Amerika

We know gaslighting: people portray reality inaccurately and repeatedly in order to skew your perception so that you do what they want. Most passive-aggressive people do this simply by repeating a narrowed, simpler representation of events that includes only the cherry-picked facts that support their perspective.

The successful gaslighting attack directs itself at your ability to perceive reality accurately:

Klein is lead author of a paper that suggests gaslighting can be viewed as a learning process, using the concept of prediction error minimization (PEM). PEM describes how the mind maps out the input it receives from the world, and strives, based on this information, to predict the future, adjust its expectations and respond to the environment.

In addition to behaving in a way that violates your expectations, a gaslighter will, according to the researcher, suggest that the cause of your surprise has something to do with your general grip of reality, making you feel what he calls “epistemically incompetent.”

The model also relies on the idea that we depend on others — especially close others — to form our sense of self and reality. This, combined with the view of gaslighting as a learning process, means that anyone could fall victim to gaslighting, according to Klein.

They want you to feel as if you are completely wrong about how you understand the world. They want you to question your viability as someone who might understand the world. They want you to doubt yourself, everything you know, and your ability to know anything.

This mirrors what every con man, hipster, priest, and politician tells you first: nothing is as it seems. Instead, there is this magical world of bright solid colors and plasticine figures where things are simple because symbols are reality and reality as you know it is a pale imitation of that.

The liberals do it with their promised Equality Utopia. The religious people promise a Heaven where there is no death, want, or suffering. The con man sells you a car that will get you laid like a rug. All of them are telling you the contrarian idea, which is that reality does not matter, but your perceptions of it do!

Let me point a .45 at your head. You will the bullet to not hit you. I will pull the trigger. We will find out — or at least one of us will — what is real. The answer is that life can kill you at any time, through disease or accident, or even political instability. It is out of your control. This disturbs the human.

To counter this, they project a world of symbols because they can control these mentally and confuse that with being able to alter reality. The only glitch is that this is conjectural, so if anyone else does not share the illusion, it pops like a balloon and their fantasy-reality gives way to gritty, ambiguous, and difficult actual reality.

When people gaslight you, it may be for direct manipulation because there is something they want. It may be simply to defend their fiction-absolute, or the set of justifications that make them believe their past decisions were the best possible option.

In any case, it shows us the problem of individualism: when the individual comes first, it crowds out reality, and therefore justifications must be invented to rationalize that conjecture as more real than reality itself.

Tags: control, fiction absolute, gaslighting