically made me check my posture, check my hair and clothes. So tiresome. We all immediately violate rule 1 and start whispering like guilty schoolchildren. I'm a veteran of this, of course. Most of the others don't seem to understand how to talk amiably to the person next to you without turning round or making faces or otherwise being massively obvious.
They keep us waiting for a while. Probably their first trick. Then they come up on stage and immediately start throwing out the big We Are A Scam signs. Shiny, perfect American teeth tell us that there are twelve thousand people waiting for a place on this training, that their lives were turned around from this, that they call us friends and try giving themselves a cutesy nickname. And the negs, of course, thank you NLP; telling us we're screwups, assholes, that our lives don't work. That they don't care if we turn around or not, because their lives work out anyway (translated: you already gave us your cash), therefore it's to our benefit only that we should hang on their every word.
Add a bit of the dominance game; no timepieces in the session, which someone has obviously failed at already, so they pull them up on it - "Why have you broken your agreement already?" Definitely a bit of the fascism coming through here. The re-reading of the rules, "I'm going to tell you what to do and then you're going to do it," it all smells so much of The Wave that I wouldn't be surprised if they pulled out the Strength In Unity line and then cut to the Nuremberg Rally in some kind of Big Reveal.
More heavy-handed attempts to ensure engagement; 'did anyone pressure you to be here?' Only a mug answers that question. There are two mugs in the audience, neither of them yours truly; one of them only after some cooing about how it won't help if people aren't _honest_, that if you aren't going to be _honest_ you can just get up and leave. The first one claims some jerk in the Jobcentre sent him here, poor guy. They attempt to deconstruct that motivation, make it his fault for coming here anyway, and he kind of gives up and goes along with it in the end, because what can you do?
The second guy didn't actually have anyone in mind. He's just pulling some kind of first-year philosophy student wank about how he 'pressured himself' to come here. Yeah, yeah, and everything's relative and you, sir, are a massive douche. They deconstruct that, too; "Did you pressure yourself to have breakfast this morning? Did you pressure yourself to wear those clothes?". Eventually the guy stops wanking in public and shuts up and sits down too.
At which point, our dear friend - although we didn't know him yet, of course - Ace Rimmer sticks his hand up and makes some kind of point which I'm sure was vitally important in his own bizarre ivory-tower-intellectual fairy-cloud world, but also sounded a lot like masturbation from where I was sitting. He gets the metaphorical pat on the head and the 'that's nice', and the obligatory applause, of course. We applaud each other for 'sharing', in that standard-issue 'everyone gets a sticker, everyone gets a prize' style, which is actually a vehicle for some excellent comedy, so I'm not that bothered.
It's all about _how_ you applaud, after all.
There's some more dull intro stuff, and Ace Rimmer stands up a couple more times until someone else makes a speech telling him to sit down and shut up, to much more vigorous applause, and the invigilators remind us that we can listen to assholes all day if we want to, but we did actually pay for a seminar course and maybe they should be allowed to get a word in edgeways now and again. Of course, they were calling us all assholes again; some lady did actually object to them calling us all liars, because some people are too sensitive...
Eventually we finish wading through their first instalment of waffle - including such gems as telling us not to believe anything they say, just to listen to it (designed carefully to take down our critical thinking defences by encouraging us not to apply our usual filters to their garbage) and informing us that belief was the lowest form of unreality and experience was everything (thank you, Jacob). They stopped short of actually condemning religion, instead resorting to the insipid 'we take inspiration from all religions' waffle when confronted with a religious comparison, from our dear friend Ace Rimmer again of course.
(He wasn't really called Ace Rimmer. I am pretty sure his name started with an 'A' and wasn't actually 'Arnold', but it never managed to override that impression in my head, despite everyone wearing name badges all day.)
Then - between instalments of waffle - the 'processes' started. I don't quite remember the order of the first two. There was the 'trust walk', where everyone stood up and wandered up and down the central aisle; I'd assumed from the name it would be that standard team-building exercise where someone closes their eyes and the others guide them round, but no, we were just meant to come across five other people, look them in the eyes, and say "I trust you," "I don't trust you," "I don't know if I trust you" or "I don't care to say if I trust you".
I'd intended to tell everyone I trusted them, as that seemed to be the smart and inoffensive move, and indeed worked great with the first three. But the fourth person, some older guy, seemed to be deliberately putting on an untrustworthy face, so I rewarded his effort with an 'I don't know if I trust you'; then the fifth, this tall, very slightly brown guy, just - I don't know, triggered something in my head, and I'd said 'I don't trust you' before I thought it through, which he reciprocated with. Some people were equally sensibly don't-knowing everyone - after all, we were all strangers - and I got another don't off some blonde lady as well, but most people were making with the polite and socially acceptable 'I trust you'.
I went back to my seat in a thoughtful mood - I had plenty of time for it as I'd apparently been more efficient than most of the others, or they didn't know how to count to five or something. Why had I told Nicholas - the slightly brownish guy - I didn't trust him? Was it, in fact, because I was still hideously prejudiced? Was it just that he was tall, and I hate looking up at people? I'm only medium height, and that only for a woman, but there's something about looking upwards that puts me on the defensive. That might be it.
And there was the amateurish trance induction. Textbook stuff. I remembered it well from - I don't quite recall - was it a Christian holiday camp or a gifted and talented weekend? Maybe both, now I look back on it. Pretty sure it was both. Traditional 'close your eyes, now think of yourself being located in each body part in order from your toes upwards, delivered in a soothing monotone, plenty of reassurance and encouragement, some deep breathing' - then a quite well done denoument, drawing out the word 'relaaaax' in some kind of very well-practiced, trippy ululation while an authoritative but kind, female voice from behind - where the female presenter had moved while your eyes were closed and you were disconnected from the world - catalogued the stuff they wanted to implant.
It was pretty inoffensive stuff, though. You're okay, it's okay, everything is going to be okay. A bit passive, probably another attempt to up the receptivity of the crowd, but not awful.
Another reminder of school; 'homework' in the morning break. I staked out the good seat next to the table and the flapjacks, and opened the logbook. Write down one incident where you were frustrated with your parents, and an account of a time you felt like a victim. The second one is easy; I neatly print a short account of a typical school bullying episode, taking care over the writing in case someone else has to read these. The first one is much harder. I didn't really get frustrated by my parents; sometimes I got angry with them, for stupid teenager reasons mostly, but I didn't get frustrated, I just worked around them.
