Transgressive Acts

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Title: Transgressive Acts
Major Warnings: Discussions of violence and abuse. Conditioning and indoctrination.
Summary: Examining the process of becoming fully conjoined with the machinery of violence, through the lens of Reid's journey up to the Carmine Contest, and the Spartan agoge. Spoilers up to Break 5

This comparison answers our previous question: why does Leonidas need to murder a helot? Because – as nearly all of the literature on child soldiers notes – the final act of conditioning, the ‘graduation’ into full membership in the group, is very frequently an act of transgressive, irreversible (read: fatal) violence, typically a murder. In that act, the child is forced to join themselves fully into the machinery of violence, to burn a bridge behind then which can never be fully walked back. It cements their place in the group because only within the group does this action make them a man – to turn their back on the group is to convert this event from a rite of passage to a depraved murder, from a proud achievement into an irredeemable shame. Very few people anywhere, at any time, have the moral wherewithal to accept such a truth and so the final act of violence compels them to live the lie.

• Bret Deveraux, Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part I: Spartan School

Hi, it’s me again, that guy that writes all that stuff about power dynamics in Pale (now also on Doof Media, (just the once, though)), and today we will be talking about practitioner culture once more, specifically through the lens of Reid Musser.

Break 5 came out a while ago, but Reid’s story has stuck with me since, and I’m taking this opportunity to dig into him, how he came to be, what his ending means, and how this reflects the wider society he grew up in.

What is a Musser?

First, let’s establish Musser. There is ever only one Musser at a time. Right now Musser’s first name may be Abraham, but I don’t care. He is Musser. All the other family members may be Mussers, but none of them are Musser. Musser is not so much the head of the family unit as he is the family unit. The family unit is an extension of him, and there can only be one person in that position. Therefore, while Reid is a Musser, and Raquel is a Musser, when I say ‘Musser’, I will only ever be referring to one person.

Musser does not create. Musser does not make. He doesn’t forge bonds or put together works of art, much as he may want to. Musser takes. Taking is the family practice, and the family is an extension of him. (One wonders how he fathered sons, giving that there’s never a mention of his wife.) The degree to which anyone in the family receives any kind of recognition from him depends entirely on how well they fall in line with this ideal.

And recognition from Musser determines how much they are allowed to be a Musser.

“Case in point. I have uncles who are the same. Still of the family, but not the family, understand?”

Raquel nodded, and he could see her eyes move, working out where she stood, working out the others, who weren’t even of the family. Like her mother.

• Reid Musser, False Moves 12.z

And, well, being close to Musser comes with a lot of power and tools and trinkets.

“That mirror a magic item? Or something that used to belong to someone else? I had the sense you weren’t in on the family secret,” Verona said.

“Magic item. But I’ve got some instrumental incidentals.”

“Some what nows?”

“They were implements, owner died, item was left behind, took on incidental power… you left before that class, right.”

“Right right. Guess an implement is nicely primed to become an accidental magic item.”

“Yeah. Pretty good ones, a lot of the time.”

• Verona and Raquel of the Mussers, Summer Break 13.12

So it’s safe to say there are some serious incentives to playing along with Musser’s way of doing things.

Becoming Reid Musser

And what a way of doing things it is! The deranged demands of self-denial, of erasing your own wants and needs and desires to better serve the family, to go above and beyond to climb the ranks of this particular social structure and get more of that sweet, sweet power...

But a child has certain emotional needs of their father. A need for warmth, for nurturing, for safety.

Those needs are rather incompatible with the Musser way of doing things, and that makes them inconvenient, so how does Musser get rid of that? How does Musser make a Musser out of his son?

At functionally all of its stages, the Spartan agoge strongly resembles modern systems for indoctrinating and conditioning children to perform violence as child soldiers or terrorists. Like functionally all such systems, it begins by separating the child from their parents; the agoge is only unusual in that it effects this separation at a younger age than average.

• Bret Deveraux, Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part I: Spartan School

“When I was young, my father drove me hard to get my basic education out of the way. Tutors, boarding schools, advanced classes. Education in society when I wasn’t getting my grounding in the world. It was never said out loud that I had to, but I’ve seen many family members fall by the wayside, some twice my age. My older brother Donovan currently attends family business in Edinburgh. When mentions are made of plans for the family, logistics, who should attend to what, he’s not a part of that planning, and his name rarely comes up.”

• Reid Musser, False Moves 12.z

Step one, naturally, is to keep his distance from his son. Tutors, boarding schools, advanced classes. Deny that parental affection as much as possible, make even the acknowledgement of the familial relationship entirely conditional, but that’s not enough to break someone into the systematic nature of this community.

