Bone-chilling compliance

A movie of our era, as noted by Frank Bruni.

The story: [...] set during one shift at a fictional fast-food restaurant called ChickWich, it imagines that the manager, a dowdy middle-aged woman, gets a call from someone who falsely claims to be a police officer. [...] The “officer” on the phone tells the manager that he has evidence that a young female employee of hers just stole money from a customer’s purse. Because the cops can’t get to the restaurant for a while, he says, the manager must detain the employee herself in a back room. He instructs her to check the young woman’s pockets and handbag for the stolen money. When that doesn’t turn up anything, he uses a mix of threats and praise to persuade her to do a strip-search. And that’s just the start. [...] The manager’s boyfriend later assumes the duties of watching over the detained employee. Cajoled and coached by the voice on the phone, he makes her do those jumping jacks, which are meant to dislodge any hidden loot. By the time he leaves the back room, he’s also been persuaded to spank and then sexually assault her.

The chill factor: the gullibility of ordinary people. A culture where a politician can run for office by claiming that there exists a form of rape that is "legitimate", and that a woman in the process of being raped can "shut down" or make her eggs immune to the overtures of an invading spermazoid, is a culture where gullibility has become a monstrous liability.

As Bruni says, we have dwindled into people who are willing to "trade the calm of certainty for the disquiet of doubt, or potentially hunkering down to the hard work of muddling through the elusive truth of things. Better simply to be told what’s what."

The voice on the phone is the voice of the slick marketer, slick, emphatic and highly persuasive, with that right amount of affected empathy that bring people to do as he commands.