I know just what you mean, colorman.
I just learned a new psyche term;
gaslighting.
The powers of perception and self delusion are mighty and awsome. Even under normal circumstances, two people viewing the same events can and often do come away with completely different perceptions about it. Some people remember the Seed as nothing but goodness and light. They were right there when the chick tried to kill herself by swollowing a large tube of fluoride toothpaste. They were there, in body, when someone tried to split and got 'lovingly' tackled and restrained. They just viewed it as the loving group helping the poor, insane recalcitrant newcomer.
I understand how this works, it happened to me. After a year and some months, almost two years in Straight, I felt the effect of intensive gaslighting like a mack truck to the face. I had just got done delivering my requisite script lines to a kid who had run away, been brought back and been 'confronted' intensively for many hours through the night and halfway into the next day. When they brought him out in front of group, he couldn't really stand or walk on his own or even respond to or look at whoever was talking to him. I "saw" a defiant kid who wouldn't cooperate. Naturally. That's how we all were told to interpret the situation. In that context, that closed groupthink thing, it went without saying.
I bought it, hook line and sinker. My only sop to the kid was that, for whatever reasons, he had chosen to act this way and take the beating. I never understood why ppl did that. I always just complied outwardly and kept my own council privately, or so I thought.
Well just after I finished delivering my lines and sat down, Chris Casselor called on the kid's sister to give him a dose of GroupLove. For the first time in this episode, this kid responded. His face became animated, hopeful. He heard his sister's voice and he started searching with his eyes for the source. Couldn't find her! He couldn't locate his sister's face, not 15 feet away! Cathy just sat down with her face in her hands and cried. I experience intense vertigo and tunnel vision. I looked around at the faces around me, not even bothering to be wary of the ever vigilant 5th phasers on the lookout for cliquing, eye games and such. What I saw was a combo of blank, vacant stares, people waiting for Staff to tell them what to think and people who were terrified and, maybe, thinking this might be just the time to make a break for it. I thought about it hard for a brief moment. Realized that I really had no choice at all. If I made a move, I would just have been beat down and maybe a few other people would be too. So I stuffed it, pulled a face and waited for an oportunity to get my fail self away from that satanic influence so that I could think again.
