Classic Gaslighting

A lot of folks still aren’t grasping this manipulative strategy, so I want to make a glaring point of it this post.

It’s easier for others to recognize classic rudeness, and shrug it off. It’s considered good manners to be tolerant of others’ petty foibles or potential misunderstandings or cultural differences and so on.

But folks aren’t putting a stop to plain old gaslighting, even when it’s obvious. They aren’t calling it out, and naming for it what it is—abusive, highly toxic, anti-social, not only for those who perpetrate, and their victims—but also from those merely viewing or reading.

Abuse radiates much further than those immediately involved in the moment.

This little rant, or welcome observation, depending on your position, was inspired by a small YT channel, another East Texas gardener, which I was curious to view from his title today—Garden Failures: Looks like another bad year.

The kind of title of a seemingly honest person just sharing his experience, not a hustler looking to sell me shit or snare me into another Cult-ur, is one of the nice rare finds still sometimes popping in my social feeds.

I watched only a few minutes before taking a gander at the first comment, and was relieved to find a someone seemingly aware of the enormous amount of weather manipulation going on, and clicked because I saw there was a reply.

But, much to my annoyance and disappointment, it was the typical reply of a Master Gaslighter.

To be shamed as you seek validation, or understanding, is gaslighting. This ‘rude behavior’ is far more than rude and it is tolerated in our culture far more than bullying. Why?

This behavior is graver than victim-blaming and bullying, it is an aggressive attempt to diminish, deflect, avoid, minimize, and control the perceptions, research, feelings and lived reality of the host.

The host, as in the one who has had the audacity and courage to seek understanding in the first place, in a hostile environment and against the norms of the Cult-ure.

I’d just been listening to Jon Levi discussing it, so it was very fresh in my mind. I’ve experienced it all my life, as ALL have in our Cult-ure.

It’s just that some go along with it, instead of recoil from it.

I have gaslit others before, sometimes knowingly, sometimes quite unconsciously, only realizing it years later. My mindset was at those times to ‘fight fire with fire’ and maybe that’s a good strategy, at times, with those who have breached the boundaries into your personal life and betrayed you.

But the large majority of the time those gaslighting others on social media is ALL about narrative control and social engineering. Sometimes I wonder if these are actual individuals, but I don’t bother to check, because I’ve experienced it enough in real life to know if these are just AI bots replying to one another, well, they have a pretty good idea of the human condition.

Is it because the political world has so infiltrated every aspect of our existence that folks have come to accept a steady supply of gaslighting in their lives?

I’ve stopped fighting fire with fire myself, too much gas out there, I’m too old for that now.

But, I wonder, besides avoidin the gaslighters, which seems quite impossible these days, what other action might one take?

Thoughts welcome!