Asked a few other people, but everyone's still reticent to engage with each other, and they seem to be finding it much easier. Finally dredged up something suitably anodyne, blaming my inevitable short-sightedness on having to sneak up and use the computer in the dark rather than just being allowed the time I needed. It's not quite accurate, but it's good enough. Celebrated with some more flapjack; it's good stuff, I've always had a weakness for it though. Quietly ignore the bottles of water; overhydration never a good idea with limited toilet breaks, and it's not like I need to concentrate on anything today. Offhandedly warned people that the coffee might be a trap; the Arbitary Rules List included 'no stimulants', after all.
Back in a carefully different seat - as 'change seats each time' is on the Arbitrary Rules List too - and obviously someone doesn't remember that bit, and the gentleman I am afraid I childishly referred to as 'unemployed-face' for most of the proceedings (at least internally) has sat in the same seat for some kind of passive-aggressive attention-seeking reason. Then of course Ace Rimmer has to point out that it was totally just passive-aggressive attention-seeking behaviour, which all of us regular human beings had worked out for ourselves, thanks.
Noticed a loophole in the Rules when they read them through again - does 'no reading anything but the logbooks' include name badges? - and decided to risk being singled out to clear it up; dear Henry the Bad Cop attempted to insult my intelligence, which was not the most original insult I'd ever heard. The lady sat next to me, Heather, decided to call him out on his bullshit, which I found kind of flattering but also somewhat unnecessary. It went down quite well with the peanut gallery, though, even though he didn't rise to the bait much.
----
"I am your mother."
I tried to put interesting inflections in it, sympathise a little, draw out the anecdote like poison from a wound - or at least give her something to work with, to make the time pass quicker. It was an interesting little challenge, really.
The day passed, gradually. I wondered if lunch would ever come, and then we were finally released for a lunch break around two in the afternoon, although not much of one. More lectures, more exercises. "What do you want?" I started with "World peace" because I thought it was appropriately sarcastic. Cameras everywhere, cameras in my face. "I want there to be less cameras in my face." Project the model student attitude. It's not like I don't have the practice, on endless training courses and seminars and briefings.
At least it is more interesting than another Women In Government junket. I do tell him what I really want, when the camera has gone away. When it's his turn, I try to make it easier for him, even when the vultures swoop down - or Nikki, anyway - on hearing him utter the fateful words, "I don't know what I want. I don't really do wanting. I know just how fortunate I am". They contrast oddly with his threadbare clothes, but I get him talking again, emphasising each word in turn to suggest new avenues. He has such wholesome, everyday ambitions. I wish I had the kind of desires that could be satisfied with a little travel, but I've always found travel kind of empty and meaningless at the end. Everything I need to know, I can have here; I can scroll through the pictures and imagine just as well as wasting all that time and energy on going to faraway places.
Lying on the ground again. I've never been able to lie on the ground well; one of my head or my back will always complain. Looks so undignified for the cameras, especially this ancient t-shirt I dredged out of my supplies to fit with their arcane dress code. Eventually I find a compromise, leaning my head on my hands, that looks a lot more natural, although I have to shift and squirm from time to time to avoid crushing my poor, delicate fingers.
I need those for typing with! I haven't done as much writing by hand for years.
Another trance, this time with a 'process' in the middle, not just the amateurish idea implantation (it might be amateur hour but it was certainly textbook, I could hear it resonating in my mind while we were out of the room; a little voice calling the refrain, 'and that's okay', 'and it's okay', to all my thoughts. Acceptance. I was reminded at the time, as soon as they wrote it on the board - demons teach acceptance. A reference you probably won't get.)
We'd had another break with 'homework'. Write down a barrier that you currently face, a problem you want to work through, even if it's an external one. Of course, I knew what I wanted to write, what would be truthful, but there was no way I was committing _that_ to paper. Having said it in the vicinity of cameras was bad enough, even if I was pretty sure they had moved on and stopped recording me. I spent a while chasing thoughts around my head, looking for something anodyne and unrevealing, but convincing all the same.
The best lies have a grain of truth. Insomnia. It doesn't really haunt me; I have strategies, I have pills, I know how to work around it; but it would be easy for any of the people here that I might have to 'share' it with to believe that someone like me had a major problem with that. I sowed the seeds of it in the "What do you want" exercise. The first meditation on this problem was a private meditation, in the middle of the trance; give it a shape, give it a colour, because stupid people can't understand anything unless it has a tangible representation; because apparently they were trying to cure us of abstract thought, in some kind of ludicrous reversion to kindergarten theories of causation and the world.
I had an excellent description all ready to go, too. A threatening purple-black cloud, hovering over the back of my head and extending down into my lungs. It was a masterpiece, but what was also a masterpiece was my ability to evade actually being called in group discussions. We got an attack of the cheerleaders again which had us carefully tearing into someone else's description of their problem, that girl with the too-wide eyes.
The festivities came to an end before it was my turn because they took her over to the wall. In some kind of weird pressure ritual, they'd pulled out Mister Philosophy Student earlier and had their pet ogre and the greasy little rat push him against the wall while demanding he told the truth about 'what he wanted', because they'd caught him obviously making fun of the exercise. He had totally deserved it; he should learn to lie better if he's going to be that pretentious, and eventually they wrung something sufficiently pretentious and empty out of him that it had to be the truth, as much as he was capable of containing such a thing.
So they took Bette over to the wall, and I remarked casually when I was sure they were all distracted, "Shades of the Milgram Experiment, huh?". Then I had to explain, of course, because I'd forgotten I was with a less sophisitcated crowd than usual. "Where they see how much you'll stand by and watch bad things happen. The bystander effect." My interlocuter nodded, and turned back to watch. The tiny blonde girl was practically shaking, making 'no way' signs with her hands, pleading. I was glad they weren't doing it to any of the people that I cared about here; she had been just fake and plastic enough that I was pretty sure this was all play-acting, too, and in any case I didn't think there was enough substance in her to be the kind of person who could truly be said to _be_ hurt. I don't care about animal rights and I didn't care about her rights, either.
If it had been Heather, or even one of the weak-eyed and stumbling, genuine girls, I might have had to do something about it.
And then I'd have lost my bet.
After just a little bit of screaming and flailing and whimpering, they got something out of Bette or really they just gave up because they couldn't stand hearing her talk for one more moment either. We'd done an exercise where we all lined up in rows and had to cross the room and stand by whoever we found the most attractive. I'd gone and stood in front of Bette, because she was _very_ stylish, you couldn't fault the wardrobe or the hair or the anime eyes; if I'd wanted to fuck anyone in the lineup, it would have been her. I'd considered picking Eddie, who'd got a genuine engagement with the world that I admired just a bit, but they said 'most attracted to', not 'who do you most like'.
Of course, no-one was attracted to me. My vanity did attempt to give me a kicking over it, but I think I kept the disappointment out of my demenour. I hadn't come here to solicit, after all. Mister Philosophy Student came to stand in front of the person next to me, and I was surprised by how vehemently I thought, if he stands next to me I am going to punch him right in the nose. I didn't want some kind of sarcastic pity, which I knew would be the reason if he happened to pick the last girl who didn't have a queue.
