Part 3 Part 2

L1.0 seems to slowly be turning into Hogwarts with everyone going all in on various occult practices they find in mythology and fairy tales. They are still hiring at this point, so it's entirely possible your first meeting as a new hire could be about carrying around iron nails to ground your spiritual energy.

As shocked newcomers tried to process what they were hearing, Emily cried.

The author makes sure we know that Nevin thinks that while the ultimate practicality of all this may have been dubious, “Had the research continued, they would have ultimately done, I think, a very good job of making sense of the area and coming up with theories and testing them.” So it's almost fine I guess.

Then she goes on to describe obvious cult shenanigans like the leader sexing whoever he wants in the most ~~oblivious~~ ~~whitewashy~~ ~~irresponsible~~ uncritical way possible:

Most of the dramatic events at Leverage can be framed as totally mundane — as resulting from humans doing human things in an unwise manner. After all, it was a workplace where many employees lived together, and had multiple overlapping romantic relationships with their colleagues, while also essentially acting as each other’s therapists. One especially intense incident occurred in early 2018.

[Dear Leader] Geoff had long had open relationships around Leverage. Generally, his relationships were fairly transparent both to their participants and to other Leveragers. But at the beginning of April 2018, one person Geoff was involved with, who was also his employee, found out that he’d gotten into a secret romance with another colleague he practiced bodywork with. The revelation left those around Geoff reeling — in some cases merely confused; in others, betrayed and devastated.

But don't worry, Geoff feels bad about it, whatever it was, I would think simply stepping out on the workplace polycule shouldn't merit such a special mention given everything else going on.

Geoff also acknowledges that his actions might be partially attributable to the cognitive changes he was attempting, and that perhaps as a result of psychological experimentation, “during this time, my own reasoning did not work nearly as well.”

We close part three with a somewhat odd epilogue that starts out with (paraphrasing) "many leveragers believed that maybe it's possible that there may have been a non-provably non-negligible chance" that Geoff was allocating funds with respect to who he was fucking at the time. This uncharacteristic throwing of dear leader under the bus helps draw attention away from the rest of the epilogue where in a very roundabout and muddled way it seems to be implied that the actual issue was everyone using L1.0 tech to gaslight the hell out of each other.

Specifically, I think the part about using leverage's homebrew brainwash toolkit to cure jealousy and broken hearts is as close as the author is willing to get to alluding that there was a lot of gaslighting and manipulation of people into sexual roles they wouldn't otherwise have consented to going on, like maybe being part of dear leaders harem until he grew bored of them and cast them aside and pulled their funding.

But it wasn’t just Geoff. In the close-knit ecosystem community, where all kinds of boundaries blurred, where many performed unofficial therapy for each other while yearning for deep personal change, such secrets were not just an internal currency for maneuvering within the group — they also affected what seemed psychologically possible.

Had they really seen what they thought they saw? What feelings, ideas, or mental frameworks could plausibly be managed with a bodywork or charting session? Could jealousy, or a broken heart, be “cured” with the Leverage toolkit? Was it reasonable for leaders to require specific psychological interventions of their subordinates? In this high-pressure context, where the researchers were themselves the subjects, did it make sense to set limits on what they were trying to be?

On to part 4