Violence, [...] – and in particular the alternation of violence with ‘rewards’ such as recognition or frequently food – is a key component in these systems. It is especially common that older recruits are forced to be the ones to use violence against the newer recruits – Beber and Blattman (2013) note that among child soldiers in the LRA, 54% reported being severely beaten themselves and 55% reported that abductees were forced to beat or even kill new ‘recruits.’ Violent punishments – especially inflicted by fellow (but more senior) abductees serves to reinforce group membership and solidarity as well as condition loyalty to the (adult) group leader.

[...]

And – in line with the paragraph above – the punishments were often delivered by the senior boys (Plut. Lyc. 18.2-3), just as in groups like the LRA. This increases the feelings of complicity and belonging in abductees, slowly transforming them from victims to victimizers (though we should note that – these all being children, they all remain victims) and at the same time giving them a ‘reward’ in the form of perceived power over their fellows.

• Bret Deveraux, Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part I: Spartan School

Reid’s breath rasped as he let out a hoarse chuckle. An eyeball with torn eyelids roved to look at the Aurum Coil. “Reminds me of my father setting my cousins and I against one another. All these fancy sounding justifications, but when you get down to it, it’s people being stupid and savage. We were always that way, it’s just easier to dress it up with fancy ideas than to actually move forward.”

• Reid of the Mussers, Break 3

“I graduated early, a couple years older than Raquel here, and I did well enough that I got rewarded. They gave me a choice, for the first time. Did I want to stay and focus my efforts within the family, somewhere in the cluster of family members my father keeps around to delegate to? Did I want a mission, a specific, greater task that would be my test to see if I warranted more missions? Or did I want to leave, furthering my education?”

• Reid Musser, False Moves 12.z

Step two is to integrate the way the system works, and upholding the system, into the education itself. Fighting and undercutting family members becomes the way status is achieved, and, because you’re enforcing the system against those of lower status than you, you accept the way the system is enforced against you by those of higher status as valid.

And step three is to return some of those denied little dignities, in very measured amounts, of course. If Reid’s a good boy who plays along, he’ll get his little rewards, and he’ll gain status, and he gets to enforce the system on others (and boy, he sure loves enforcing the system on Raquel something fierce, huh?)

But that’s not completely enough to turn someone into a cog in your machine. Sure, you’ve eroded their empathy, and scrubbed away all the inconvenient parts of an attachment to the family (a feeling of safety and community, of support and friendship), and kept and reinforced only the loyalty to the family as an institution, and maybe some of that need for approval that ends up being useful to that end, but eventually you’ll have to send your child out into the wider world, where they’ll come into contact with a lot of different perspectives, and those might still break the control you’ve put up, however much you’ve demonised those perspectives:

There would be no choice for her. Just the opposite, really. For the tier she occupied, she had two routes to exit. To find a way up and through, or to go the road her mother had traveled. Someone who wasn’t loyal to the family was a liability to the family, by way of the things about the family that they knew. What if they got into drugs and decided to trade information to a family enemy in exchange for a score? What if they gave a filtered version of events to a therapist, received filtered guidance in return, and then decided to lash out and hurt the family?

• Reid Musser, False Moves 12.z

So then what does it take? It takes a little something special, something to achieve that total control, that absolute reflexive loyalty. It takes...

The Transgressive Act

Some of you may have already formed objections about those Bret Deveraux quotes I’ve been including. They’re talking about child soldiers, and the Mussers don’t seem to be that extreme. For one, Reid was never completely removed from his family, or completely isolated from the rest of the world (indeed, he mentions, with pride, that he’s well-travelled). I hope the way I’ve used those quotes to contextualise Musser’s actions make my meaning clear regardless (and if I introduce some people to Bret Deveraux via a ‘Spartan Mussers’ thesis, all the better).

But I don’t think those objections apply to the quote I started this essay with.

Reid’s transgressive act is not, in fact, the first time he shoots a slave that just killed his ‘owner’ at his first opportunity, in order to maintain that family’s hegemony. It’s horrific, sure, but it isn’t the culmination of the system he was raised in. By his own words:

“Was that your first kill?”

Reid blinked. “Yes.”

“A milestone then.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way. It didn’t really rate.”

“You were fifteen, sixteen?” Wye asked.

“Sixteen then,” Reid said. Uncomfortable, he changed the subject. “You know, that whole business was another test. Not set for me or planned in any way. Our family didn’t conduct or anticipate the beheading. But it was a situation that called on me to be my absolute best. Any failure in the handling of it would make me less of a Musser, more of a Donovan, or an Uncle Grant, or an Uncle Lyndon.”

• Wye Belanger and Reid Musser, False Moves 12.z

This was just another test, another step towards true respect, but not the step. Not the big one.

The big one isn’t even when he took Blackhorne.