As I said in the sharing circle afterwards, I did feel like I'd kind of won a popularity contest when not one but two people came and stood in my line for Least Attracted To, though. Of course, it was nothing on the massive line that Ace Rimmer had managed to get together for himself, but he really had been trying quite hard and it's easier to tell a guy you're unattracted to him than to tell a girl to her face. Kit the Philosophy Boy was in my face, although he said something daft about being 'unable to connect', which kind of made sense really; I wasn't here to connect to drifters and losers, either. The other member of my queue surprised me a little; apparently I reminded him of someone who'd been racially abusive to him in the past, nothing to do with _me_ at all.
It was kind of disappointing.
I picked one of the weak-eyed girls to be least attracted to, because I felt like being honest for a change. I thought about picking Kit - in fact, I said as much - but 'least attracted to' wasn't it, although the critera that dear fence-sitting Bette was given - 'who would you least like to go and have a drink with afterwards' - certainly applied. I'd rather have had a drink with the vague, plain-looking blonde with the rainbow dolphin amulet, but I'd rather have had sex with Kit. After all, ten million fanfiction writers can't be wrong about the excitement of a good bout of hatesex, right?
I told the girl some drivel about how I didn't percieve any depth to her - perfectly true of course, I've always had a particular disdain for dolphin-lovers, if rather a decent amount of respect for the actual rapist, conniving creatures themselves. But that wasn't why I was there, I was interpretting the question in a perfectly shallow fashion, but the watery-eyed girl didn't need to know that. I made my eye contact as apologetic as possible; she indicated that it was okay, that she understands.
Of course there was the inevitable lifeboat exercise. I used the opportunity to say my piece about already being saved, of course, and the incredibly wet hippy in the group - called herself Skye, had been sitting in a meditation posture during the first wait for people to come in and wouldn't stop _smiling_ at everyone - then said something pointed about how she had made her peace with how we would _all_ go on. Unsurprisingly I didn't live, but surprisingly Skye did; the power of being small and cute and infectiously forced-cheerful, I guess. And Sadie lived, who was in our group.
The twist was that once all the survivors were lined up on stage, audience members were allowed to shoot any they didn't think were worthy; not that it would save us, but to stop them surviving either. In a depressing display of modern nihilism, mostly orchestrated by Skye when she got 'shot' by Little Greasy Man of the organisers, not one of the 'survivors' actually made it. Skye justified herself by saying that she felt it was wrong that anyone was labelled as 'better' or 'more worthy' than everyone else, that she felt better now we were all equal, even if we were all dead. I think that just illustrated the poisonous nature of her philosophy more than anything I could have ever argued. Even the organisers were left a little bit speechless; apparently that doesn't happen usually, even with one of them taking the initiative in picking someone off.
Then, well, the lecture about how to blame yourself for everything. Everything in the universe, apparently, is your own fault. You can choose to blame other people, but really you should be choosing to blame nobody, to just let experience wash off; that's a nice theory, but actually, experience that you can't blame on other people just means everyone else can abdicate their responsibilities, that you never get them to change anything. "I realised that all parents are abusers," said someone at the circle after the "I am your mother" exercise. I know that is not true - but _these_ parents, these figures up on the stage attempting to stand in loco parentis for the poor sufferers who have come to them for guidance, _they_ are abusers. They have all the hallmarks of abusers; it's not their fault, it's your fault. If only you didn't make them punish you. If only you could just keep to your agreements. You should be honest; but they are allowed to tell as many lies as they like, as long as they tell you that you needn't believe a word they say. And you mustn't go running to any other sources of comfort, because belief is the lowest form of awareness, the deepest pit of unawareness, which they have redefined to mean 'the enemy'...
I'm no longer sure at which moment I decided, you are poisonous and I need to shut you down for the good of humanity, but this part was certainly a contributing factor. It wasn't all that though, it was something else, something specific which I have forgotten. But I wrote it down, so that's okay.
I can't do it by suing them into the ground over the obvious thing, because I told him I forgave him, and I mean it when I do that. But that's getting ahead of myself. (Heather told me she didn't know how I could forgive the people who bullied me at school. I don't know how I could not forgive them. People are people. People do things for a reason. They might be wrong, but very few of them, maybe none of them, are evil. These people here, for instance, up on the stage, they're doing this for money, they're doing this because they were brainwashed into believing it too, they're doing this because they are using it to fulfil the basic human need to have power and control over _something_ - maybe they never had it in their own lives, so now they are grasping for it over others. No-one is evil. People are just misguided...)
Okay. So you want to know how I came by these bruises. I'm getting to that.
There was one guy - Henry - who was obviously there to act as their Bad Cop. Not that Nikki and the others were incapable of being the Bad Cop on occasion - there was a whole thread to do with them bullying one of their repeat attendee volunteers, Sadie, which I've kind of elided because I still feel bad about not being able to save her. She really just needs to stop coming to these things, unless she was a plant of course - but why would they have a plant who called into question the central tenet that this course fixed people, let you become a person of integrity, and coming back made you even more fixed?
Anyway, Sadie and the Board-Rubber was a running theme, she didn't bring one in the morning and there were increasingly comical attempts to fix the problem badly all the way through the proceedings, with lots of Reading The Rules and Asking Why You Can't Keep Your Agreement and generally insulting and belittling and becoming angry and making her feel about three inches tall, which Nikki participated enthusiastically in; Steve a little more laid back, trying to be the Good Cop, pulling the We're Disappointed, We Only Feel Bad For You lines. But when one of the participants broke the rules, it was Henry who would stand front and centre and say it was Unacceptable and read the entire Agreement again to make everyone feel like naughty schoolchildren.
He was a tall, strongly built man who was obviously called out for intimidation purposes with the wall-pushings and in this weird line-up exercise where half the participants at a time were called up on stage to 'learn to be comfortable with being them' by having the audience and the staff make uncomfortable eye contact with them. (I won a lovely staring contest against the little greasy dude who didn't say much; it made me feel like I was a teenager winning staring contests in the playground again. He was seriously good at it, I barely caught him blinking at all, and I have no idea if he caught my trademark fluttering sneaky eye-rests or not.) This working-class girl with her hair in bunches made the mistake of admitting she was intimidated by him during the line-up and that's why she'd run off the stage, and got a bonus staring bout for her troubles.
----
This isn't working.
