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samwisethewitch · 4 years

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Cults? In my life? It’s more likely than you think.

In my last post, I talked about how the Law of Attraction and Christian prosperity gospel both use the same thought control techniques as cults. I’ve received several public and private replies to that post: some expressing contempt for “sheeple” who can be lead astray by cults, and others who say my post made them scared that they might be part of a cult without knowing it.

I want to address both of those types of replies in this post. I want to talk about what a cult really looks like, and how you can know if you’re dealing with one.

If you type the word “cult” into Google Images, it will bring up lots of photos of people with long hair, wearing all white, with their hands raised in an expression of ecstasy.

Most modern cults do not look anything like this.

Modern cultists look a lot like everyone else. One of the primary goals of most cults is recruitment, and it’s hard to get people to join your cause if they think you and your group are all Kool-Aid-drinking weirdos. The cults that last are the ones that manage to convince people that they’re just like everyone else — a little weird maybe, but certainly not dangerous.

In the book The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, author Jeff Guinn says, “In years to come, Jim Jones would frequently be compared to murderous demagogues such as Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. These comparisons completely misinterpret, and historically misrepresent, the initial appeal of Jim Jones to members of Peoples Temple. Jones attracted followers by appealing to their better instincts.”

You might not know Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple by name, but you’ve probably heard their story. They’re the Kool-Aid drinkers I mentioned earlier. Jones and over 900 of his followers, including children, committed mass suicide by drinking Flavor Aid mixed with cyanide.

In a way, the cartoonish image of cults in popular media has helped real-life cults to stay under the radar and slip through people’s defenses.

In her book Recovering Agency: Lifting the Veil of Mormon Mind Control, Luna Lindsey says: “These groups use a legion of persuasive techniques in unison, techniques that strip away the personality to build up a new group pseudopersonality. New members know very little about the group’s purpose, and most expectations remain unrevealed. People become deeply involved, sacrificing vast amounts of time and money, and investing emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, and socially.”

Let’s address some more common myths about cults:

Myth #1: All cults are Satanic or occult in nature. This mostly comes from conservative Christians, who may believe that all non-Christian religions are inherently cultish in nature and are in league with the Devil. This is not the case — most non-Christians don’t even believe in the Devil, much less want to sign away their souls to him. Many cults use Christian theology to recruit members, and some of these groups (Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) have become popular enough to be recognized as legitimate religions. Most cults have nothing to do with magic or the occult.

Myth #2: All cults are religious. This is also false. While some cults do use religion to recruit members or push an agenda, many cults have no religious or spiritual element. Political cults are those founded around a specific political ideology. Author and cult researcher Janja Lalich is a former member of an American political cult founded on the principles of Marxism. There are also “cults of personality” built around political figures and celebrities, such as Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Donald Trump. In these cases, the cult is built around hero worship of the leader — it doesn’t really matter what the leader believes or does.

Myth #3: All cults are small fringe groups. Cults can be any size. Some cults have only a handful of members — it’s even possible for parents to use thought control techniques on their children, essentially creating a cult that consists of a single family. There are some cults that have millions of members (see previous note about Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses).

Myth #4: All cults live on isolated compounds away from mainstream society. While it is true that all cults isolate their members from the outside world, very few modern cults use physical isolation. Many cults employ social isolation, which makes members feel separate from mainstream society. Some cults do this by encouraging their followers to be “In the world but not of the world,” or encouraging them to keep themselves “pure.”

Myth #5: Only stupid, gullible, and/or mentally ill people join cults. Actually, according to Luna Lindsey, the average cult member is of above-average intelligence. As cult expert Steven Hassan points out, “Cults intentionally recruit ‘valuable’ people—they go after those who are intelligent, caring, and motivated. Most cults do not want to be burdened by unintelligent people with serious emotional or physical problems.” The idea that only stupid or gullible people fall for thought control is very dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that “it could never happen to me.” This actually prevents intelligent people from thinking critically about the information they’re consuming and the groups they’re associating with, which makes them easier targets for cult recruitment.

So, now that we have a better idea of what a cult actually looks like, how do you know if you or someone you know is in one?

