Gaslighting

Deceit & Manipulation as an Ideological Survival Strategy

The gaslighting and ideological derangement on display in the conversation around Washington D.C.’s crime problem, and Trump’s federalization of city law enforcement

‘Gaslighting’ is certainly an overused term these days. In many cases it has come to mean ‘any claim with which I disagree.’ Just as ‘oppression’ has become a stand-in for ‘any group disparity’ and ‘harm’ for ‘any idea certain people don’t like’, gaslighting has become unmoored from its original meaning.

Gaslighting refers to the practice of trying to change a person’s vision or perception of reality, in order to make that person feel unsure of their sanity or perceptual integrity. Therefore it requires not just lies or distortions but a kind of malign intent: the gaslighter must know that they’re lying and must be attempting to not just convince the gaslighting target that they’re incorrect, but that they’re unmoored from reality in some sense: dishonest, deranged, brainwashed. It’s one of the communication strategies that barely used to exist at the upper levels of power and is now extremely common. Like gossiping or shaming, it’s a more feminine tactic, for it attempts to covertly reassign the roles of manipulator, and make the manipulated seem like the manipulator (or at least the disconnected or dishonest party). If it’s successful, the actual manipulator comes to assume the role of the grounded and helpful interventionist, all while feeding the target lies and poison and half-truths. It’s essentially a covert psychological strategy, which uses a person’s goodwill and uncertainty against himself. I think it’s worthwhile to point out that the jostling for victim status and the cynical practice of selectively referring to norms and standards (which are applied when they help an agenda, and are forgotten when they don’t) are similar ideological tactics which have also become much more common, as power has become more feminized and bureaucratized. These kinds of maneuvers would have been mostly incoherent to the residents of great historical civilizations of the past. If you had power, you wielded it, and no one questioned your intentions or your view of reality. Victim status was nothing but a source of shame, and the high-flown moral appeals to grand (and twisted) concepts (like ‘democracy’ or ‘inclusion’) would have been irrelevant - indicators of weakness, and little else. Such tactics would have been compelling to almost no one. The curious thing is that they’re still compelling to almost no one (as we will see), yet they’re deployed so often. Cultures display their values constantly, whether they seek to or not, and our values are apparently a kind of false sanctimony, a constant appeal to good intentions and to the sympathy of the viewers, and a deep desire to make one’s opponents seem crazy or malign or dishonest.

Washington D.C. is a dangerous city. It’s been that way since I was a child (and long before). It’s the kind of fact that is, in every sense, undeniable. Is it so dangerous that the federalization of Washington D.C.’s Metro Police Department (MPD) is necessary? Would that be helpful? That’s obviously a separate question, and it’s one that I won’t really address here. I don’t have to - for there are now many people involved in the national conversation who apparently believe that Washington D.C. is not a dangerous city, despite them (in many cases) living in D.C. and even being victim of crime themselves. This is gaslighting. It’s an attempt to make a fairly obvious truth seem not just incorrect but somehow ill intentioned or unbalanced.

The facts and claims and counter-claims are flying all around… but (as with a large terrestrial battle) a kind of natural trend is making itself felt. The winners are gaining and the losers are abandoning their positions, in the kind of speed-run debates that X’s comments section now allows. One side is yielding more and more ground, being flanked and cut down and attritted by the hour. The data is fairly clear.

FactCheck.org jumped in and refuted President Trump’s claim that the murder rate in D.C. is at the “highest rate probably ever,” but of course murder is only one (serious) element of crime. Harassment by bums and drug addicts, mob behavior by teenagers, car-jackings and attempted car-jackings - these are all aspects of the crime problem as well… and these things are now often unreported by their victims.

I believe that FactCheck.org is probably broadly correct… and that it’s irrelevant. I also doubt whether they fact-checked any of the claims that Washington D.C. isn’t dangerous. This kind of selective and casuistical fact-checking is almost worse than none.

