Gaslight! Gaslight! Why Am I Gaslit Everywhere I go?

We need to talk about the overuse, incorrect application and my sheer irritation of all things ‘Gaslight’

Okay, first things first, let's deal with one of the minor issues with this article. I’m well aware that ‘gaslighting’ has no real connection with gas masks as featured in the picture above.

Against all the advice of every Medium sage ever, I actually don’t put a huge amount of time or thought into picking pictures for my stories. On this occasion, a gas-masked lady in an empty bread aisle was a clear winner. My impromptu title ‘In Karen’s world, surviving the apocalypse without sourdough wasn’t really surviving’.

Plus when you’re considering images for gaslight — there are scant evocative images of Edwardian lamps and/or propane.

Also, whilst I’m doing disclaimers. This article is part two in a series I’m writing about the state of modern debate. The first article dealt with the concept of weaponised offence. If you haven’t read it then it comes highly recommended — I’m heavily biased but I can assure you it’s a cracking good read.

Enjoy the PPPP structure of my article. Penguin. Play. Politics. Philosophy — in that order.

What is ‘Gaslighting’?

I’m not going to bore you too much with the historical details — but it’s far and away the worst thing to come out of the theatre world since Andrew Lloyd Webber murdered the poems of T.S Elliott.

I’ve been a drama teacher and I’m now a playwright, so on behalf of theatre folk everywhere I’d like to apologise for Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play ‘Gaslight’ and the 1944 film of the same name. I won’t apologise for the play, the play is actually quite good.

See how I did a gaslight right there? In the opening section of the article. Nailed it.

Despite the scenery-chewing nature of the text, initial performances went rather well over here at the Richmond Theatre in London. By pulling some celebrity favours, the play then transferred over to Broadway in where it was rebranded as ‘Angel Street’ and turned into a mediocre movie.

In the play, naughty Mr Manningham attempts to convince his wife Bella that she’s going insane. Firstly by trying to seduce the maid and denying everything, pretty standard for a dastardly Victorian husband.

When his wife reports that the gaslights keep dimming and she hears footsteps upstairs in the empty flat he implies she’s slowly losing her mind.

In reality, he’s upstairs going through the underwear drawer of a lady he previously murdered. It’s him clomping around like a Scooby-Doo villain and it’s him causing the gaslights to dim.

With the help of a police officer called Mr Rough, Bella tricks her husband into confessing to the murder. She uses the defence ‘Yeah… but I’m insane’ to deny any accountability for incriminating him.

Hah! Take that Jack Manningham you absolute scoundrel.

From that point on ‘Gaslighting’ entered into modern psychological parlance as a way of manipulating someone, specifically by making them question their version of reality. It applies mostly to psychopaths and narcissists.

It remained in relative psychological obscurity until about 2016 before some idiot dusted it off and decided it was a good catch-all term for everything between ‘I don’t have to listen to you’ and ‘How dare you question my perception of reality!’

There’s been so much gaslighting reported since 2016 that we could probably jump-start a solar system by now.

I often get accused of gaslighting

I don’t always believe in cosmic fortune — but about ten minutes after I began writing this article I received the following comment from Staci. I have never screenshot something so quickly.

There are two accusations of gaslighting here. The first is for calling identity politics, identity politics. The second is for telling a woman what to do with her body — something we hadn’t been discussing. Then another request to ‘please stop the gaslighting’ followed by the absolutely awesome ‘You made no argument’.

Now I love a non-sequitur as much as the next penguin, pierce the lid and microwave it for twelve minutes, but there are limits. The entire conversation with Staci is available in the comments section of this article and it’s well worth a read to get a sense of the back and forth

Staci has clearly learned that ‘gaslighting’ is a term that can be deployed in her favour but hasn’t bothered to learn what it is or how to apply it. I particularly enjoyed ‘You made no argument’ as a finishing move, delivered without a shred of irony after reading my argument.

It’s as close to actual gaslighting as either of us got.

You can’t be gaslit by reading things on Medium

The nature of gaslighting means that one person must be in a position of relative power over another. They must be able to manipulate and be able to sustain that manipulation long enough for someone to genuinely question their reality.

This is why it happens most frequently in long-term couples when one person is a narcissist and the other has no means of escape. You can’t be gaslit by anything you read on Medium because you have the option to not read it.

