The 1938 film (based on a play) reflected in the above poster, won the Academy Award. It was a complex psychological drama in which a wealthy controlling British socialite was hellbent on convincing his wife that she was losing her mind. It was a form of marital abuse, where, for example, he would dim the lights but tell his wife they were not touched (she would be “imagining”). As Porter Braswell explains in the July 13th FastCompany.com, “The Victorian setting of the play is significant: This was an early era for psychology, when scientists began studying mental illness empirically and methodically. It was also the culmination of a much longer history of a (now-defunct) condition called ‘hysteria,’ which classified ‘abnormal’ behavior in women as a physical affliction of the uterus. From Ancient Greece to 19th-century London, countless doctors in the West claimed that women who deviated from ‘normal’ female behavior–i.e., being modest, sexually inhibited, submissive, subdued, unquestioning, religious, etc.–were in fact physically unwell.”
In 1938, the study of psychology was at a nascent stage, still evolving away from those Victorian roots. Audiences were fascinated with the newly discovered machinations of the mind… and how slowly to distort perceptions by this slow, steady convincing that an individual’s perceptions were simply wrong and thus, the victim had to rely on this external force to depict the truth. Hardly coincidentally, it also was the time of Adolph Hitler’s meteoric rise to power. His fiery speeches ignited and supported malignant conspiracy theories that excoriated Jews as the underlying cause of German suffering from horrific “reparations” extracted by the victorious WWI allies. He was a consummate gaslighter of masses of desperate zealots. But Hitler was just the beginning of the political effectiveness of mass gaslighting. Mao Zedong’s 10-year Cultural Revolution promoting “right thinking,” which ended shortly before his death in 1976, used the same technique, killing tens of millions of people. Zealot-driven gaslighters do love culture wars. Obviously, political gaslighting has not stopped.
Today, gaslighting has grown from one-on-one manipulation into an obviously effective tool for misguiding masses of people. Technically, “Gaslighting is a form of emotional manipulation, in which the gaslighter questions or denies the validity of their target’s emotions and perceptions. Psychologists most often cite it as a form of abuse in relationships, but it extends well beyond that. Nowadays, gaslighting is used to describe many more ways of questioning people’s experiences, whether it’s a U.S. president railing about ‘fake news’ or someone at work telling you you’re taking a racist or sexist comment ‘too seriously.’” Braswell.
Indeed, there is a touch of “emperor’s new clothes syndrome” where enough people signing on to fake news as if it were true – today amplified by conspiracy theories communicated within social media – convinces those who think they see the reality, eventually to replace that perception of reality with that mass, if false, perception. “What’s important to glean from gaslighting as a psychological concept is that it’s all about the gaslighter maintaining control in difficult situations. And they’re able to maintain that control by virtue of their importance in someone’s life. The gaslighter has to be important enough to the victim(s) that they are willing to question their own emotions. So, it’s never really about victims being mentally ‘weaker’ compared to their abusers. It’s about the gaslighter abusing their power in a relationship, and that power can come from any number of things: love, loyalty, prestige, trust, admiration, and so on.
“Gaslighting makes it easier for people who’ve done something wrong or hurtful to confront it. It’s a maneuver that allows them to sidestep their own self-examination by denying the reality around them. It is not the same as disagreement, which is natural and normal in relationships of all kinds and scales. It’s about negating someone else’s (uncomfortable or inconvenient) truth.” Braswell. In a sea of political complexity, it is often about outsourcing opinions to those accorded social, media or political status, regardless of the absurdity of the claims. Like religious zeal, those subject to this political gaslighting reinforce their reliance on the purveyors of falsehood, seldom actually seeking literal proof, by mutual affirmation within a defined peer group. Simple answers.
The length and depth of such “perception distorted” peer groups can be staggering. In today’s modern era, it is exceptionally easy to filter out information that may prove that the emperor is naked and relegate the stream of incoming information solely to that which affirms the “fake news,” often in statistically massive cohorts. From a few individuals to massive political movements of millions of adherents. After all, neither Mao nor Hitler had social media, just the Ministry of Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels for Germany, the Red Book for China, and their own dynamic speaking skills.
Donald Trump is considered one of most brilliant tacticians in the use of social media. Fox News became the functional equivalent of his propaganda arm. Or, as Braswell puts it, “And of course, the most famous example, the reason that the Oxford English Dictionary chose ‘gaslighting’ as a runner-up [to “toxic”] for word of the year, is Donald Trump. In 2018, President Trump was at the height of his manipulative powers, gaslighting the entire nation by constantly calling the trustworthiness of some of our most respected journalistic institutions into question. As one commentator remembers it, at various points Trump claimed:
“. . . that he watched thousands of people cheering on 9/11 in Jersey City (police say there’s no evidence of this), that the Mexican government forces immigrants into the U.S. (no evidence), that there are ‘30 or 34 million’ immigrants in this country (there are 10 or 11 million), that he never supported the Iraq War (he told Howard Stern he did), that the unemployment rate is as high as 42 percent (the highest reported rate is 16.4 percent), that the U.S. is the highest-taxed country in the world (not true based on any metric of consideration), that crime is on the rise (it’s falling and has been for decades), and too many other things to list here because the whole tactic is to clog the drain with an indecipherable mass of toxic waste. –Lauren Duca, Teen Vogue (2016)
“When, under closer scrutiny, Trump then claimed that he was the victim of ‘fake news’ and other media conspiracies, he forced millions of Americans to question whether they could trust news outlets they previously respected for their journalistic integrity. Even for those who understood that he was lying, there’s only so far you can go when the most powerful person in the country tells you it’s his word or yours.
“Trump got to power and maintained it in large part by gaslighting Americans en masse. (And he certainly was not the first American in power to do so.) But there are even more insidious forms of gaslighting that affect millions of people without the boost of a president’s word. Institutions and businesses, employers and educators–they’re all capable of gaslighting at scale. And the only thing that stopped Trump in the end was hard data: You can’t keep believing in someone’s denials when you have fact-checkers on your side.” If one cares about fact-checking.
So, a year and a half and half after claims of voter fraud, lots of recounts, audits and legal rulings later, there has been no proof of material voter fraud proves the sticking power of effective gaslighting. The Big Lie continues to be the backbone of a very large segment of GOP political candidates and constituency. Truth has left the building. The consequences are mounting, and we just may lose our representational democracy in the process.
I’m Peter Dekom, and look what it took to undo Hitler’s and Mao’s hypnotic hold on the their citizens to dissolve the gaslighting: Tens of millions of deaths.
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