A good rule of thumb is to compare the group’s actions and teachings to Steven Hassan’s BITE Model. Steven Hassan is an expert on cult psychology, and most cult researchers stand by this model. From Hassan’s website, freedomofmind.com: “Based on research and theory by Robert Jay Lifton, Margaret Singer, Edgar Schein, Louis Jolyon West, and others who studied brainwashing in Maoist China as well as cognitive dissonance theory by Leon Festinger, Steven Hassan developed the BITE Model to describe the specific methods that cults use to recruit and maintain control over people. ‘BITE’ stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control.”

Behavior Control may include…

Telling you how to behave, and enforcing behavior with rewards and punishments. (Rewards may be nonphysical concepts like “salvation” or “enlightenment,” or social rewards like group acceptance or an elevated status within the group. Punishments may also be nonphysical, like “damnation,” or may be social punishments like judgement from peers or removal from the group.)

Dictating where and with whom you live. (This includes pressure to move closer to other group members, even if you will be living separately.)

Controlling or restricting your sexuality. (Includes enforcing chastity or abstinence and/or coercion into non-consensual sex acts.)

Controlling your clothing or hairstyle. (Even if no one explicitly tells you, you may feel subtle pressure to look like the rest of the group.)

Restricting leisure time and activities. (This includes both demanding participation in frequent group activities and telling you how you should spend your free time.)

Requiring you to seek permission for major decisions. (Again, even if you don’t “need” permission, you may feel pressure to make decisions that will be accepted by the group.)

And more.

Information Control may include…

Withholding or distorting information. (This may manifest as levels of initiation, with only the “inner circle” or upper initiates being taught certain information.)

Forbidding members from speaking with ex-members or other critics.

Discouraging members from trusting any source of information that isn’t approved by the group’s leadership.

Forbidding members from sharing certain details of the group’s beliefs or practice with outsiders.

Using propaganda. (This includes “feel good” media that exists only to enforce the group’s message.)

Using information gained in confession or private conversation against you.

Gaslighting to make members doubt their own memory. (“I never said that,” “You’re remembering that wrong,” “You’re confused,” etc.)

Requiring you to report your thoughts, feelings, and activities to group leaders or superiors.

Encouraging you to spy on other group members and report their “misconduct.”

And more.

Thought Control may include…

Black and White, Us vs. Them, or Good vs. Evil thinking.

Requiring you to change part of your identity or take on a new name. (This includes only using last names, as well as titles like “Brother,” “Sister,” and “Elder.”)

Using loaded languages and cliches to stop complex thought. (This is the difference between calling someone a “former member” and calling the same person an “apostate” or “covenant breaker.”)

Inducing hypnotic or trance states including prayer, meditation, singing hymns, etc.

Using thought-stopping techniques to prevent critical thinking. (“If you ever find yourself doubting, say a prayer to distract yourself!”)

Allowing only positive thoughts or speech.

Rejecting rational analysis and criticism both from members and from those outside the group.

And more.

Emotional Control may include…

Inducing irrational fears and phobias, especially in connection with leaving the group. (This includes fear of damnation, fear of losing personal value, fear of persecution, etc.)

Labeling some emotions as evil, worldly, sinful, low-vibrational, or wrong.

Teaching techniques to keep yourself from feeling certain emotions like anger or sadness.

Promoting feelings of guilt, shame, and unworthiness. (This is often done by holding group members to impossible standards, such as being spiritually “pure” or being 100% happy all the time.)

Showering members and new recruits with positive attention — this is called “love bombing.” (This can be anything from expensive gifts to sexual favors to simply being really nice to newcomers.)

Shunning members who disobey orders or disbelieve the group’s teachings.

Teaching members that there is no happiness, peace, comfort, etc. outside of the group.

And more.

If a group ticks most or all of the boxes in any one of these categories, you need to do some serious thinking about whether or not that group is good for your mental health. If a group is doing all four of these, you’re definitely dealing with a cult and need to get out as soon as possible.

These techniques can also be used by individual people in one-on-one relationships. A relationship or friendship where someone tries to control your behavior, thoughts, or emotions is not healthy and, again, you need to get out as soon as possible.

Obviously, not all of these things are inherently bad. Meditation and prayer can be helpful on their own, and being nice to new people is common courtesy. The problem is when these acts become part of a bigger pattern, which enforces someone else’s control over your life.

A group that tries to tell you how to think or who to be is bad for your mental health, your personal relationships, and your sense of self. When in doubt, do what you think is best for you — and always be suspicious of people or groups who refuse to be criticized.