In Staci’s case, she read my article and then accused me of gaslighting. The linguistic equivalent of grabbing my fist, punching herself in the face with it and subsequently accusing me of being abusive. It totally ignores any agency she has in the writer/reader relationship.

If you feel personally attacked by what I write, that’s on you. For an accusation of gaslighting to be valid, I’d have to be Clockwork Oranging every poor sod who opens one of my articles. And I’m not. Yet.

In this dystopic subjunctive, no matter how many articles you opened, they’d always be mine. You’d get a text, it’d be me. You’d turn on the TV, it’d be one of my articles. You’d try and sleep but my articles would be running through your mind.

The constant barrage of sheer Penguinity would become overwhelming and you’d have no choice but to succumb to my psychotic world view of moderate liberalism and left-leaning social democracy.

At the moment though, despite my best nefarious efforts you can simply close my article and read something else. Boo hiss!

If you go hunting for something to disagree with, find it, read it, then accuse the writer of trying to alter your perception of reality, you’ve massively missed the point of the word ‘gaslighting’

There will be people out there who write things you disagree with. There will be people out there who write things you find offensive. Ideological self-flagellation by reading outside an echo chamber is not psychological torture perpetrated by others.

It’s all you. You aren’t even gaslighting yourself, you’re just an idiot.

I’m not worried about political gaslighting

Not in a liberal democracy and not at the moment. Politicians do lie all the time and then tell us they didn’t lie — but we all know they do it. The fact we let them get away with it, that’s on us. But we aren’t gaslit, we’re just bad at accountability come voting time.

The people of North Korea are currently having their psychological reality altered by the Kim family. The Germans were masters of it between 1933 and 1945 — they targeted the youth. Stalin was pretty good at it too and made up his own rules of genetics. To gaslight a population you need a totalitarian regime,you need to heavily control and regulate the press and need to control the language. Even then it doesn’t work on everyone.

Not even Mr Trump managed that. Cue the sound of a thousand soy lattés being spat out. But… but… but… didn’t Trump try and gaslight the United States?No. I don’t think so.

A democracy with a functioning judiciary and freedom of the press can maintain some semblance of objective shared reality. I think Trump was a narcissist who invited us all into a private, terrifying journey of someone with a casual relationship to the truth and a different objective reality.

It’s my opinion that he’s not a well man. Privileged yes, but not well. Some people believed everything he said? Sure, some did. Some people believe the earth is flat and Bill Gates put chips in all our bloodstreams. Some people will believe anything.

What is most galling for the left is that lots of people knew he lied yet voted for him anyway.

The left has always shot itself in the foot in times of crisis. On this occasion rushing around like they’d been hit by a death ray of psychological malevolence did just fine. What do you do with a choice between a man who seems obsessed with proving the size of his hands and a horde of people claiming their realities were being fractured every time he spoke?

I’m not saying he was a good president, I’m saying he wasn’t some sort of Dr Who phenomena.The moderate and arguably most useful response was to be found somewhere between Anthony Fauci and Jim from the office. Quiet resignation, being the adult in the room and an occasional knowing look to camera.

Instead, taking the term ‘gaslight’ and overusing it at every single juncture the word has ceased to have any real meaning. Now it means that people are less inclined to read or seek the opinion of those who disagree with them. Gaslight is short hand for ‘nobody should read this’

This leads, without a shadow of a doubt, to the collapse of liberal democracy. The democratic process is a 400-year-old experiment in civil disagreement. It relies on people listening to each other, having carefully controlled arguments and then voting to work out who won.

When we can’t entertain the idea of difference without opining that the nature of our reality is being fractured, we move from civil disagreement to ideological warfare.

From that point, it’s only a short hop step and a jump to actual warfare.

This may seem like on brand penguin based hyperbole but I can see liberal democracy collapsing under the weight of perceived oppression on both sides. We must protect our shared reality at all costs, it is the fundamental driving force of continued liberal progress. I can see things getting worse by everyone’s desire to insist their reality trumps everyone else.

I liked it when the writers of Season 2 of USA called the hero/villain ‘Trump’ — I’d do that if I were a cosmic showrunner.

Doing a deeper dive on Gaslighting.