Maybe I should describe the moment. One moment, there is Henry, shouting in my face. I'm sure that some people find that kind of thing very intimidating, but all I can think of in that kind of circumstance is how silly people's faces look, twisted by rage. How I can see his uvula, dangling at the back of that parade-ground cavern which he is making so much noise with. I barely register what he is actually saying; it's just the same as before, Get Back In Your Place, but when someone starts shouting you know they have lost all vestige of authority.
Then, with no recollection whatsoever of the intervening time, I am on the floor.
For a moment, there is silence, a void in which I know I must act; this whole charade is being played out to demonstrate that I am not, in fact, a coward, in any of the conventional meanings of the word. So I regain my feet, with as much dignity as is left to me, and I say my piece. Somewhere in the back of my mind I feel as if I should be making some point about faith, about belief, about God, but the message that I have bursting forth from me is much more primal and deep-rooted than those things.
I speak of truth. "These people," I say, "claim that honesty is important. They claim that we are here to speak the truth to each other. But this is what happens," and I know they are in no doubt as to what I refer, "when we attempt to speak the truth. Tell me," I say, sweeping up to my place, to where Henry is still standing implacably, outside of his role, of his programming, waiting for further orders, "is truth not, then, the highest virtue? Is that not what we are here for? Do you want us to lie?"
He mutters, repetatively, stuck on his tracks, that no, what we are here for is to do the processes. To go through the motions. I can't think that anyone in the wider room than our group could even have heard him. I have made my point.
I was speaking of truth because we had been telling the truth to Eddie. Eddie is a beautiful, older woman, in the inner sense at least, and she has obviously been struggling with the bitterness certain elements of the past have left her with. In the spirit of breaking down everyone in the room so that their insidious baggage can take hold, Henry has come over to our group and called us cowards, pointing at each one and stating it bluntly, "Coward" - for prefacing our remarks to Eddie with positive comments about her. But there is so much positive about her, it just bursts out through her skin and radiates through her actions into everyone in her vicinity; it would be a lie to say anything else.
So I challenge him. I ask him if we are not supposed to speak the truth. I ask him if we are not supposed to be honest with each other. I ask him if we are supposed to lie. He calls me a coward again, so I step up, closer. Better people than him, more powerful people, bigger people have attempted to intimidate me. He has picked the wrong target. I ask him again: should we lie? He begins to bluster. I should get back to my place, or I should walk out right now. The 'like it or leave' clause. I will not leave.
Quite apart from any bets, any things which are riding on this occasion, to leave is not to assert my authority, as they frame it; to leave is to walk away, to let them win, to abandon the rest of the people here into their clutches, to display that here in this room they cannot be defeated, cannot be defied.
I demonstrate that they can be defeated. That they are only some people, giving a training course, who have their script and their limitations and their blinkers.
Then I do return to my place, and carry on with the 'process', because being needlessly disruptive is not winning. The most useful victories are those that you can win while playing by their rules, working with the system rather than destroying it; more respect accrues from adaptation, from turning the bad to the service of the good, than childish and wasteful destruction.
----
There were a couple more hours after that which I am comprehensively failing to write up, including another bout of 'lie on the floor and trance induction' that asked the question 'imagine yourself in your workshop, the place you make things' and had Maria crying as she realised that her 'workshop' was the House of Commons but she would never be there due to her chosen career (and the scandal she had probably caused by being videoed during the events of the day), that nothing she did would ever be 'good enough' for her; and that then asked 'imagine all your beliefs and unreality were not there any more' and her realising that she just used 'pleasing God' as an excuse, that really she did 'good' because she cared about people, but she needed to shield herself from feeling that directly because otherwise she would find the burden of not being able to fix everything even more intolerable than it already was. And being told to go to drama school and to be less angry because it hampered communication, which was hilarious combined with that because she'd been going on about how she needed to work out how to communicate with people better in the 'what do you want' exercise earlier ;-). I've also left out the bit where the IC organisers lined up on the stage and the IC characters were meant to walk by and tell them if we trusted them, and Maria said 'I trust you' to Sadie and Henry, but only actually meant it on reflection to Henry, because trust is always trust to do something or other and Henry was the only uncomplicated one, the one she felt wasn't lying...
But given it's taken me another whole week to write this up I doubt you'll be getting an IC-perspective version of that any time soon!
My usual approach is proving quite difficult here, though; the context and setup are important as well as the in-character elements, and I'm struggling to find the right song or prompt for telling the story of the event.
So. I've been referring to Level 5 as 'the crazy artlarp thing', which was pretty accurate. There was a lecture beforehand on 'stuff the artist has done before' and 'how crazy Scandawegian LARP is better than yours'; whilst there was some traditional Bizarre Modern Installation Art in the artist's portfolio, the LARP pictures from the time they trolled a sculpture exhibition by inhabiting it with a tribe of LARPers worshipping the other sculptures as ritual foci were quite entertaining, along with the primitive tribe LARP pics. The section on crazy Scandawegian LARP rules / methods was nothing I hadn't heard before, but I tend to follow that sort of stuff reasonably closely anyway.
After the public lecture there was a participant workshop, which had a range of slightly insane drama-school bonding / fake-intimacy-creating methods interspersed with some character creation exercises. I love this kind of stuff, because it gives me plenty of excuses to talk about myself, listen to other people talk about interesting bits of their lives, and make too much eye contact with and hug strangers; people who are more prone to being uncomfortable in weird artificial social situations might have differed...
The character I'd created and done research for before the event turned out to be a non-starter because it transpired that the event was actually set in the modern day, although based on 70s seminars and with kit appropriate to the 70s period, so I took up their suggested character theme which was 'make a character that is the person you would have been if your life had gone the other way at a point of divergence; base their name on someone who has been a great influence in your life'. So Maria Rose (points available for spotting the reference) went to Oxford to do Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and then went into the Civil Service.
This basically gave me an opportunity to exaggerate my rational, picky, intolerant and determined sides, which turned out to be an excellent match with the game. We also had to come up with a hook for why we were determined to see through this seminar; as Maria didn't believe she had any issues she needed to sort out, which was the standard reason for showing up, I manufactured an acquaintance of hers, Jacob Begley (fewer points for identifying those references), who was an atheist mathematician that had entered into a wager with her - if she attended and made it through the seminar, he would attend an Alpha course.
The other funky mechanic in this LARP (other than the fact it was being filmed by cameraman who were IC employed by the seminar organisers to get footage of the event, and streamed live to an unseen audience in the art venue we were doing this in) was the Logbook. We were all issued with a small red-covered exercise-book style notebook, in which we were instructed to write down in dull moments our character's thoughts, our thoughts about our character, and our general thoughts, marked as 1, 2 and 3 respectively. There was meant to be a moment at which our characters were meant to get an insight from our number 2 category comments, but for some reason this didn't actually happen in the end (or I missed it!).