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Line of Duty: Jed Mercurio ‘We Know There Are People Who Don’t Like the Show’

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Warning: contains spoilers for Line of Duty series six.

When I tell Jed Mercurio that I felt bereft after the end of Line of Duty, he thanks me and jokes “Well, we do aim to leave people disappointed.” I’m talking about missing the communal viewing experience and frenzy of fan theories between episodes; he’s talking about a well-publicised outcry from some viewers that the finale’s ‘H’ mystery reveal was a let-down.

Speaking on Zoom three weeks after Line of Duty concluded – perhaps for good – Mercurio has answered the finale’s critics his way. On Twitter, he shared Audience Appreciation Index stats on the final series – scores out of 100 compiled on behalf of the BBC Audience Research Unit and used as an indicator of how viewers felt about a particular programme. He won’t argue with subjective reactions, he says, but will confront what he describes as a misleading assumption of how widespread those reactions are. “It’s not just about the show, it’s about facts.”

A former hospital doctor turned screenwriter, Mercurio is exacting when it comes to facts and statistics. He’s an exacting speaker all round, never stuttering, fluffing or lacking an answer, and able to call on a vocabulary that includes terms like “potentiate” and “analogous”. He’s understandably sceptical about the way some press headlines about Line of Duty are generated, and has perhaps adapted his interview style to limit the chances of misinterpretation. The overall impression given is of somebody who, in one of Line of Duty’s famous “glass box” interrogation scenes, would fare well on either side of the table.

The finale hubbub is one story (my view: anyone who was expecting Line of Duty to deliver an upbeat ending hadn’t been paying attention) but first I want to ask Mercurio about protest. Not least in its choice of ending, series six was sounding a klaxon…

It felt like the volume of protest against laziness and venality and incompetence in high office kept getting louder and louder in series six. Is Ted Hastings’ exasperation your exasperation?

That’s a really important question, not just for me but for drama at the moment. Look at the trajectory of our country over the last few years. When you’re doing a drama that’s about institutional corruption, you have an important decision to make about whether you acknowledge that the environment has changed, or you plough on doing something that’s set in an entirely fictional, disconnected world?

For me, I was thinking about the fact that we aired season one during the summer of the 2012 London Olympics when we were a very small, unheralded police drama buried in the BBC Two schedule. Looking back to that time, it did feel like the country was a very different place. To quote L.P. Hartley, it’s like a foreign country, how it felt then in terms of our national pride and the shared experience of positivity.

Lennie James as DCI Tony Gates in Line of Duty series one.

To quote your own words back at you then, what has happened to us? When did we stop caring about honesty and integrity?

It’s a really hard one to answer because there’s obviously no point at which that occurred, it appears to have been a progression towards a system now where very senior politicians can visibly be corrupt – and let’s not use any other word – in a way that I think is new in this country. We’re accustomed to seeing it in other countries, we’re accustomed to seeing reports of big civil contracts being awarded in other countries and lots of money just vanishing going into the pockets of corrupt enterprises. We haven’t seen that in this country before, certainly not visibly.

The answer to ‘when’ is hard to say, but it would appear that the pandemic has potentiated the visibility of that through very conspicuous examples, such as the awarding of PPE contracts to companies that were fast-tracked through favourable relations with the government who didn’t have experience of delivering those products. There are examples of defective products being delivered at huge cost to the public purse.

Filming on series six shut down at the start of the pandemic before restarting under Covid-safe conditions. How did the scripts change during that hiatus? You told Mary Beard that the pandemic had been included in the series in an allegorical way…

The specific answer to the question about allegory is about social distancing. It was about the practicalities of filming, so the physical distance between people. There’s more distance between the characters than the intention was. With the key personal relationships that were portrayed in the season, we did look very closely at how impractical it would be to have physical intimacy involving our main cast. That did affect some of the sequences we wanted to do and some of the personal stories we wanted to do.

Are you talking about Jo and Kate?

I’m talking about the trajectory for Steve and Steph, and Jo and Kate. Those were things that had very specific trajectories, and there were limitations on how we could approach them.

Would there have been sex scenes then, between either of those couples?

If we’d known we were able to do it, we might have had more physical intimacy, but we knew that we weren’t able to do it, so that was just something that we weren’t in a position to explore. There’s no point trying to explore something that you can’t do.

Vicky McClure and Kelly Macdonald as DI Kate Arnott and DCI Jo Davidson in series six.