One of the main problems human beings have is getting our head around there’s no such thing as reality. This is a tough thing to explain in one paragraph, so I’m going to hit the enter key and try in the next one.

Everything you think about everything you encounter at all times is crafted for you in your own subjective reality. Everything that has ever happened to you informs how you perceive the world from moment to moment. Yeah….I need to hit enter again.

We use language, in part, to agree on some aspects of objective reality — this is only a tool and it’s not perfect. If you’re interested in the philosophy of language I’d recommend starting with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Better still just watch the film ‘Arrival’ and work back from there.

How our individual realities are structured and how we experience the world is down to our private understanding. We share abstract concepts using sounds and squiggles but we have no idea what other people experience in their reality.

This makes being a singular human really really really complicated.

Now, remember there are 7 billion of us angry hairless apes using 6500 different languages to communicate their reality. They’re all doing this whilst trapped by an invisible force on a floating rock in the meaningless void of space.

By reading this article we’re participating in some sort of small miracle. Two separate bubbles of stardust trying to find a way to describe the rest of the universe to itself. It’s why I’m always amazed when anyone reads anything.

Given all this, is it any wonder that the existence of some people seems like gaslighting to others? I don’t mean what they say, I mean their existence itself.

What do you do when someone threatens your reality? You either let your reality collapse and build a new one from scratch, a stark choice for any primate, or you double down.

Doing so means subjecting someone else to your mental rules. You enforce your reality at the cost of theirs. Ask every LGBTQ+ kid whose parents refuse to believe that homosexuality is real. Such an approach is psychologically damaging to everyone involved and you can read almost any play by Tennessee Williams for more on this.

Conversely, if you’ve spent the last five years building a reality that includes twenty-seven types of gender, fourteen pronouns and now insist your reality is absolute — there’s gonna be a kickback. You’re going to find every moderate you encounter to be the epitome of oppression.

You can see my recent tete-a-tete with James Finn as an example in action.

For James, and for many on the far ideological identity left, everything appears to be gaslighting. In part due to the fact their reality is currently out of step with most liberals on the planet. Everything is oppression and they’re fighting a losing war with all the wrong weapons.

Protecting your own reality at all costs usually devolves into smaller and smaller units of alliances using more and more complicated words to create infinite out-groups. In many cases we are more oppressed by our perception of the world than by the world itself.

We call that anxiety.

For those of us in the centre-ground and who enjoy psychology, language is key to a shared reality. That’s why old fashioned liberals will reject any attempt to hijack public language by any niche interest group.

It means we won’t support any right to enforce pronouns by law, not even if you ask nicely. Maybe, in the fullness of time, a neutral gendered pronoun might emerge — but no true liberal is ever going to mandate it by law.

Latinx is catching on far quicker than womxn. Latinx sounds like a bad-ass Marvel character, womxn looks like dyslexia.

Why you aren’t allowed to control the language

When you control the language, you have the power to shape private realities. Society forgets this at its peril. Explore Soviet phraseology, understand the concept of sīxiǎng gǎizào (思想改造) or get a copy of Lingua Tertii Imperii

Don’t have time for that? Read 1984 and internalise the concepts of Newspeak and Doublethink. Consider how the tendency to police each other’s social media draws us closer to Thoughtcrime.

In 1984 the citizens of Oceania brook no uncomfortable thoughts. When presented with contradictory arguments they engage in a process of Crimestop.‘The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak’

In the book within the book Crimestop is described thus:

“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” (1984)

What better way to re-enforce your own protective stupidity than using the word ‘gaslight?’

We should be wary of anyone who tries to decide who can and cannot speak. We should pay attention to the words people use and not focus on how those words make us feel. We should do everything in our power to make sure that we talk — we should debate often, with skill and with sincerity.

We should protect jokes and humour at all costs, only fools can speak the truth to kings.

We must be very wary of rhetorical tricks like weaponised offence and ‘gaslighting’ as a way of closing down dialogue. Above all else we should protect the words we share and decide their meaning carefully. Words matter.

I don’t think this word is useful outside of its proper psychological frame— we must consider whether it’s time to extinguish the gaslight for good.

Phew, got heavy towards the end there didn’t it?Prefer sticking with the sourdough jokes? One order of philosophy-lite coming up.