The narrative of a post-truth world
In a January 2017 opinion piece for CNN, world affairs columnist Frida Ghitis wrote: “The fact is Trump has become America’s gaslighter in chief”. Earlier, in a 2016 article in Teen Vogue, writer Lauren Duca used the word “gaslighting” to capture the “post-truth” anxieties that “facts have become interchangeable with opinions, blinding us into arguing amongst ourselves as our very reality is called into question.”
Ever since “post-truth” was perceived to be a narrative of the contemporary world — it was also declared as Oxford Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” in 2016 — the term has remained shadowy and possibly a bit incomplete. Now, “gaslighting” has not only supplemented “post-truth” but also explained the modus operandi for igniting the modern collective post-truth rhetoric.
Political context as catalyst
It was destined to, though. Despite its origins in the 1930s, the term only became a cultural touchstone in the 2010s, particularly in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It depicted a range of deceptive behaviours by politicians (Donald Trump), who frequently asserted that the media were spreading “fake news”, as well as the U.K. government’s handling of various issues regarding Brexit. The term first entered psychological literature in 1969. It made its way from the psychotherapist’s notebook to the wider public domain by 2018.
In 2018, the term was named a “buzzword” by The Guardian and shortlisted for the “word of the year” by Oxford Dictionary. And, finally, it became Merriam-Webster dictionary’s word of the year in 2022, after online searches spiked by 1,740%. As Merriam-Webster puts it, “In this age of misinformation — of ‘fake news,’ conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes — gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time.”
As per Psychology Today, gaslighting is “a form of manipulation where targets are urged to doubt their memories, beliefs, feelings, or sanity”.
It is a process
The origin of the term can be traced to the 1938 play, ‘Gas Light’ by British playwright Patrick Hamilton ( a dark tale of a marriage based on deceit and trickery, and with two film adaptations in the 1940s). In George Cukor’s Oscar-winning 1944 adaptation (starring Ingrid Bergman), a Victorian husband manipulates his wife into believing that she is going insane so that he can obtain her fortune. When she complains about the constant dimming of their London townhouse’s gaslights, he convinces her she has been hallucinating. It wasn’t, certainly.
Thus, gaslighting is not an incident but a process, with confusion, lying, deception, isolation, denial, accusation, and manipulation all parts of the process. A 2022 paper in Popular Communication postulated: “As well as describing abuse in romantic relationships, the term has provided a lens for popular understanding of ‘post-truth’ politics.” Clearly, there is a significant overlap between gaslighting and post-truth political categories.
Also, in her 2021 paper titled “Post-truth politics and collective gaslighting” (Episteme), Natascha Rietdijk wrote that post-truth politics can “fundamentally undermine epistemic autonomy (trusting what one knows), in a way that is similar to the manipulative technique known as gaslighting.” Using examples from contemporary politics, she identified three categories of post-truth rhetorics — the introduction of counter-narratives, the discrediting of critics, and the denial of more or less plain facts — that tend to isolate people, leaving them disoriented and unable to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources.
In context
Knowing the dynamics of gaslighting thus enables us to envisage post-truth in a new light. In the movie, Gaslight (1944), Gregory deliberately tries to make his wife Paula lose her mind using manipulation. This, undoubtedly, is gaslighting at the individual level. In contrast, in collective gaslighting, a whole group of people is victimised, but the process would look very much like this.
In the Orwellian, post-truth world, words like “election”, “dissent”, and even “rights” are contested and derided. Political gaslighters may wish to push through a policy. Simple examples include “stolen elections” to save face after losing one or “fake news” to clamp down on free speech. Jair Bolsonaro’s denial of the systematic destruction of the Amazon rainforest or Donald Trump’s denial of the 2020 U.S. presidential election outcome are popular examples of collective gaslighting.
“Gaslighting,” is not simply lying. It is more sinister. Kate Abramson’s 2014 paper “Turning Up The Lights On Gaslighting” (Philosophical Perspectives) argues that the gaslighters’ characteristic desire is “to destroy even the possibility of disagreement”.
The 2022 paper, however, argued how a well-designed and well-intentioned “good echo chamber” might constitute a technique of resistance to online disinformation. But would that be effective to counter the collective gaslighting of the modern world? It is not quite clear, though. What is clear is that, in this post-truth world, collective “gaslighting” might go on shaping society’s outlook and direction in the near future, in various ways and directions.
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