There were also supposed to be 'five focuses' which we would be reminded of at certain times to move the story along - the first two was 'what does your character wants to be percieved as' and 'what do you perceive your character as'. I don't remember the others, and only those first two were actually invoked that I noticed.
Anyhow, now I'm going to drop into my more usual event report style for the actual IC action bit. The bits outside the 'seminar room' were in more or less public areas of the art venue we were hosted in (mixing LARPers playing characters with the unsuspecting public being another stylistic hallmark of one of the organisers), which might explain a couple of bits. Trigger warning for discussion of sexual violence and various other kinds of abuse including parental abuse.
----
Arrived in plenty of time. So much plenty of time that there wasn't even anyone out to greet us. I'm sure the original invitations said nine o'clock; by the time the last mailing said nine thirty instead, travel plans were already made. Never mind. No idea which of these people are here for the seminar; not sure I want to introduce myself to them out of the blue anyway. There'll surely be plenty of Hello My Name Is in the course of the day.
Plenty of art in the area, on the walls, to look and read through like I'm just at any kind of gallery or museum; place is a bit run down though, chipped paint and bare concrete in places, and... well, that is an interesting design of lock on the toilets. Loop on the outside; much harder to see if it's in properly from the inside to undo it on the outside... but I should get over myself already.
Almost read everything in the vicinity before the tannoy sounds, not even got actual greeters down here like they said they would, but fortunately some of the crowd seem to know the way up to the seminar area. Here's the tea, coffee, biscuits, and the inevitable consent forms. Yes, yes, no eating or drinking in the seminar room, no smoking... oh, and they've got the traditional knee-jerk anti-science 'we recommend you aren't taking any medications' nonsense. Couple of bits in a rather fascist tone, too; like being back at school, doctors notes for everything, no getting up from your seat or passing notes without permission, hah.
Breezily sign everything, attempt to draw a couple of the more receptive looking participants out of their shell over some biscuits, but nobody's biting. Some kind of exhibit on the walls to read, at least; the saga of some kind of local monument that got taken down and trashed. Newspaper articles, it's an outrage, blah blah blah. Eventually the room's set up and we are finally admitted to the hallowed inner sanctum, or whatever. Bags by the door. At least we don't have to leave them downstairs in the lockers. I like to have my bag nearby, thank you.
Seats in neat rows, and the cameras already installed, oh joy. We'd been warned, of course, but seeing them there automatically made me check my posture, check my hair and clothes. So tiresome. We all immediately violate rule 1 and start whispering like guilty schoolchildren. I'm a veteran of this, of course. Most of the others don't seem to understand how to talk amiably to the person next to you without turning round or making faces or otherwise being massively obvious.
They keep us waiting for a while. Probably their first trick. Then they come up on stage and immediately start throwing out the big We Are A Scam signs. Shiny, perfect American teeth tell us that there are twelve thousand people waiting for a place on this training, that their lives were turned around from this, that they call us friends and try giving themselves a cutesy nickname. And the negs, of course, thank you NLP; telling us we're screwups, assholes, that our lives don't work. That they don't care if we turn around or not, because their lives work out anyway (translated: you already gave us your cash), therefore it's to our benefit only that we should hang on their every word.
Add a bit of the dominance game; no timepieces in the session, which someone has obviously failed at already, so they pull them up on it - "Why have you broken your agreement already?" Definitely a bit of the fascism coming through here. The re-reading of the rules, "I'm going to tell you what to do and then you're going to do it," it all smells so much of The Wave that I wouldn't be surprised if they pulled out the Strength In Unity line and then cut to the Nuremberg Rally in some kind of Big Reveal.
More heavy-handed attempts to ensure engagement; 'did anyone pressure you to be here?' Only a mug answers that question. There are two mugs in the audience, neither of them yours truly; one of them only after some cooing about how it won't help if people aren't _honest_, that if you aren't going to be _honest_ you can just get up and leave. The first one claims some jerk in the Jobcentre sent him here, poor guy. They attempt to deconstruct that motivation, make it his fault for coming here anyway, and he kind of gives up and goes along with it in the end, because what can you do?
The second guy didn't actually have anyone in mind. He's just pulling some kind of first-year philosophy student wank about how he 'pressured himself' to come here. Yeah, yeah, and everything's relative and you, sir, are a massive douche. They deconstruct that, too; "Did you pressure yourself to have breakfast this morning? Did you pressure yourself to wear those clothes?". Eventually the guy stops wanking in public and shuts up and sits down too.
At which point, our dear friend - although we didn't know him yet, of course - Ace Rimmer sticks his hand up and makes some kind of point which I'm sure was vitally important in his own bizarre ivory-tower-intellectual fairy-cloud world, but also sounded a lot like masturbation from where I was sitting. He gets the metaphorical pat on the head and the 'that's nice', and the obligatory applause, of course. We applaud each other for 'sharing', in that standard-issue 'everyone gets a sticker, everyone gets a prize' style, which is actually a vehicle for some excellent comedy, so I'm not that bothered.
It's all about _how_ you applaud, after all.
There's some more dull intro stuff, and Ace Rimmer stands up a couple more times until someone else makes a speech telling him to sit down and shut up, to much more vigorous applause, and the invigilators remind us that we can listen to assholes all day if we want to, but we did actually pay for a seminar course and maybe they should be allowed to get a word in edgeways now and again. Of course, they were calling us all assholes again; some lady did actually object to them calling us all liars, because some people are too sensitive...
Eventually we finish wading through their first instalment of waffle - including such gems as telling us not to believe anything they say, just to listen to it (designed carefully to take down our critical thinking defences by encouraging us not to apply our usual filters to their garbage) and informing us that belief was the lowest form of unreality and experience was everything (thank you, Jacob). They stopped short of actually condemning religion, instead resorting to the insipid 'we take inspiration from all religions' waffle when confronted with a religious comparison, from our dear friend Ace Rimmer again of course.
(He wasn't really called Ace Rimmer. I am pretty sure his name started with an 'A' and wasn't actually 'Arnold', but it never managed to override that impression in my head, despite everyone wearing name badges all day.)
Then - between instalments of waffle - the 'processes' started. I don't quite remember the order of the first two. There was the 'trust walk', where everyone stood up and wandered up and down the central aisle; I'd assumed from the name it would be that standard team-building exercise where someone closes their eyes and the others guide them round, but no, we were just meant to come across five other people, look them in the eyes, and say "I trust you," "I don't trust you," "I don't know if I trust you" or "I don't care to say if I trust you".
