The season of gaslighting is upon us
It's not just the partisan exaggeration and silliness--it's worse. Political gaslighting is increasing in Silicon Valley: from city officials brazenly ignoring crime sprees to non profits blithely ignoring basic math.
Check it out:
Gunshots shatter our beloved Valley Fair mall on Black Friday. Innocents are rushed to hospital; and, like a B-horror movie, thousands cower in retail storerooms. City officials, tone-deaf, respond by saying: "San Jose is the safest big city in CA."
Over decades, billions are spent promising to "solve homelessness" via no-barrier, slow-to-build, hugely expensive (and of course subsidized) housing. But local homeless counts doubled and tripled, year after year. And housing advocates, oblivious to data, repeat their mantra: "Housing First is a proven solution."
And take a walk through an empty downtown San Jose on a grey winter's afternoon. The only things moving appear to be the windswept white plastic bags scudding along Almaden Blvd or the unwatched ads sliding across gigantic, ugly digital billboards. And city officials brazenly say, "Downtown is back and it's vibrant."
This, my friends, is gaslighting.
Sure: propaganda, exaggeration, and howlers have been baked into our local political discourse forever. But gaslighting is a different beast because it attempts to convince you that:
What you see with your eyes and what you know be true are false.
This is dangerous stuff, as it demolishes the traditional guardrails of rational rhetoric and argument--you know, those concepts which suggest that there is an objective reality out there against which we should judge the effectiveness of ideas and policy.
Gaslighting replaces all that with bullying, signalling, and b.s.-ing unmoored from factual accountability.
Because, to the gaslighter, the only reality is power.
So be advised: when our local governments employ gaslighting, they're not just trying to coerce and deceive us. By taking away accepted notions of logic and reason, they are stripping us of the language and culture with which we hold gov't accountable.
Which is another way of saying that gov't gaslighting otherizes, disenfranchises, and disempowers us.
This weekend, we take a tour around the world to explore how academics and comms experts perceive the rise of political gaslighting. Their topline conclusions:
There's a sexist undercurrent to much gaslighting, as its roots are in efforts to silence and dismiss women's perspectives.
Some people think gaslighting is simply what it takes to push through ideas in an increasingly crowded public square.
There are powerful movements afoot-especially in Europe--which use opposition to gaslighting to restrain free speech.
--CJE for the Opp Now team
This weekend's new stories:
The sexist roots of gaslighting
Some folks think gaslighting is ok--as long as it's in the service of revolutionary advances
Inquisition, redux? Euro want to roll out the Thought Police
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