Zimbardo wrote about “the strip search scam.” A con man calls an assistant manager at a fast-food restaurant and claims he is a police officer calling about a theft by an attractive new employee. The caller gives the option of the accused coming to the station or being “strip searched” by a fellow employee. Gradually, more and more degenerate instructions are given until overt sexual acts between employees take place. These sexual activities continue for several hours while they wait for the police to arrive which, of course, never happens. This scam has been carried out successfully in 68 similar fast-food settings in 32 states. This bizarre authority influence in absentia seduces many people. In the end, store personnel are fired, some are charged with crimes, the store is sued, and the victims are seriously distressed. The perpetrator, a former corrections officer, was finally caught and convicted. Zimbardo wrote, “So let us not underestimate the power of ‘authority’ to generate obedience to an extent and of a kind that is hard to fathom.” An assistant manager interviewed by Zimbardo said, “You look back on it, and you say, ‘I wouldn’t a done it.’ But unless you’re put in that situation, at that time, how do you know what you would do? You don’t.” What is Creator’s perspective?

Here is a situation with a predicate that is a cultural influence everyone is exposed to—the authority of police as an extension of government power to enforce the rules, as well as the cultural expectation that those who are criminals are not only undeserving and faulty in their behavior and choices but they are deserving of punishment for every bit of harm their criminal conduct causes. So this scam artist masquerading as a police authority, by then conferring that authority on a store employee, is creating a "powerful state of agency," as the psychologists would describe it, where they are actually expected, as codified in law, to represent law enforcement and make a citizen's arrest, if need be, so that justice can be served. So there are strong cultural imperatives and a large karmic foundation to reinforce the role-playing involved here on the part of those being manipulated. So not only are the outlines of power and control, authority figure versus a subservient underling, assigned to unwitting victims of this con artist, the fact that the reward is powerful enough for him to break the law and put his own freedom at risk is very telling. Here you see on display this divide and conquer strategy exercised through a parallel manipulation of two opposite perspectives taken up through role-playing by two victims, one expected to be the authority on the scene to administer justice, and perhaps punishment in this instance as well, and then the other as a victim and, in the act of being confronted and accused of being a criminal, put on the defensive and intimidated to become more and more cooperative and compliant as the only hope of convincing the would-be authority of their innocence.

So this is a classic and quite iconic dichotomy that is the linchpin of the interloper treatment of humans, individually and collectively, over and over and over again, putting someone in power and someone in the line of fire to be their victim. Through repetition and inner makeup, people become more and more able to adopt one or the other role and, in many cases both, as suits the occasion, so people have experienced both being in charge at times as well as having to kowtow to a dominant figure officially in charge of things. That is the reason why this kind of role-playing, simply at the behest of a voice on the phone claiming to be an authority, becomes all too easy for people to fall in line and act their part. After all, you are groomed by your television watching alone, in how to be a criminal, and also how to be a law enforcement official as well as seeing people go under and give up when they reach their level of overwhelm. So people will engage in such conduct, in a kind of theater of the absurd when seen in the light of day, from this predisposing training and grooming to fall in line over and over again in following orders from an authority.