Mind Rape
It is an assault, and it is also the most effective individual defence anyone has found.
Those are not two uses of the technique. They are the same act, and the difference is who is holding it.
The act of forcefully penetrating the mind of a specimen that is either unwilling or incapable of consent. It covers a full spectrum of actions, ranging from suggestions to outright erasure of the will. Light mind rape may occur during or following deeply traumatic events. Heavier variants present a strong opponent in the form of the victim's whole mind. inherited
It is a psyop technique
The inherited passage reads as though this were an esoteric practice performed by seekers. It is mostly not. It is done at scale, by institutions, through ordinary media, to populations who never meet the operator. contested
The Mind Divers entry describes the intelligence side of this — entering a subject to gather. This entry is the other half: entering to leave something behind. The methods are the ones set out under Meme Wars and Fifth Generational Warfare, applied to an individual or a demographic rather than to a public, and their defining property is the same: a successful operation is indistinguishable from the subject having simply come to think that. unverified
The defensive use
This is the part that belongs in Inoculation and was missing from it, and it is the reason the entry was rewritten. ⚠ warning
A mind can be armoured against burrowing by installing thought-terminating devices — the short, final, unanswerable phrase that arrives at the threshold of a dangerous line of thought and ends it. The term is not ours; it comes from the study of coercive persuasion, where it was catalogued as a marker of a captured mind. It works. Something arriving to burrow in requires a way in, and a mind that reliably stops at the same point does not offer one. contested
So the cults have a third arm of inoculation, alongside the chemical and the administrative: memetic. Cheaper than Soma, faster than the Pineal Gland campaign, and it does not require anyone's cooperation or knowledge. unverified
The mechanism is the horror and it should be stated plainly rather than admired: a thought-terminating device works by making part of a mind uninhabitable. That is why nothing can burrow in there. It is also uninhabitable to its owner, permanently, and he will not experience this as a loss because the faculty that would notice is the faculty that was removed. You defend the house by bricking up rooms and telling nobody which ones. ⚠ warning
The problem this poses
Every entry in Category:The Long War treats inoculation as something done to populations by remote institutions, which keeps it comfortably abstract. This one is done to a person, individually, and it works, and by the wiki's own account it may save them. contested
A recruit should sit with the following and not resolve it quickly: the most reliable individual protection against the Dark that anyone has documented is an assault performed on someone without their consent, that damages them permanently, that they cannot detect, and that this wiki's own method — question the claim, follow the disagreement, refuse the short final answer — is specifically the practice of dismantling exactly that protection. firsthand · Gershon
We are teaching recruits to remove their own armour. We think that is right. We are aware of what it is. ⚠ warning