Gaslighting?

No, this is not about your furnace nor about your need for a thermostat guard for sale on this web sight. Gaslighting is about something far more critical to life.

Gaslighting is “the manipulation of someone using psychological methods into questioning their own sanity or powers of reasoning”.

The 1944 film called “Gaslight” is about a husband who psychologically manipulates his wife Karen Valentine into believing that she is going insane.

A few years ago, I was invited by a friend to attend a weekend long seminar in Minneapolis, Mn, touting a new “intellectual technology”. About three hundred people were in attendance in a large convention center room. The weekend was advertised as a “forum” but it turned out to be more of a lecture by one man with a strong foreign accent (one I couldn’t identify). After a few hours of sitting and listening, without being given any opportunity to ask questions or to take a break, I was beginning to feel like I was in a cult. Then the bomb was dropped. A large board at the front of the room was turned and we read the purpose statement for the new technology being presented. It simply read, “Life is meaningless, and it is meaningless that life is meaningless.”

I wish that I had been able to comprehend more quickly what was happening. We were being gaslit. We were being told that our sanity and our hard won powers of reasoning were not reality. There was now a new reality.

Only a few people in the group were then brave enough to ask, “was this the purpose of the whole weekend”? “Did we all come just to hear that life is meaningless?” “How could it be?”

I was surprised that not one person got up and left the room. I didn’t either. I was thinking, “there’s got to be more,” but there wasn’t. I think that most stayed and were effectively gaslit. I think that most, somehow came to agree with the presenter that the only meaning in life is the meaning that we as individuals give it.

The danger for all of us in this regard is that we can easily become the victim of gaslighting. Advertising can easily be an attempt to convince us that our understanding of our life is incomplete or just plain wrong, and that we need a new product that will deal with our “new need” (a need that we didn’t know we had) in a new effective way.

Politics can also be gaslighting. We can be told things about our environment that are not true or are partially true and that we need to respond to this “emergency” very soon. We should be asking, has this new “inconvenient truth” become a way for new government spending and a “reason” for new government controls on our lives. Is there another motive behind what we are told is the new reality.

The bottom line then becomes, “What is the truth?”

The way I see it is,

TRUTH IS THE PROPER REPRESENTATION OF REALITY.

And reality is what we bump into when we are wrong. Let’s all do our best to live in reality and avoid being gaslit.

David F. Ask