I'd intended to tell everyone I trusted them, as that seemed to be the smart and inoffensive move, and indeed worked great with the first three. But the fourth person, some older guy, seemed to be deliberately putting on an untrustworthy face, so I rewarded his effort with an 'I don't know if I trust you'; then the fifth, this tall, very slightly brown guy, just - I don't know, triggered something in my head, and I'd said 'I don't trust you' before I thought it through, which he reciprocated with. Some people were equally sensibly don't-knowing everyone - after all, we were all strangers - and I got another don't off some blonde lady as well, but most people were making with the polite and socially acceptable 'I trust you'.
I went back to my seat in a thoughtful mood - I had plenty of time for it as I'd apparently been more efficient than most of the others, or they didn't know how to count to five or something. Why had I told Nicholas - the slightly brownish guy - I didn't trust him? Was it, in fact, because I was still hideously prejudiced? Was it just that he was tall, and I hate looking up at people? I'm only medium height, and that only for a woman, but there's something about looking upwards that puts me on the defensive. That might be it.
And there was the amateurish trance induction. Textbook stuff. I remembered it well from - I don't quite recall - was it a Christian holiday camp or a gifted and talented weekend? Maybe both, now I look back on it. Pretty sure it was both. Traditional 'close your eyes, now think of yourself being located in each body part in order from your toes upwards, delivered in a soothing monotone, plenty of reassurance and encouragement, some deep breathing' - then a quite well done denoument, drawing out the word 'relaaaax' in some kind of very well-practiced, trippy ululation while an authoritative but kind, female voice from behind - where the female presenter had moved while your eyes were closed and you were disconnected from the world - catalogued the stuff they wanted to implant.
It was pretty inoffensive stuff, though. You're okay, it's okay, everything is going to be okay. A bit passive, probably another attempt to up the receptivity of the crowd, but not awful.
Another reminder of school; 'homework' in the morning break. I staked out the good seat next to the table and the flapjacks, and opened the logbook. Write down one incident where you were frustrated with your parents, and an account of a time you felt like a victim. The second one is easy; I neatly print a short account of a typical school bullying episode, taking care over the writing in case someone else has to read these. The first one is much harder. I didn't really get frustrated by my parents; sometimes I got angry with them, for stupid teenager reasons mostly, but I didn't get frustrated, I just worked around them.
Asked a few other people, but everyone's still reticent to engage with each other, and they seem to be finding it much easier. Finally dredged up something suitably anodyne, blaming my inevitable short-sightedness on having to sneak up and use the computer in the dark rather than just being allowed the time I needed. It's not quite accurate, but it's good enough. Celebrated with some more flapjack; it's good stuff, I've always had a weakness for it though. Quietly ignore the bottles of water; overhydration never a good idea with limited toilet breaks, and it's not like I need to concentrate on anything today. Offhandedly warned people that the coffee might be a trap; the Arbitary Rules List included 'no stimulants', after all.
Back in a carefully different seat - as 'change seats each time' is on the Arbitrary Rules List too - and obviously someone doesn't remember that bit, and the gentleman I am afraid I childishly referred to as 'unemployed-face' for most of the proceedings (at least internally) has sat in the same seat for some kind of passive-aggressive attention-seeking reason. Then of course Ace Rimmer has to point out that it was totally just passive-aggressive attention-seeking behaviour, which all of us regular human beings had worked out for ourselves, thanks.
Noticed a loophole in the Rules when they read them through again - does 'no reading anything but the logbooks' include name badges? - and decided to risk being singled out to clear it up; dear Henry the Bad Cop attempted to insult my intelligence, which was not the most original insult I'd ever heard. The lady sat next to me, Heather, decided to call him out on his bullshit, which I found kind of flattering but also somewhat unnecessary. It went down quite well with the peanut gallery, though, even though he didn't rise to the bait much.
----
"I am your mother."
I tried to put interesting inflections in it, sympathise a little, draw out the anecdote like poison from a wound - or at least give her something to work with, to make the time pass quicker. It was an interesting little challenge, really.
The day passed, gradually. I wondered if lunch would ever come, and then we were finally released for a lunch break around two in the afternoon, although not much of one. More lectures, more exercises. "What do you want?" I started with "World peace" because I thought it was appropriately sarcastic. Cameras everywhere, cameras in my face. "I want there to be less cameras in my face." Project the model student attitude. It's not like I don't have the practice, on endless training courses and seminars and briefings.
At least it is more interesting than another Women In Government junket. I do tell him what I really want, when the camera has gone away. When it's his turn, I try to make it easier for him, even when the vultures swoop down - or Nikki, anyway - on hearing him utter the fateful words, "I don't know what I want. I don't really do wanting. I know just how fortunate I am". They contrast oddly with his threadbare clothes, but I get him talking again, emphasising each word in turn to suggest new avenues. He has such wholesome, everyday ambitions. I wish I had the kind of desires that could be satisfied with a little travel, but I've always found travel kind of empty and meaningless at the end. Everything I need to know, I can have here; I can scroll through the pictures and imagine just as well as wasting all that time and energy on going to faraway places.
Lying on the ground again. I've never been able to lie on the ground well; one of my head or my back will always complain. Looks so undignified for the cameras, especially this ancient t-shirt I dredged out of my supplies to fit with their arcane dress code. Eventually I find a compromise, leaning my head on my hands, that looks a lot more natural, although I have to shift and squirm from time to time to avoid crushing my poor, delicate fingers.
I need those for typing with! I haven't done as much writing by hand for years.
Another trance, this time with a 'process' in the middle, not just the amateurish idea implantation (it might be amateur hour but it was certainly textbook, I could hear it resonating in my mind while we were out of the room; a little voice calling the refrain, 'and that's okay', 'and it's okay', to all my thoughts. Acceptance. I was reminded at the time, as soon as they wrote it on the board - demons teach acceptance. A reference you probably won't get.)
We'd had another break with 'homework'. Write down a barrier that you currently face, a problem you want to work through, even if it's an external one. Of course, I knew what I wanted to write, what would be truthful, but there was no way I was committing _that_ to paper. Having said it in the vicinity of cameras was bad enough, even if I was pretty sure they had moved on and stopped recording me. I spent a while chasing thoughts around my head, looking for something anodyne and unrevealing, but convincing all the same.
The best lies have a grain of truth. Insomnia. It doesn't really haunt me; I have strategies, I have pills, I know how to work around it; but it would be easy for any of the people here that I might have to 'share' it with to believe that someone like me had a major problem with that. I sowed the seeds of it in the "What do you want" exercise. The first meditation on this problem was a private meditation, in the middle of the trance; give it a shape, give it a colour, because stupid people can't understand anything unless it has a tangible representation; because apparently they were trying to cure us of abstract thought, in some kind of ludicrous reversion to kindergarten theories of causation and the world.