What about script changes in terms of the real-world commentary layered on top of the story? Do you remember the specific circumstances of writing Ted’s line about there being a “bare-faced liar in the highest office”?

That predates the shutdown. The intention to portray the conspicuous corruption that has arrived in our society, and make specific references to individuals who hold high office, or practices that are now visible in high office, was always part of the intention.

How about the ‘Lies Cost Lives’ series tag-line. Did that pre-date the lockdown, or did that come as a reaction to the events of the pandemic?

That came after. The process has always been that we start delivering the series before the marketing campaign starts ramping up. The initial marketing meetings with the BBC post-dated the pandemic, so that’s when we started talking about the possibility of coming up with something which was allegorical in the way that that particular tagline is.

To give you a clear history, we shot four weeks before the shutdown, which was our unilateral pre-empted move. We shut down about a week and a half before the national lockdown, and that was because we saw that we needed to shut down because of Health and Safety. Basically, all the things that were being pointed out to the government and they didn’t act until that later date were things that we were seeing at ground level. Those four weeks related to the first couple of episodes. Then we had the shut down and the scripts were pretty much finished, the only re-writing was about creating a safer environment for the cast and crew, moving more things to exteriors and reducing physical contact between characters.

There was almost a Reithian educational motive in series six’s use of real-world corruption cases. Most viewers might be familiar with the Stephen Lawrence and Jill Dando murder cases, but names like Christopher Alder, Daniel Morgan and Daphne Caruana Galizia would be less familiar. Did you want to use the series as a platform to urge viewers to go away and read up on these cases to find out more?

I’d be very pleased if they did. In terms of how we portray police corruption, it’s hugely important to us that we find ways of relating it to the real world. Otherwise, people will claim that this corruption doesn’t exist, so to be able to identify specific real-world correlates is something that’s been very important on Line of Duty all the way through.

With this season, what we wanted to do was show something about the shape of the careers of public officials in high office, and the fact that people can be involved in things that very clearly involve misconduct and error and negligence and yet still continue into high office. So that was why we looked at things like Alder and Lawrence, Charles De Menezes – who is obviously the Karim Ali connection. There was also a little bit of Blair Peach in the ‘Lawrence Christopher’ case with the murder weapon being lead piping. The police officers who killed Blair Peach had illegal weapons like lead piping in their lockers. And in the identity parade, they all grew beards, which is the opposite of what the identity parade did in our fictional version, where they all shaved and cut their hair.

If you’re looking at the most conspicuous cases of real-world corruption or police failings, we did touch on the most high-profile in the last generation, with Lawrence and Savile and Dando. It’s really about reminding viewers that while Line of Duty is entirely fictional and at times lurches into a very fictional world and a very fictional portrayal of police operations, but the basic idea that corruption exists in our society is not a fiction.

It’s kind of a riposte to [Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis] Cressida Dick’s critique of the show then? A way of saying, ‘you can’t deny corruption exists, here’s the evidence’.

Yeah, I would say that Cressida Dick’s analysis of Line of Duty is analogous to her analysis of corruption in the real world.

Line of Duty: the Best Crime Thrillers to Watch Next

By Jamie Andrew

Designing Line of Duty: “Buckells’ Office Décor Reflects His Shallowness”

By Louisa Mellor

Have you read [Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn’s] The Untouchables book about police corruption in Scotland Yard in the 1980s? Was that an inspiration for Line of Duty?

No, I haven’t read it.

How about the Daniel Morgan podcast that’s referenced in series six? Did you listen to that?

I did.

I don’t expect you’re surprised by home secretary Priti Patel delaying the release of the Daniel Morgan murder independent report?

I am surprised actually, I didn’t see that coming. Obviously in hindsight it does fit with the fact that the repeated failures to properly investigate the Daniel Morgan murder do relate to quite murky relationships involving the press and police officers.

Series six had a valedictory feel, welcoming back so many familiar faces. What explains that sense of doing a final lap, saying goodbye and tying up loose threads?

I think it was because we were looking at the H story. The fact is that it’s something that’s gathered momentum over the seasons and a lot of the things that were fed into it did relate to past characters. The most efficient and vivid way of showing that is obviously to include those characters in the present.

There were some people we didn’t see return. Though we went to HMP Brentiss, there was no sign of Thandiwe Newton’s Roz Huntley, for instance. Were there ever plans to bring back other characters?

