To Walk by Gaslight

Why are chronic liars are able to deceive people when the lies are so obvious?

You wonder "How can they believe the lies?"

It's because of gaslighting. Gaslighting starts when you trust someone who is not trustworthy. It could be a romantic partner, a religious leader, a friend, a political leader. The gaslighter usually starts off by saying things that aren't quite true, but that you want to be true. They tell you that your dreams can become a reality, but you have to trust, you have to believe. Other people are liars who will try to destroy your dreams, but the gaslighter knows how to make them come true.

This gets you invested in believing in the reality that the gaslighter creates. From this point forward, they will usually try to isolate you from sources of information that contradict what they are saying, who try to give you a reality check. The isolation can be physical (getting you to stop associating with those people) or psychological (getting you to distrust those people.) Ideally, they will also encourage you to form new connections with others who reinforce the gaslighter's message.

This is when it becomes very difficult to hear the truth or break free.

Human beings rely on each other to establish what is real, what is true. If you see something bizarre, your first instinct is to turn to the person next to you and ask "Did you see that?" If they saw the same thing, it means you aren't hallucinating. We establish what is real and what is fake, delusional or misperceived through epistemic relationships with others. (“Epistemic” means “having to do with knowledge or truth” — an epistemic relationship is one in which we create or share knowledge.) The things that we agree on, that we all experience, are truth, whereas if one person’s experience is at odds with the consensus, we see them as mistaken, weird or even insane.

So if I see or think something that is at odds with what the gaslighter is telling me, I’m going to turn to the people around me and say, “Did you see that? Does this make sense?” This is why isolation is so important: I’ve noticed that most of my Trump-voting friends almost never ask these questions on what they call “normie,” that is, in public forums where there is a real risk of push-back from people with a range of political and ideological views. They ask in places where it is “safe” to speak openly. Ironically, the people who object to safe-spaces on campuses and in communities strongly feel the need for this kind of ideological safety when they are trying to work out what is true for themselves.

Part of this is because they have been taught to see people who disagree with them as dangerous or malicious. The other part is that that experience of danger is often reinforced by actual interactions with outsiders.

Unfortunately, we don’t tend to respond gently to people who have beliefs which are massively at odds with our own. We don’t understand how others can’t see the things that are, from our perspective, blatant, obvious, visible from space. The gaslighter’s claim that “those people” are crazy, angry, or otherwise unreliable, is reinforced whenever the gaslit person repeats the gaslighter’s lies and receives an angry or insulting response.

“See,” the gaslighter says, “those people are irrational, hateful, intolerant. They can’t even give a reasonable defense of their views.” This is an attractive explanation because it validates the person’s feeling of being hurt or rejected by “those people.”

(As an aside, this is also the reason why “It’s not my job to educate you” is an approach guaranteed to alienate people who might be starting to question, or starting to be curious about the views of the other side. It’s absolutely true that the work of education should not be dumped on minority folks just because they happen to be part of a minority — but this is where allies come in. A trans person should not have to educate every transphobe who shows up in their combox, but tagging an ally who has the bandwidth to do the work, then hitting the “no notifications” button, is a much more fruitful approach than saying “educate yourself.”)

As someone gets sucked into a gaslighter’s alternate reality, they very quickly become alienated from people who don’t share that reality. At first, the alienation is choreographed by the gaslighter, but after that, the more the gaslighter’s claims are at odds with reality, the more effective they will be in provoking social rejection of the person who believes them. Paradoxically, as the lies get bigger they become harder, not easier, to dislodge — people will tend to correct small lies in a casual, non-threatening manner, but with big lies they will become incensed that the person ever entertained the lie in the first place. This reinforces the feeling that it is not safe to undertake epistemic work with people who disagree with the gaslighter.

There is, as it were, a pool of illumination controlled by the gaslighter, so that victims are only able to clearly see the things that the gaslighter wants them to see. Everything else is obscure, dark, and frightening.

Moreover, gaslighters often use that obscurity and fear to draw their victims into complicity with evils that are falsely lit so that they look like goods. This complicity may merely involve cheering on things that you would normally find unconscionable, or laughing at the suffering of the gaslighter’s enemies. It may mean publicly defending the gaslighter’s reprehensible actions or views, or it might mean actually getting involved in immoral behaviour. Those who abstain from overt involvement are often made to feel guilty for their “cowardice,” their lack of zeal for the gaslighter’s cause.

To move out of a gaslighter’s reality is incredibly difficult because it demands that you simultaneously:

a) let go of the hopes and promises that the gaslighter uses to draw you in

b) to rearrange your relationships, upend who you trust and who you mistrust

c) risk the rejection of the only community where you feel accepted and safe

d) admit that you were conned

e) accept responsibility for any evils you might have supported or participated in

f) possibly face punitive repercussions from the gaslighter or their followers

g) accept that you’ve wasted time and energy contributing to a megalomaniac’s fantasies, and that you are never getting a return on your investment

None of these things are easy, which is why people try so hard to make excuses, to shelter themselves from facts that contradict the gaslighter’s vision, to explain away evidence that the gaslighter is lying, and to justify the gaslighter’s behaviour even as it becomes increasingly harmful or disconnected from reality. It’s not that people are stupid, it’s that they have been sucked into a kind of pocket dimension, a mirror universe of the gaslighter’s creation, where down is up and up is down.

Photo by Dark Light2021 on Unsplash