Jonestown ran "White Nights" — Jones would summon the community in the dark, tell them the drink was poison, watch them file up and drink, then reveal it was a test. Over and over, with fake poison, for years. On November 18, 1978, the same drill ran with real cyanide. (See White Night: The Rehearsal of Death.)
[RESONANCE] The horror isn't the poison — it's the rehearsal. Every genuinely unthinkable act has friction: the flinch, the alarm, the whole nervous system saying no. The first time is hardest because the friction is at its maximum. Rehearsal sands it down. By the twentieth White Night, walking to the vat was a procedure, and the last night was a procedure too — the terror that should have stopped it had already been spent.
This generalizes far past Jonestown. To get people to perform an act they'd refuse under full friction: strip the act of its consequence (fake poison), drill it until the friction is gone, then quietly reattach the consequence. The impossible gets laundered into the routine. It's the ordinary-person thesis with a time dimension the classic experiments only hint at (Milgram's escalating shocks are the closest analogue) — obedience to an extreme act is built by ratcheting through less-extreme rehearsals. And it's a malignant samskara: the groove worn by repetition, cut toward death.
The deepest work of a rehearsal isn't building the capacity to act — it's destroying the capacity to refuse. Christine Miller, the one dissenter on the last tape, is the proof: refusal wasn't impossible, it had been drilled out of everyone else. Promotion criterion: connect to fractionation / the vault's compliance-laddering pages, and test whether "refusal atrophies when un-exercised" holds beyond cults (military training, professional desensitization).
Next action: cross-check against fractionation — is "rehearse the atrocity with the stakes removed" a named technique anywhere in the BM corpus?