Flood them with love, then ration it.
The order matters and it is the whole of the law. Affection given unconditionally is a gift. Affection given lavishly and then withdrawn unpredictably is a schedule, and a schedule is an instrument.
Chapter 19 sets out the reinforcement science. A variable-ratio schedule — reward after an unpredictable number of responses — produces the highest and most extinction-resistant response rates known. Schultz's recordings of dopamine neurons explain why: these cells signal reward prediction error rather than reward, and sustained activity is highest under maximum uncertainty. The not knowing is the reinforcer.
Chapter 20 supplies the relational version. Dutton and Painter's traumatic bonding research identified two necessary conditions, and severity is not one of them: a marked power imbalance, and intermittency. Their 1993 study of battered women found attachment strength predicted by intermittency rather than by how bad the abuse had been.
The Unification Church's Boonville workshops, chapter 162, gave the flooding phase its name. Saturation attention at the point of maximum isolation, never being left alone, constant praise — and then, once the recruit was inside, approval that became conditional on participation and cooled when they raised objections.
The operational sequence is therefore three-part and each part depends on the one before. Isolate, so that the group becomes the only source of the reward. Flood, so that the target becomes dependent on a supply they did not previously have and so that reciprocity debt accumulates. Then ration, on no schedule the target can predict.
The output is not a person who complies to obtain warmth. It is a person whose attention is fully occupied by the question of whether warmth is coming, which is a much more complete form of control.
The boundary is that this technique has no legitimate version. Every other law in this codex has a defensible application — a real deadline, a real scarcity, an honest frame. This one does not, because the mechanism requires the affection to be withdrawn for effect rather than for cause, and there is no honest reason to do that.
It is the core mechanism of intimate partner abuse and of cult intake, and its documented consequences include the withdrawal state described in chapter 345 and the fact that separation is the highest-risk period, which is chapter 350.
The counter is chapter 301 and the charting exercise in chapter 19.
Countered by The Too-Fast Devotion