No, the big one is when he took Drowne. It’s the one story of Reid’s we see where Musser is actually present, where the pressure he exerts is so clearly felt, in those little reminders Reid gives himself while he’s convincing Drowne’s partner to give him up. It’s there that Reid fully internalises the family Practice, the family way of doing things, and becomes an extension of his father.

The words were more his father’s than his, a reinterpretation of something his father had said when someone had ticked him off. Reid wasn’t really ticked off. Just- upset that she’d made him feel bad for doing this.

• Reid Musser, False Moves 12.z

And so tries to destroy those final remnants of his empathy and his humanity, as well, to better fit that little cog in the machine, even when Musser is no longer directly around.

She renewed her attempts, as if she’d sensed that Reid might not do this if his father wasn’t behind him. Maybe, if his father hadn’t been here, his resolve might have faltered.

What would he even have said?

What was he supposed to say here? A lot of the words had been his father’s, more or less, Reid aping the approach his father had taken when he’d let Reid watch the capture of his sixth and most recent familiar.

He mulled over the words, and then decided on, “He was too good for some shabby little girl who can barely practice.”

• Reid Musser, False Moves 12.z

And so, having fully embraced the Musser practice, the Musser way of doing things, he’s fully there. He’s receiving the benefits, the power, the tools, the recognition, and he’ll never stop, because if he does, it’ll mean having to face this, to strip this act of the power it gave him and reveal it as the horror it is, and having to start all over again.

Man, this is starting to sound familiar, where have I heard this stuff before?

“This is an initiation ritual for Finders, those who walk the Paths. There are many benefits, but you should be aware your first big ritual that isn’t the Awakening will shape who and what you are as a practitioner. Many spirits and forces are out there, waiting and poised to see you identify yourselves as one thing or another. If you do the Finder ritual, Lucy, then you may find it hard to shake the guise of being a Finder.”

• Miss, Stolen Away 2.8

...

Oh.

Practice and Patterns

Now, obviously I’m not saying that all forms of Practice are evil, or even remotely as horrific as what Reid did here and what the Mussers do in general, but the way taking Drowne made Reid a Musser, the way the trangressive act makes one a man in those cultures, the way it becomes the core of someone’s self-worth, it’s how the spirits identify someone’s practice.

Doing your first big ritual makes it your thing, in a way that has the spirits perk up and pay attention and reinforce as you carry on. It’s establishing a pattern, and patterns (in the Otherverse especially) have momentum.

It makes change difficult, and in a lot of ways counterintuitive. The worst Practitioners have attached so much of their self-worth, their self-image to the horrible shit they do (just look at the various families Reid references in 12.z) that to acknowledge another way of doing things as valid, let alone superior is enough of a threat that it demands a response (excommunication, like with Raquel’s mom, or simply closing the ranks, the way Raquel does when the Kenneteers talk to her).

If you’re not careful about how you go about breaking patterns, you simply get run over. You lose your power, the spirits either stop recognising you or downright won’t let you get away from the pattern you’ve established, and you’ll have to start all over again, relinquishing all that power, and all those other benefits.

Going against all the established incentives, in other words.

Does that mean it’s impossible? Is the grip of these systems, the control of that indoctrination, truly impossible to break?

Becoming Reid

It takes a truly epic sequence of asskickings, metaphorical and otherwise, but Reid does eventually snap out of it. Does eventually realise just how god awful the system his dad’s perpetuating truly is, and we see just how completely devastating it is to him, to his Self. He just instantly falls apart.

And this is what makes getting people to this point so difficult. Nobody wants to be here, wants to be in this position. It would take truly herculean willpower to face this entirely on your own, after everything Reid’s gone through to indoctrinate him into this, to realise he’s been an evil bastard, and how to handle that.

But he gets there, with some help, from Drowne, from Lauren, from John, he gets to see the error of his ways, and he gets to reject his family’s way of doing things in front of the spirits of his ancestors, the literal embodiments of the Musser tradition.

But he does not get to live.

He will never have the opportunity to rebuild his worldview, rebuild his self-worth in a way that isn't so utterly horrific and designed around the exploitation of others.

He’s just going to be dead.

Let’s hope Raquel does get that opportunity.

“Soldier,” Reid called out. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Haven’t I already?”

“If you survive, if this is my loss? Can you tell Raquel something?”

“If you don’t hurry this along, I’m inclined to promptly forswear you and mislead her about how you went out.”

“Tell her- I hope she puts in some effort and appeals to someone suitable for the family, someone kind to her, and marries them. That will elevate her station enough she- she can maybe have something of her own. I want her to have something of her own.”

“I think she’s more likely to find happiness and find something of her own if she leaves the family entirely,” John called out.

Reid stared across the rink at him, then nodded, as if to himself.

• Reid and John Stiles, Break 5