I had an excellent description all ready to go, too. A threatening purple-black cloud, hovering over the back of my head and extending down into my lungs. It was a masterpiece, but what was also a masterpiece was my ability to evade actually being called in group discussions. We got an attack of the cheerleaders again which had us carefully tearing into someone else's description of their problem, that girl with the too-wide eyes.
The festivities came to an end before it was my turn because they took her over to the wall. In some kind of weird pressure ritual, they'd pulled out Mister Philosophy Student earlier and had their pet ogre and the greasy little rat push him against the wall while demanding he told the truth about 'what he wanted', because they'd caught him obviously making fun of the exercise. He had totally deserved it; he should learn to lie better if he's going to be that pretentious, and eventually they wrung something sufficiently pretentious and empty out of him that it had to be the truth, as much as he was capable of containing such a thing.
So they took Bette over to the wall, and I remarked casually when I was sure they were all distracted, "Shades of the Milgram Experiment, huh?". Then I had to explain, of course, because I'd forgotten I was with a less sophisitcated crowd than usual. "Where they see how much you'll stand by and watch bad things happen. The bystander effect." My interlocuter nodded, and turned back to watch. The tiny blonde girl was practically shaking, making 'no way' signs with her hands, pleading. I was glad they weren't doing it to any of the people that I cared about here; she had been just fake and plastic enough that I was pretty sure this was all play-acting, too, and in any case I didn't think there was enough substance in her to be the kind of person who could truly be said to _be_ hurt. I don't care about animal rights and I didn't care about her rights, either.
If it had been Heather, or even one of the weak-eyed and stumbling, genuine girls, I might have had to do something about it.
And then I'd have lost my bet.
After just a little bit of screaming and flailing and whimpering, they got something out of Bette or really they just gave up because they couldn't stand hearing her talk for one more moment either. We'd done an exercise where we all lined up in rows and had to cross the room and stand by whoever we found the most attractive. I'd gone and stood in front of Bette, because she was _very_ stylish, you couldn't fault the wardrobe or the hair or the anime eyes; if I'd wanted to fuck anyone in the lineup, it would have been her. I'd considered picking Eddie, who'd got a genuine engagement with the world that I admired just a bit, but they said 'most attracted to', not 'who do you most like'.
Of course, no-one was attracted to me. My vanity did attempt to give me a kicking over it, but I think I kept the disappointment out of my demenour. I hadn't come here to solicit, after all. Mister Philosophy Student came to stand in front of the person next to me, and I was surprised by how vehemently I thought, if he stands next to me I am going to punch him right in the nose. I didn't want some kind of sarcastic pity, which I knew would be the reason if he happened to pick the last girl who didn't have a queue.
As I said in the sharing circle afterwards, I did feel like I'd kind of won a popularity contest when not one but two people came and stood in my line for Least Attracted To, though. Of course, it was nothing on the massive line that Ace Rimmer had managed to get together for himself, but he really had been trying quite hard and it's easier to tell a guy you're unattracted to him than to tell a girl to her face. Kit the Philosophy Boy was in my face, although he said something daft about being 'unable to connect', which kind of made sense really; I wasn't here to connect to drifters and losers, either. The other member of my queue surprised me a little; apparently I reminded him of someone who'd been racially abusive to him in the past, nothing to do with _me_ at all.
It was kind of disappointing.
I picked one of the weak-eyed girls to be least attracted to, because I felt like being honest for a change. I thought about picking Kit - in fact, I said as much - but 'least attracted to' wasn't it, although the critera that dear fence-sitting Bette was given - 'who would you least like to go and have a drink with afterwards' - certainly applied. I'd rather have had a drink with the vague, plain-looking blonde with the rainbow dolphin amulet, but I'd rather have had sex with Kit. After all, ten million fanfiction writers can't be wrong about the excitement of a good bout of hatesex, right?
I told the girl some drivel about how I didn't percieve any depth to her - perfectly true of course, I've always had a particular disdain for dolphin-lovers, if rather a decent amount of respect for the actual rapist, conniving creatures themselves. But that wasn't why I was there, I was interpretting the question in a perfectly shallow fashion, but the watery-eyed girl didn't need to know that. I made my eye contact as apologetic as possible; she indicated that it was okay, that she understands.
Of course there was the inevitable lifeboat exercise. I used the opportunity to say my piece about already being saved, of course, and the incredibly wet hippy in the group - called herself Skye, had been sitting in a meditation posture during the first wait for people to come in and wouldn't stop _smiling_ at everyone - then said something pointed about how she had made her peace with how we would _all_ go on. Unsurprisingly I didn't live, but surprisingly Skye did; the power of being small and cute and infectiously forced-cheerful, I guess. And Sadie lived, who was in our group.
The twist was that once all the survivors were lined up on stage, audience members were allowed to shoot any they didn't think were worthy; not that it would save us, but to stop them surviving either. In a depressing display of modern nihilism, mostly orchestrated by Skye when she got 'shot' by Little Greasy Man of the organisers, not one of the 'survivors' actually made it. Skye justified herself by saying that she felt it was wrong that anyone was labelled as 'better' or 'more worthy' than everyone else, that she felt better now we were all equal, even if we were all dead. I think that just illustrated the poisonous nature of her philosophy more than anything I could have ever argued. Even the organisers were left a little bit speechless; apparently that doesn't happen usually, even with one of them taking the initiative in picking someone off.
Then, well, the lecture about how to blame yourself for everything. Everything in the universe, apparently, is your own fault. You can choose to blame other people, but really you should be choosing to blame nobody, to just let experience wash off; that's a nice theory, but actually, experience that you can't blame on other people just means everyone else can abdicate their responsibilities, that you never get them to change anything. "I realised that all parents are abusers," said someone at the circle after the "I am your mother" exercise. I know that is not true - but _these_ parents, these figures up on the stage attempting to stand in loco parentis for the poor sufferers who have come to them for guidance, _they_ are abusers. They have all the hallmarks of abusers; it's not their fault, it's your fault. If only you didn't make them punish you. If only you could just keep to your agreements. You should be honest; but they are allowed to tell as many lies as they like, as long as they tell you that you needn't believe a word they say. And you mustn't go running to any other sources of comfort, because belief is the lowest form of awareness, the deepest pit of unawareness, which they have redefined to mean 'the enemy'...
I'm no longer sure at which moment I decided, you are poisonous and I need to shut you down for the good of humanity, but this part was certainly a contributing factor. It wasn't all that though, it was something else, something specific which I have forgotten. But I wrote it down, so that's okay.
I can't do it by suing them into the ground over the obvious thing, because I told him I forgave him, and I mean it when I do that. But that's getting ahead of myself. (Heather told me she didn't know how I could forgive the people who bullied me at school. I don't know how I could not forgive them. People are people. People do things for a reason. They might be wrong, but very few of them, maybe none of them, are evil. These people here, for instance, up on the stage, they're doing this for money, they're doing this because they were brainwashed into believing it too, they're doing this because they are using it to fulfil the basic human need to have power and control over _something_ - maybe they never had it in their own lives, so now they are grasping for it over others. No-one is evil. People are just misguided...)
