Difference between revisions of "Gaslighting"

Revision as of 14:43, 29 September 2020

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines gaslighting as "to attempt to make (someone) believe that he or she is going insane (as by subjecting that person to a series of experiences that have no rational explanation)". This is based on the movie "Gaslight", where the villain is systematically trying to drive his victim insane by manipulating the environment and lying about it. The most iconic example is how he makes the light flicker, while insisting that the light is constant and that his victim is simply imagining the flickering of the light.

This, gaslighting in the traditional sense has three components to how the perpertrators are trying to trick the victims into mistaking themselves for being insane...

• A.) The pertertrator is lying.
• B.) The lie is systematic or systemic
• C.) The systematic lie is calculated to undermine the victim.

When people use the word "gaslighting", they tend to at least partially discard at least one of these three important critera. While this can be done in a reasonable and healthy way, it can also be done in such a way that accusations of "gaslighting" actually becomes a form of gaslighting.

Lets look a bit deeper into each criteria...

A.) The pertertrator is lying.

Something can be more or less untrue without being a lie, since our concept of truth should have three criteria. A person who makes a statement is telling the truth if this person...

• 1.) Honestly believes that the statement is true,
• 2.) Believes so for good reason, and
• 3.) The statement is actually correct.

Truth if all three criteria are filled, lie if none of them are, and a gray area if at least one is fulfilled and at least one isn't.

To examplify this, lets take two situations which are really very different from each others in spite of looking identical onn the surface. In both cases, a married couple goes to sleep together after a long day. Just as they are about to fall asleep, one of them hear the other give of a sarcastic laugh. Feeling upset by being laughed at, she hisses back "don't laugh at me". Next morning, they have a huge argument about what really happened.

In situation X, the partner was actually doing a sarcastic laugh which was calculated to undermine her self-esteem. The partner is gaslighting, at least if it is part of a pattern rather than a one-time act. In situation Y, it was actually just a half-asleep nightmare or a misinterpreted sigh. Yet she is convinced that she is right, and she presses on. She starts a pattern of demanding that the partner confess and repent the malicious laugh. The partner is now being subjected to a pattern of behavior which is gaslighting in every way ecxept for the perpertrator honestly mistaking herself for being right - which doesn't make the situation any less damaging for the victim.

B.) The lie is systematic or systemic

It may or may not be be a good idea to reserve the term gaslighting for patterns of behavior, rather than including single isolated instances. Either way, patterns of behavior can happen in the two following ways...

Systematic: The pattern is built by a single person, who may be actingout of habit or out of a calculatd plan of some kind.

Systemic: The pattern is built by a large group of people. While each person who does the thing may have done it only once, it is still a pattern and still has consequences for the affected.

Lets take an example where the pattern of behavior is done to a flowerpatch rather than to any person or social group. A university campus has this beautiful little garden, which separates two paths. Yet, in one place, the beautiful flowers has been trampled down and completely destroyed. Just becuase some student or students wanted to save a few seconds of their time by taking a shortcut. This may have been done by a single student every day (systematic) or by many students one time each (systemic), but in either case the flowers has been trampled down. To the health of a flower which has been stepped upon twenty times, it matters little whether each of those twenty steps was taken by the same foot or by a new foot.

In the same way, gaslighting can be either systematic like in the movie Gaslight - or systemic as in the following example...

Systemic Gaslighting intersecting with Identity fragility and with Narativism

Lets take a story in three steps, with the character labels in italic...

Step 1.) Some people are doing categorist things against people who belong to a certain category of people, for example the local managers in a corporation refusing to give a certain employee a raise or promotion simply because this employee happens to be black or white or homosexual or heterosexual or Athist or Christian.

Step 2.) Someone speaks up against the discrimination in step one, this speaker tells about how the acts of the local managers (and of those who behave in the same way) are unfair both against the employee personally and to people of the employees category in general.

Step 3.) Some bystander hears the story, and suddenly "realizes" that speaker is lying. After all, speaker is talking about people of a certain category of people, a category which are actually the good guys which the bystander personally identifies with. The bystander geels personally accused by the speakers story, and it is indeed true that the bystander did not commit the offence which the speaker spoke of. Therefore the accusation is not true, and therefore the speaker and the employee are either lying or delusional. Having no actual knowledge of what actually happened, the bystander thus procedes to inform everyone of "the real truth", this imaginary or alternative "fact" that the speaker and the employee are either lying or delusional. Having heard and believed the "facts" presented by the bystander, people now starts pestering the employee about how important it is to punlicly admit the truth that the discrimination never happened, that it was only a bad dream which got mistaken for having actually happened.