No. We’d sometimes talk about it, but we never got to the point of actually writing a script involving past characters and then not being able to include them.

The last time we spoke after series five, you said that “familiarity would potentially be our undoing”. I also read in an interview you gave to Mark Lawson in the Radio Times where you compared the series to an astronomical event whereby something’s gravitational force gets heavier than its mass? Has Line of Duty passed those points now?

I think those are two separate things. The idea of familiarity just relates to the fact that if there’s a lot of Line of Duty, so a lot of episodes and it’s on every year… I’m not saying it wouldn’t be successful, but I think you would see a normalisation of the ratings. People would just know it’s out there and they wouldn’t necessarily make time to watch it. We would then migrate to being more like one of those other shows that are on umpteen seasons that do well but aren’t talked about very much.

The Mark Lawson thing was about the Chandrasekhar Limit, which relates to stellar evolution, stars above this limit will eventually collapse under their own gravity. There’s a lot of legacy with Line of Duty, a lot of past stories and past characters, as we’ve just discussed. You could end up in a situation where there’s a lot of intricate navel gazing about the past rather than dynamic forward storytelling.

So series six could be considered either a finale, or a clearing-out of the past, ready for a fresh start?

I’d say it’s too soon. It’s too soon to draw that conclusion. It could be either of those, or it could be something different.

Martin Compston and Shalom Brune-Franklin as DI Steve Arnott and DC Chloe Bishop in series six.

It felt like this series indulged obsessive fans more than previously. A lot of that’s to do with marketing, such as the trailer treasure hunt, but even in the episodes, things like the magnetic letters in Steph Corbett’s kitchen, it felt like there was more of a game than usual being played with a particular tranche of Line of Duty viewers.

We’ve always had an attention to detail and we try to put little Easter Eggs in. You can go back to season two when Lindsay Denton is scrolling through files of missing persons and she sees a brief glimpse of Jackie Laverty and just moves on. The balance we have to strike is rewarding the loyal fans who know the past and the Line of Duty legacy but also serving the new viewers who are watching it in the present with no pre-knowledge.

When you named the character of Chloe Bishop though, you did it in full knowledge that fans would leap to the “preposterous” conclusion – as you described it on Craig Parkinson’s BBC Sounds podcast – that she might secretly be Chloe Gates, the daughter of Tony Gates from series one?

There are some things that might lead you in that direction, but then there are very obvious markers that it’s wrong. It’s just adding to the entertainment value. One of the things that we know about the way the loyal fans respond is that they enjoy the process of analysing and discussing and re-watching. We have a lot of information telling us how re-watched Line of Duty is, so think about how to make that experience rewarding. There are plenty of dramas that don’t bear up to re-watching.

We have embraced the fact that the way that people watch TV now has changed. In the past, people just had one opportunity to watch and writers like me were often discouraged from putting too much detail in because we were warned that the audience would miss it all, whereas now, the audience has the opportunity to go back – if they care, and I’m not saying that they should. Some members of the audience care enough that they go back and re-watch and it gives them a new perspective, so being able to reward them for doing that is part of our responsibility on the show.

When we first heard the phrase ‘runs of homozygosity’ in episode four, it was there and gone. Was that one for the more obsessive fans to pick up on, before it featured in a more accessible, explained way further down the line?

Yeah. We did actually script that scene as going on to reveal what the runs of homozygosity meant. We do that a lot. We make a final decision in the edit, because you can easily take things out but it’s very hard to add them in if you decide after the event that you needed them earlier. There were some people arguing within the editorial team that we shouldn’t have mentioned the runs of homozygosity at all, but I was pleased that we went the way we did.

It gave more obsessive fans something tantalising to consider between episodes while it wouldn’t have impinged on an ordinary viewing.

Yeah, and that was the reason. Because people now have access to online searches, they can look that up straight away. Rather than being something that’s frustrating for people, those who are minded to look them up have the opportunity to do so.

Nigel Boyle as DSU Buckells in series six.

So. Jimmy Nesbitt’s got a good sense of humour then!

[Laughs] Yeah! It was great. The first conversation I had with Jimmy is ‘The whole point of this is you have to lie through your teeth and misdirect’. We thought if that picture is just someone who’s a random guy in Belfast, then the audience isn’t going to get as invested as they would be if it’s a big star. They’ll think, well of course that means that he’s H and he’s going to arrive all guns blazing. Again, it was another misdirect, built around the fact that the intention with season six was that it would be about mystery more than about the jeopardy. The audience’s investment was in the H enigma and not knowing who it was, rather like a closed circle mystery, a country house detective story, revealing who the person is in a way that was most surprising and I would argue most unexpected and subversive.