Okay. So you want to know how I came by these bruises. I'm getting to that.
There was one guy - Henry - who was obviously there to act as their Bad Cop. Not that Nikki and the others were incapable of being the Bad Cop on occasion - there was a whole thread to do with them bullying one of their repeat attendee volunteers, Sadie, which I've kind of elided because I still feel bad about not being able to save her. She really just needs to stop coming to these things, unless she was a plant of course - but why would they have a plant who called into question the central tenet that this course fixed people, let you become a person of integrity, and coming back made you even more fixed?
Anyway, Sadie and the Board-Rubber was a running theme, she didn't bring one in the morning and there were increasingly comical attempts to fix the problem badly all the way through the proceedings, with lots of Reading The Rules and Asking Why You Can't Keep Your Agreement and generally insulting and belittling and becoming angry and making her feel about three inches tall, which Nikki participated enthusiastically in; Steve a little more laid back, trying to be the Good Cop, pulling the We're Disappointed, We Only Feel Bad For You lines. But when one of the participants broke the rules, it was Henry who would stand front and centre and say it was Unacceptable and read the entire Agreement again to make everyone feel like naughty schoolchildren.
He was a tall, strongly built man who was obviously called out for intimidation purposes with the wall-pushings and in this weird line-up exercise where half the participants at a time were called up on stage to 'learn to be comfortable with being them' by having the audience and the staff make uncomfortable eye contact with them. (I won a lovely staring contest against the little greasy dude who didn't say much; it made me feel like I was a teenager winning staring contests in the playground again. He was seriously good at it, I barely caught him blinking at all, and I have no idea if he caught my trademark fluttering sneaky eye-rests or not.) This working-class girl with her hair in bunches made the mistake of admitting she was intimidated by him during the line-up and that's why she'd run off the stage, and got a bonus staring bout for her troubles.
----
This isn't working.
Maybe I should describe the moment. One moment, there is Henry, shouting in my face. I'm sure that some people find that kind of thing very intimidating, but all I can think of in that kind of circumstance is how silly people's faces look, twisted by rage. How I can see his uvula, dangling at the back of that parade-ground cavern which he is making so much noise with. I barely register what he is actually saying; it's just the same as before, Get Back In Your Place, but when someone starts shouting you know they have lost all vestige of authority.
Then, with no recollection whatsoever of the intervening time, I am on the floor.
For a moment, there is silence, a void in which I know I must act; this whole charade is being played out to demonstrate that I am not, in fact, a coward, in any of the conventional meanings of the word. So I regain my feet, with as much dignity as is left to me, and I say my piece. Somewhere in the back of my mind I feel as if I should be making some point about faith, about belief, about God, but the message that I have bursting forth from me is much more primal and deep-rooted than those things.
I speak of truth. "These people," I say, "claim that honesty is important. They claim that we are here to speak the truth to each other. But this is what happens," and I know they are in no doubt as to what I refer, "when we attempt to speak the truth. Tell me," I say, sweeping up to my place, to where Henry is still standing implacably, outside of his role, of his programming, waiting for further orders, "is truth not, then, the highest virtue? Is that not what we are here for? Do you want us to lie?"
He mutters, repetatively, stuck on his tracks, that no, what we are here for is to do the processes. To go through the motions. I can't think that anyone in the wider room than our group could even have heard him. I have made my point.
I was speaking of truth because we had been telling the truth to Eddie. Eddie is a beautiful, older woman, in the inner sense at least, and she has obviously been struggling with the bitterness certain elements of the past have left her with. In the spirit of breaking down everyone in the room so that their insidious baggage can take hold, Henry has come over to our group and called us cowards, pointing at each one and stating it bluntly, "Coward" - for prefacing our remarks to Eddie with positive comments about her. But there is so much positive about her, it just bursts out through her skin and radiates through her actions into everyone in her vicinity; it would be a lie to say anything else.
So I challenge him. I ask him if we are not supposed to speak the truth. I ask him if we are not supposed to be honest with each other. I ask him if we are supposed to lie. He calls me a coward again, so I step up, closer. Better people than him, more powerful people, bigger people have attempted to intimidate me. He has picked the wrong target. I ask him again: should we lie? He begins to bluster. I should get back to my place, or I should walk out right now. The 'like it or leave' clause. I will not leave.
Quite apart from any bets, any things which are riding on this occasion, to leave is not to assert my authority, as they frame it; to leave is to walk away, to let them win, to abandon the rest of the people here into their clutches, to display that here in this room they cannot be defeated, cannot be defied.
I demonstrate that they can be defeated. That they are only some people, giving a training course, who have their script and their limitations and their blinkers.
Then I do return to my place, and carry on with the 'process', because being needlessly disruptive is not winning. The most useful victories are those that you can win while playing by their rules, working with the system rather than destroying it; more respect accrues from adaptation, from turning the bad to the service of the good, than childish and wasteful destruction.
----
There were a couple more hours after that which I am comprehensively failing to write up, including another bout of 'lie on the floor and trance induction' that asked the question 'imagine yourself in your workshop, the place you make things' and had Maria crying as she realised that her 'workshop' was the House of Commons but she would never be there due to her chosen career (and the scandal she had probably caused by being videoed during the events of the day), that nothing she did would ever be 'good enough' for her; and that then asked 'imagine all your beliefs and unreality were not there any more' and her realising that she just used 'pleasing God' as an excuse, that really she did 'good' because she cared about people, but she needed to shield herself from feeling that directly because otherwise she would find the burden of not being able to fix everything even more intolerable than it already was. And being told to go to drama school and to be less angry because it hampered communication, which was hilarious combined with that because she'd been going on about how she needed to work out how to communicate with people better in the 'what do you want' exercise earlier ;-). I've also left out the bit where the IC organisers lined up on the stage and the IC characters were meant to walk by and tell them if we trusted them, and Maria said 'I trust you' to Sadie and Henry, but only actually meant it on reflection to Henry, because trust is always trust to do something or other and Henry was the only uncomplicated one, the one she felt wasn't lying...
But given it's taken me another whole week to write this up I doubt you'll be getting an IC-perspective version of that any time soon!
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Date: 2011-10-11 03:59 pm (UTC)From:This was a very fun read! Thanks for posting it!
-Catherine aka, Heather
(Also, lj posts are so difficult to respond too, because it takes me a good ten minutes to decide which of my billions of lj roleplay accounts is the least embarrassing to comment with.)