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PRISONER_OR_JAILER

                                                  October  1-27, 2017

     An episode of "The Prisoner"
     television show...
                                         SPOILERS
     In the paranoid world of The                          Perhaps a tale of a
     Village, there are prisoners
     who've been brought there                              BITER_REBITTEN
     unwilling, and there are jailers
     who've been planted there
     keeping an eye on the prisoners.

     Number Six conceives of a simple psychological
     test to identify a jailer: if you go around
     acting over-bearing and ordering people around,
     someone who thinks of themselves as a prisoner is
     likely to behave submissively, but someone who
     thinks of themselves as a boss is going to look
     at you like you're crazy and refuse to comply.

     Number Six uses this technique to choose his
     first recruit for an underground resistance: A
     mousey old man who clearly doesn't have the
     dominant streak of a jailer. Later though, it
     occurs to this old man to apply Number Six's
     critereon to Number Six himself: how can it be
     that this dominant, strong scheming fellow is
     himself anything but a plant, one of the secret
     masters of The Village?

          And so much for the resistance:
          anyone who could organize one
          is too scarey for anyone to follow.




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