Job done. You totally got me with Buckells. All the way through I’d been telling everybody he was just a stupid pawn. I remember writing that Buckells only had half of what it takes to be a useful idiot. He wasn’t even on our list of Bent Coppers… When did you know he was the one typing those ‘Definately’ messages in series five?

That was part of our thinking all the way through. You only ever really push the button when you actually come to make sure the actor’s available and you’re going to be shooting. Steps were taken to keep that as alive as possible through season five, because we wanted to be able to point the finger credibly at other people. Going into season six, we made the decision that we were going to reveal H, and then it was a case of how do we make that the most surprising reveal?

There were obviously two ways to go. We could have just created lots of confirmatory information so that by the time we got to it, it was inevitable that it was going to be a certain person, and then the drama would work in a different way. It wouldn’t be so much about who it is, it would be ‘Are they going to catch them?’, which was kind of what we did over two to three seasons with The Caddy. My main thinking was, it was important that we didn’t go the same way that we did with The Caddy and just do a repeat, which is, we make it pretty clear who the bad guy is, and then it’s all about the tension and jeopardy around whether they’re going to get caught or not.

It felt that we’d succeeded so well in maintaining the H mystery that people honestly didn’t know who it was – they had lots of great theories, but nobody was ever able to produce absolutely convincing evidence for one candidate or another. So we went into six feeling that it would function more in terms of the H mystery than the jeopardy around knowing who it was.

Are you a Private Eye subscriber?

I’m not.

Have you kept up with their Remote Controller columns about Line of Duty?

I saw the last one. Someone sent me a screenshot of the last one in two halves. The first half was about references to Johnson and the government and the second half was just a load of complete nonsense about the BBC. It just made me think it’s no wonder these muppets get sued so much.

That column was irked that viewers had roundly taken Buckells to be a straight avatar for Boris Johnson, while the writer thought that your correlates were usually much more specific than that. What’s your reaction to that assumption?

I think he’s a type. Buckells is a type that you can see in a lot of institutions. The person who fails upwards. That’s something we’ve been careful to draw with Buckells all the way through his involvement with Line of Duty. Every time Buckells has to make a decision, he doesn’t make one. The characters who put their heads above the parapet and show their values and say that they are going to make a definite decision end up being diminished by it, whereas Buckells has succeeded by just avoiding taking responsibility for anything. That’s something that is clearly a problem in some of our institutions.

The fact that Buckells leads this double life is not necessarily related to that, it’s more about the fact that we present someone whose corruption has been mistaken for incompetence, and that is something that we are seeing a lot of. As you said earlier in the interview, in terms of more direct references to senior political figures, there are others within the show. The fact that the Chief Constable makes public statements on the record which are outright lies is not what Buckells is doing.

Adrian Dunbar as Superintendent Ted Hastings in series six.

Why did CC Osborne put trackers on AC-12’s cars?

Because as Carmichael said, they don’t trust them.

It’s as simple as that.

[Laughs]

You’ve left CC Osborne as a kind of potentially… he’s like Schrodinger’s corrupt officer, he both is and isn’t bent depending on whether we observe it?

Yeah. I think that if there is more Line of Duty then clearly there’s potential there. He’s someone who retains high office who is an outright liar and has been involved in corruption in the past in terms of the Karim Ali case and the Lawrence Christopher case. Clearly there would be potential there if we wanted to explore it, but it’s too early to say whether we ever would.

Did series six leave you in any tight spots, writing-wise? By making some of those cliff-hangers as exciting as they were, did you burn any bridges?

I think that goes with the territory in Line of Duty. It’s about delivering different things at different times, so the audience doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. There are times when we do set things up and we know there’s an expectation that there’s going to be an action sequence involving lots of jeopardy and we have to deliver on that, and then there are other times where we feel that it’s too predictable and if we keep doing it, it’s going to become kind of like The A Team. You just know they’re going to get locked in a shed with a lot of equipment and then they can just work their way out of it by building an armoured personal carrier with a rocket launcher attached to the top!