I’m not interested in adjudicating the precise crime rate in Washington D.C. It’s in every sense an unknowable figure, anyway. Once a place becomes dangerous and dysfunctional enough, people stop calling the police, knowing that they won’t respond quickly and - even if they do - nothing will be done. That’s the case in parts of Los Angeles and all of Oakland and Baltimore these days. If you’re attacked or robbed or if you fight off a rapist you might simply hurry home and nurse your wounds, to say nothing of the hundreds of urban zombies who shuffle around in an antisocial daze each and every day, or the teenagers who have dedicated themselves to ignoring every minor law and established norm of our society. These are issues of law and order and public safety as well, and they have almost disappeared from the crime statistics. It is a fact, that I rarely see noted in these discussions, that for cities like Oakland or Baltimore or D.C., crime statistics are bogus. In our bureaucratized era the natural tendency is to pretend as if the numbers are the reality but that’s never the case and when a bureaucracy reaches a certain level of social friction and inaction its figures become totally worthless.

Then there’s the allegations of deliberate doctoring and underreporting and whitewashing of crimes.

The Wire was written and produced more than 20 years ago, and even then it was common knowledge (reflected in the show) that urban crime statistics were massaged (and inaccurate). Yet that reality has apparently escaped most of these commenters. They never learned of it, or they’ve forgotten it… or they’re deliberately ignoring the possibility to strengthen their arguments and make their opponents seem bad or unhinged.

This is the reality of the modern bureaucratic regime: the goals of the organization become the goals, and - even if the operation of the bureaucracy results in impoverishment or ignorance or insecurity or death for many, many people - those factors will not be considered. The elites who comment on the situation (having been trained and incentivized by the bureaucracy) will reflect its assumptions and parrot its claims. And they will represent its critics as ill intentioned or unbalanced. They will never claim that the critics are simply incorrect, and that is one peculiar feature of this discourse. Their opponents are always dishonest or “racist” or “authoritarian.” Surely some of the people who disagree with them have simply seen different data, or are weighting personal experience or anecdote, or using different starting assumptions? Could it really be the case that all of the people who are making the claim that Washington D.C. is dangerous are motivated by racism, or loyalty to Trump, or driven by some ideological capture? If you listened to the people claiming that D.C. isn’t dangerous (that it doesn’t have a serious crime problem) you might believe that. That is the difference between disagreement and gaslighting. That is the element that makes these arguments different from the policy arguments of previous decades. It’s now more important for these claimants to establish that they are good and moral and sane, and that their opponents are not, than to honestly represent the facts as they understand them. This actually functions as an enormous debating handicap, for it drives people towards adopting positions according to where the apparent virtue or status rewards are (among their narrow social set), rather than according to what is apparently factual. In my opinion, this dynamic accounts for the Democratic Party tendency (which has gotten much worse during the past decade) to veer towards positions which are frankly indefensible. Such ideas might seem valid on initial examination (propped up as they are by misleading bureaucracy-generated statistics and by legacy media toadies) but they can only survive by ignoring vast swathes of reality, and gatekeepers no longer have that degree of control.

The fascinating part of all of this for me is the memetic defenses that are thrown up. They are quite revealing as to the class blindness of many progressive followers. When reality doesn’t conform to your preconceptions, and your preconceptions can’t be amended (in this case, because you’ve constructed a binary world in which the opposition is by definition harmful and wrong) what options remain? You can resort to ad hominem attacks: racist, fascist - a dozen other terms that have become so stretched and formless from over-use that they literally now just mean “someone I strongly disagree with.” You can construct an alternate reality, but this requires a comprehensive grasp of the statistics and the policies at play, and progressives (like most other political enthusiasts) don’t have these assets, and certainly aren’t up to the task of manipulating all of X. That leads us to our third avenue, which is increasingly the one chosen by anti-Trump partisans on a number of issues. I call it the ‘ostrich strategy’: you can ignore all contrary data and inconvenient perspectives (forget the thousands of suffering and now grateful working class black residents of D.C.!) and pretend - to yourself and others - that reality is as you wish it was. It’s not adaptive, and it’s not compelling or convincing to doubters, but it is a psychological strategy. The farther the distance between your dreamworld and the real world (and for nearly any ideology that divergence grows every day, for ideologies are never completely faithful renderings of reality) the more bizarre and absurd your convictions come to seem to observers.

