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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsGaslighting the Electorate
"Gaslighting" is the attempt by one person to redefine another person's reality. The term comes from the 1944 classic film about a man deliberately trying to destroy his wife's sanity to protect his own guilty secret.
It's a common tactic used by abusers: Re-frame and re-define everything the victim says or does to reflect what the abuser wants them to believe about themselves. It can be deliberate, and subtle, and it's devastatingly effective.
Less maliciously, but still doing damage, it can be a form of manipulation, unconscious or even inadvertent. It's often a tactic used by partners in an intimate relationship, parents, or bosses, who are insecure or controlling.
You simply overwrite the reality with your own interpretation, again and again, re-interpreting it, and forcing your interpretation on the target, disallowing their experience, their belief, their reality, and replacing it with yours.
"Did you HAVE to cut me off at the knees, in front of our friends?"
"Cut you off... what do you mean? We just talked about the weekend!"
"The only time you mentioned me was to make me look like an idiot."
"What? I told them about the restaurant mix-up, I thought it was funny, and cute!"
"You saw them smirking at each other. You always have to make me look like the bumbling fool."
Enough of this, and the target starts asking themselves "AM I being unfair? Is it my fault?" and questioning their own motivations. Ultimately, they get sucked into the reality the gaslighter presents, and (ideally, from the gaslighter's POV) it begins to affect their behavior and even their beliefs.
A really determined gaslighter will often escalate their efforts-- taking mutual friends aside and "explaining" the target's actions and responses, broadening the redefinition of reality and surrounding the target with people who've been 'inoculated' with the gaslighter's version.
By effectively destroying the target's confidence in the reality they experience, and replacing it with the reality the gaslighter wants them to experience, the target is disempowered and subverted, co-opted into accepting the imposed reality and responding on the gaslighter's terms. You can see why it's popular with abusers.
It's popular with another category of people, too: Marketers.
In fact, consumer marketing in almost every category of goods and services has been pretty much subsumed into gaslighting. No longer do marketers seek information about a potential need or want, and develop or refine their product to fill it. Now they start with the product they want to sell, and use "focus groups" to identify exactly how to re-frame potential customers' realities to make the product an object of desire, or the solution to an unmet need or unsolved problem.
It's an unpleasant reality of modern life in a global community shrinking via mass communication. But the consumer marketing gaslighter is an old-fashioned, almost benignant predator compared to the feral and ubiquitous political gaslighter. Potentiated by the increasingly effective mass connection of the Internet, fueled by the torrent of big money, and fronted by a legion of punditry who've raised "redefining reality" to new levels, political gaslighters are working to overwrite everyone's experience.
They use the lessons of marketing, psychology, and mass manipulation like virtuosos, pulling out all the stops and tropes: fear, the need to be part of an 'in-group,' othering, conspiracy. They redefine 'common sense' and 'freedom' and 'democracy' and 'human decency' and 'morality' and even 'science' to meet the needs of the moment and advance to their goal.
They are gaslighting us. It works.
As those who've experienced gaslighting in the interpersonal context know, it's a terrifyingly difficult tactic to fight, once you've cracked and let the gaslighter's version of reality into your consciousness. And even more so, when the gaslighter has escalated to surround you with others who've already accepted their redefinition of you, and who reinforce that overwritten reality. It can be a long, lonely, frightening struggle, to reconnect with your own reality, disengage from the rewards and reinforcements of the imposed version, and survive the sanctions of your rejection.
I have no answers, and no solutions, no magic lists of things to do to turn this around.
Everyone's sum total of reality differs in some respect from everyone else's. How can it be otherwise? We have different experiences, different genes, different patterns of thinking and tastes and desires. To accept and affirm our own reality demands two things: First, that we embrace our own differences and stand up for them.
Second, and much harder, is to accept and affirm the validity of others' realities, even when they differ from our own.
We cannot effectively fight the gaslighting without doing both of these, but it will not be easy.
soberly,
Bright
haikugal
(6,476 posts)1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)or that someone doesn't care about Black people, when no one said anything approaching that?
Frankly, that is not "gaslighting" ... there is another term for that.
rbrnmw
(7,160 posts)1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)I'll try to be more compliant/docile in the near term.
rbrnmw
(7,160 posts)murielm99
(30,656 posts)WB
1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)so I think I'll give the Different People, Different Places, Different Things thing a shot ...
I, now, am a Bernie-supporter ... I will hang out in the Bernie Group (though I can't post there) ... and speak only in support of economic primacy.
Maybe my PO will terminate my parole early?
stevenleser
(32,886 posts)Social justice, but then a few weeks later, when contradicted by Senator Warren, claimed they never said those things instead of admitting they were wrong.
And they keep claiming it was never said.
Yep, gaslighting
rbrnmw
(7,160 posts)1StrongBlackMan
(31,849 posts)you get to say and remember EVERYTHING. Yes ... there are plenty of a segment of DU being all brand new about economic justice being the cure for social justice ... and a whole lot other stuff.
brer cat
(24,401 posts)brer cat
(24,401 posts)The Man is back in the house!
polly7
(20,582 posts)it's exactly like you've stated - once you're away from it you realize just how much it's affected your every thought, your view of everything and everyone around you and you begin to live again.
Excellent, Bright.
been there, done that.
NBachers
(17,001 posts)TygrBright
(20,733 posts)In a way, it's the beginning of my thoughts about reverse-engineering the smash-and-grab raid on our government.
reflectively,
Bright
ljm2002
(10,751 posts)...and very well thought out. I think it is very important for all of us to realize how thoroughly our political discourse is manipulated and controlled. It is why people can be easily manipulated into hating the Other, and into wars without end, among other things.
Thanks for the post. Very thought provoking.
K&R
senz
(11,945 posts)because it could help young people recognize and avoid users and abusers, thus saving them a lot of grief later in their lives. Of course if their parents are the gaslighters, it could be complicated. A kind, caring adult might simply let them know there are other ways to look at things, other options.
I see that a few commenters are trying to use your OP for their own purposes, but I think on the political level, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and just about all rightwing media have long been gaslighting their audiences. I have a couple of relatives who have been damaged this way but can't break free and don't trust anyone who contradicts their brainwashing.
TygrBright
(20,733 posts)And many of us have experienced it personally, to some degree. So it's painful to watch.
But if you can connect it with your own experience, it does help you understand how that 'complicit' thing works, a bit.
thoughtfully,
Bright
Duppers
(28,094 posts)Bookmarking to save.
Maedhros
(10,007 posts)All very frightening, but true.
Bluenorthwest
(45,319 posts)cheating. Trying to merely control or upset another is also not 'gaslighting'.
Definition
gas·light
ˈɡaslīt/
verb
gerund or present participle: gaslighting
manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.
Anyone who trusts an internet poster enough to allow such manipulation are already absent form the realm of reason. To 'gaslight' a person that person has to trust you. If you trust people on the internet more than your own mind, the problem is not the other people.
raouldukelives
(5,178 posts)Are twisted and co-opted at an early age to service the will of corporate shareholders. When ones definition of success is money, it doesn't require much prodding to do anything for it.
One small mind conjuring up new ways to bear false witness against ones neighbors for a few bucks seems small in the grand scale of things. It is only when one starts multiplying out all those small minds, each plotting and scheming, that one starts fully realizing the totality of what they have unleashed upon us all.
They devise the schemes and corporations implement them on behalf of the shareholder. We all are trying to survive in the most reality, the most democracy, they cannot afford to block.
But as assuredly as we have Citizens United, we will have ever improved and ever egregious assaults against what so many have fought for, killed millions for and died face down in the mud for.