It’s about keeping the show fresh. What that does mean is you run the risk of frustrating people who have developed certain expectations about what’s going to happen next. But we’ve been doing that since series one, and some people got frustrated by that, it turned people away and they stopped watching. We understand that it’s not to everyone’s taste and they will stop watching, but what the data shows is that we must be getting something right because the viewing figures and the loyalty of the audience is pretty solid.

You obviously feel quite strongly a need to correct assumptions and misunderstandings about things like viewing figures and audience appreciation figures and so on. What drives your need to explain those things on Twitter? What kind of criticism are you unwilling to take on board?

It’s purely about facts. During the pandemic, amid the tragedy of the incompetent handling of the crisis, we also had the phenomenon of disinformation. We had mainstream media outlets platforming people who were telling outright lies about the virus. Journalists on the payroll of these organisations were lying about the pandemic. I saw how far we’d come in terms of disinformation.

Of course a person can have their own personal opinion about whether a drama worked for them, of course they can, that’s just basic common sense. But the way in which some of that argument works now is to combine that with disinformation or misinformation. Someone puts forward their opinion in a very strident way, and then they add to that misinformation or disinformation by saying ‘everybody agrees with me’. They are both strident and misinforming or disinforming. There’s nothing that I can say or do, or would want to say or do, about their stridency about their own subjective opinion, but if they’re putting forward the idea that their opinion is held by everybody, or nearly everybody, then that is manifestly untrue, and there’s data to prove it. By disclosing that data, I’m just putting it out there and saying that reasonable people will look at that data and it will give them food for thought.

I’m not saying it will convince the hardliners, because then they’ll just come back and start arguing about statistics in a way that makes me think they weren’t really listening in GCSE Maths. That is part of the problem we have in our society. It’s like the guy on Question Time having a rant about what he earns – the guy who earned £80K a year who was just ranting that it didn’t mean he was in the top five percent of wage-earners or whatever percent it was. He just didn’t understand statistics. All he kept doing was ranting that it wasn’t true. That is something that I find frustrating.

As I said, if a person subjectively has a reaction, then of course that’s acceptable and I recognise it and I’m not going to argue with it. We know there are people who don’t like the show, because [laughs] the data tells us there are people who don’t like the show, but what is misleading is the assumption of how widespread that is, and it’s distorted by the way in which people present that information on social media. It’s not just about the show, it’s about facts.

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Line of Duty Series 6 out now on digital. Series 6 DVD & Blu-ray + Line of Duty Complete Series 1 – 6 DVD Box set released 31 May.

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wwwrains · 4 years

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Reflection

This class has been eye opening to say the least. I had always been under the assumption that being a woman and succeeding was enough; I never gave much attention to the struggles that women as a whole encounter, the idea that some women have to work even that much harder never occurred to me. In the modern day, being a feminist is not enough. Intersectionality is a reality and because of that we must be humanist with an emphasis on WOMEN! How do we do that? Is it done by unveiling the middle east? Probably not. How about by closing the wage gap? That could certainly help, but still is not enough. We have to retrain our brains and the culture in which we are raised in. One way of doing this is through storytelling, and no, not the stories you want to hear but the ones that are difficult to tell and even harder to read.

In the readings and TedTalks from the class we could see the idea of this intersectionality starting to form (figuratively of course, this kind of bias has been around for generations). How many times have women been subjected to a single story? I know I'm guilty of doing it to other women. Thinking to myself that if I pushed through the sexism then why can't they? Well because sometimes is more than just the gender or even the race that creates obstacles. Chimamanda Adichie talks about the perceptions her roommate had of her in her TedTalk The Dangers of a Single Story. These prejudices had nothing to do with her gender or race, but because she was from Nigeria it was assumed her english would be poor and her music more indigious. How often have we made judgements in our own minds about someone who looks different then those in our inner circle. In Adichie's story it wasn't even her outward appearance that got her labeled as less, it was the country, community and culture that assigned her identity long before her physical self. Her birthplace became her single story at that moment, but the reality is english was her native language and she loved Mariah Carey! It's this type of pitying stereotyping that can be so damaging, especially in a country made entirely of immigrants.