This is the epistemological cul-de-sac. What happens when your view of American society is so fixed to the conviction that Donald Trump is a bad and dangerous man (and all of his policies are bad and dangerous) that you literally cannot acknowledge good or useful moves or ideas made by him? What happens when your convictions, which are untrue, become more important than reality itself? In that case, your ideas are essentially unfalsifiable. No matter what the outcome of a situation, you’ve already arrived at your conclusions. However, when every single prediction you make turns out to be incorrect and every promise you announce is broken, then something is deeply wrong. Politics is a game of half-truths and instrumental messaging, but there must be some kind of deeper value system and some reflection of reality behind it all, else it’s all just a sociopathic jostling for power.

The DNC Implodes

The Democratic Party is collapsing. It’s grown increasingly dysfunctional and ridiculous. Certainly it controls many smart people and it has many good policies and values (buried beneath the thick mire of academic theory and political corruption) but it has intentionally and profoundly separated itself from the interests of its working class base, and it has rushed to fight Trump with such enthusiasm that it has embraced sociopathic and incompetent operators, simply because they parrot the correct ideas (which is a trivially easy requirement to fulfill, especially for unethical and unoriginal people). It has stifled the engines which were designed to create and develop brave and curious leaders, and it has dedicated itself to ideas which are appealing only to people who are not in touch with the reality of American social problems. That is really the issue here. The critics of Trump’s D.C. federalization have no connection to crime, and little experience of it (and what they do have they can’t or won’t be honest about). They have no connection to poverty. They have no connection to struggling public schools or the massive social problems of illegal immigration. They have quite intentionally avoided all of these things, carefully building citadels in which they’re protected. Yet their worldview and their political vision depends on a certain conception of these issues. It is literally (at least on the surface) a theoretical and policy package to address them. But it hasn’t worked. It simply hasn’t. No one is even really claiming that it has. No one is seriously making a case that more money for public schools or fewer police for bad neighborhoods are good things. These assumptions are baked in to progressive dogma, but they’re too embarrassing to even state aloud, aside from the reflexive mantras that progressives deploy in place of critical thought (“support public education,” and “over-policing,” etc.). Trump broke the American left, in a certain way of thinking. I think the process has been more subtle: he uncovered and reinforced tendencies and ideas that were already there. By making everything a crisis and by pushing millions of progressive journalists and bureaucrats and creatives and voters away from any possibility of self-criticism or internal reform, he helped to make the left a parody of itself.

Here’s the really fascinating question: when will they realize this? And what happens when they do?

el gato malo

has coined the term “cognitive breakage,” and I think it’s apt. This kind of cognitive dissonance requires an enormous amount of psychological energy to maintain, and makes every dialogue or strategy session more emotional, even hysterical. It also makes any possibility of balanced discussion or internal amendment vanishingly small. If one wanted to understand crime and policing in D.C., surely one would want to speak to social scientists, and D.C. police, and residents? Social science barely exists anymore, swallowed by the trends I’m outlining here. Police are completely ignored as a source of policy insight, and have been for many years (much better to ask a graduate student at GWU about effective policing strategies than an MPD shift commander and 20-year veteran in Anacostia). Residents and poor people can’t be consulted. They are the shield and the pretext for the entire progressive agenda! If progressives actually spoke to them they might discover that their conception of reality has become completely ludicrous. “The risks are too great,” their internal psychological/ideological defense mechanisms tell them. “Better just to do exactly what we’ve been doing… but more so.”

I just wish they would avoid pretending that they’re doing any of this for the poor and working class residents of Washington D.C. That is one pretension too many.

If you think that Mayor Karen Bass’ record entitles her to competently comment on matters of public safety then I suspect that you might be viewing the world through her own distorted lens.

This is the flawed, modern progressive coalition: rich folks and unaccountable politicians and tenured academics and nonprofit executives… but no ordinary people. The vital source of energy and raison d’etre of the progressive movement has disappeared (moved elsewhere, many towards Trump) and we’re left with an entitled and misleading political class desperate to hold on to their power and credibility.

There’s a difference between self-delusion and ideological capture… and cynically using the struggles and suffering of poorer people to cling to power. The former is unseemly, but the latter puts your soul in peril.

How far will they go?

Thanks for reading. Take care of yourself.