In my opinion muslim women have it the hardest in the eyes of intersectionality. I also believe they are the most misunderstood and misinterpreted group that we talked about. Lets cover the intersectionality part first, because it is very different depending on what part of the world they are located in. As Americans we all put up a guard against muslims on September 11, 2001. We began to tell ourself the same story about every muslim we saw. In America it became painful to be a mulism overnight. Many women from this population are easily identified by the color of their skin and a hijab covering their heads. This is now a group of women who have so many odds stacked against them, especially in the American culture. Its the single story of these muslim women that so many of us lump into a single idea when we think of them in their native country. I cannot speak from experience about what it is like to be a woman in radical muslim country, but I think we can all agree we’ve seen news coverage and shocking headlines that gives us an idea of the grim reality that so many women in those positions must feel and be going through. This brings me to the misunderstood part. Now there is absolutely no doubt that women of the middle east (that are normally muslim) have been opressed for many years. Unfortunately, we assume that hijabs is an external show of that oppression. Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? paints a very different reality than the one many Americans make in their heads; showing how damaging ill-informed readers can be on a single story. Another example we saw of this is Mogahed’s What It’s Like to be Muslim in America. Her account of what it was to be a well educated muslim in America after the 9/11 tragedy was a harrowing example of how easily our bias can be swayed. After that day, muslim people were minimized not to a single story but a single act of violence.

Now that I’ve laid out some of the largest issues which we discussed in class, I want to talk about how they apply to each of the books we read. While both books were interesting reads and each protagonist had their own struggles, it can not be overlooked that religion had a major role as co-star in each. This has my mind thinking about how many real life stories are impacted by a religious villain; it can take the form of stereotypes but also it can impact the way you see the world around you. Okparanta Under the Udala Trees was a story of a girl who faced hardship after hardship in her life. Losing her father in the beginning and then her mother(not literally in this instance but the divide between them shattering their bond), lastly, feeling betrayed by religion because of her sexual preferences. She lived in a country in which homosexuality was not accepted, mkaing her question her own skin while her beloved mother tried to use the bible to teach her a virtuous life. I think we so often think about how our communities and cultures discriminate against women and race and religion, that we forget that sexual preference is something that commonly is not tolerated within families and close friends. This is one thing I wish we would have explored in more detail, since internal sexism and discrimination was present in both books, is just damaging these are in adding to the single story. The idea of how the ‘author’ of the single story may be impacted by these principles within their own home not just their own community. Peri, which was the lead character in Eli Sharfak Three Daughters of Eve battled with religion and sexism among other things. When reading this book its easier to understand why the world makes these assumptions about oppression in muslim centered countries. I can also imagine how empowering this story would be for a person who is in a similar situation. Peri had the opportunity to step out of her community and into a more tolerant open minded one at Oxford. She also had the advantage of being well educated. To the average American this doesn't seem like much of an advantage, but it is. Women in muslim communites have started closing the gender gap on education. (Murphy, 2016) That’s an important fact when fighting for equality worldwide. Higher education can mean better jobs, better salary, and more independence for women. Peri was able to stand up for herself at the dinner party because she had the knowledge to do so.

Earlier I talked about shifting the culture to end inequality, and to do that we have to change the way we think about situations. The gender divide is ingrained in us from a young age; sayings like “you run like a girl” and “thats so gay” are derogatory but yet every child has heard them and most have said them. Most children are raised in a home where the mother is the homemaker and the father is the breadwinner. It's these things that are not taught and that make up are individual stories that are so limiting, so dangerous. Aristotle's moral theory deals with habits; virtue is practiced and mastered. If that's the case then we have to change our habits and teach our youth differently. When i read these books and listened to these stories I couldn't help but think how difficult it would be to have conversations on these topics frankly. That's the thing about it, ‘the gift of good literature is that it begins difficult conversations.” What are those difficult conversations for you? When was the last time you told a story that evoked a conversation that started a revolution? I had an experience while in the military that wouldn't allow men and women to stand 24 hour watch together. This resulted in the women of that station to have more watches because there were more of them. When i saw this i couldn't help but think how unfair this was, these women were being given more work for no other reason than being female. I took a stand, this was sexism in my military and I wouldn't just accept it. I stood up to the leadership and demanded equal watches for all sailors. It took two years of adjusting the policy, but ultimately the separation of the sexes was dissolved. That was where my single story as a femisnist begun.

If you had a single story, what would it be?

“The impression she left on others and her self-perception had been sewn into a whole so consummate that she could no longer tell how much of each day was defined by what was wished upon her and how much of it was what she really wanted.” -Elif Shafak

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