And the winner of the 2022 Word of the Year goes to … gaslighting!
Some guy who works at Merriam-Webster
What would it take to up your gaslighting game?
Welcome everyone to my supremely succinct and most authoritative lesson on how to gaslight effectively. After decades of close observation while suffering at the hands of gaslighters, I am delighted to offer this compact treatise on the ways and means of gaslighting to you, the morally reprobate public.
My regular followers will be surprised that I would offer advice on how to gaslight. After all, I usually write appeals to people’s basic human decency and rail against bullies and liars and other incompetent humans. In other words, most bosses.
I will level with you. Although I more typically promote human decency as key to great leadership, decency is just too limited in scope, depth, and attractiveness to entice most people. It is much easier and, let’s face it, sexier to be an indecent creep than to actually live your values. So, in the spirit of “if you can’t beat them, join them,” I offer my sage advice on how to be the best nasty jerk you secretly aspire to be.
What Is Gaslight (a Play or a Movie)?
To get started, we must establish what gaslighting is and isn’t. Gaslighting has a lot in common with lying and bullshitting. All three are means of deception, but there are significant differences. The term “gaslight” is derived from the title of a 1944 movie, based on a 1940 movie, based on a 1938 play, based on a 1936 concept, based on a 1934 experience in which a husband attempts to convince his wife that she is imagining things so that she will lose her grip on reality, giving him cover to hunt for a missing trove of jewels in the space above their abode. (I know. I know. It’s an unsatisfying motivation)
If he were simply a liar, he could manufacture a false story, perhaps to send his wife on a trip so that he could poke around the attic at will. Of course, that would make for an uninspired and rather brief movie plot. If he were a mere bullshitter, his bullshit would come in handy only with small and limited objectives, such as covering up his dalliance with their pretty young housemaid or just being an abusive creep. Bullshitting, though, would do little to advance his scheme to locate and steal the jewels.
As an accomplished gaslighter, the husband instead creates a cruel and complex web of circumstances designed to induce cognitive dissonance in his wife and undermine her confidence and her hold on reality. Once she mistrusts her perceptions, he is free to do as he pleases, which happens to be rummaging the attic by night and the housemaid by day. By the way, kudos if you have spotted the shared motives and methods of gaslighters, emotional abusers, psychological tormentors, and sadists. They are rotted peas in a decaying pod.
Have you ever faced this sort of deception? Makes you a little queasy, right?
So let’s dive deep into these terms: lying, bullshitting, and gaslighting.
What Is Lying?
People often think of liars as being unconcerned with the truth, but liars must actually be preoccupied with what is true in order to spin their falsehoods. A liar knows and believes the truth but chooses to say something untrue in order to deceive. Because it is intentional, one cannot accidentally lie.
Here is an example:
Most bosses are leaders.
See how easy it is to lie? You just think of the truth, click your heels together, and then say something that plainly contradicts that truth.
On the other hand, both gaslighters and bullshitters don’t care much about whether what they claim is genuine or not and have an expansive and fluid conception of the truth. In fact, they will go so far as to use the truth itself to bolster their deceit.
What Is Bullshitting?
Bullshitting is a form of deception, like gaslighting, that relies on exaggeration, fabrication, feigning, concealment, selective disclosure, misdirection, half-truths, and flat-out lying. Unlike plain old liars, though, bullshitters are not concerned with what they believe is true. Whether something is true or false is perfectly irrelevant to the bullshitter’s scheme.
Unlike liars and gaslighters, though, bullshitters can get so up to their eyeballs that they are not even aware of their own behaviors and become self-deceiving. They may even start just bullshitting for bullshit’s sake. Many committed bullshitters are quite content with this state of affairs.
By the way, if you want to learn more, the seminal text on understanding BS is philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit.
What Is Gaslighting?
Just like the bullshitter, the gaslighter will use combinations of lies, half-truths, fabrications, and even full truths to gain advantage, but their intent is more long-term and intensely goal oriented. In fact, their campaigns can last months or years in pursuit of their objective.
Another way of looking at it, bullshitters are tacticians while gaslighters are strategists. And just as any good strategist will also be skilled in tactics, an able gaslighter will always have a solid awareness of the ways and means of bullshitting. In other words, committed gaslighters tend to be damned good bullshitters but not necessarily the other way round.
The effective gaslighter must be a master, an artist, and an engineer while the bullshitter is an operative, an improviser, and an opportunist. To gaslight effectively is to go all in and commit oneself to a fraud. It’s the long con. Both the gaslighter and the bullshitter are shameless and relentless in the effort to sow doubt and confusion in a victim, but the gaslighter’s art always features that longterm endgame. Like the liar and unlike the bullshitter, there is no such thing as an unconscious gaslighter. Self-deceiving, yes, but never unaware.
So how does one become a practiced gaslighter? Doing so certainly requires dedication and a fractured sense of morality, but, once you’ve committed to being such an asshole, there are some clear steps involved as well.
Learn to Gaslight in 4 Easy Steps
1. Find a cause and commit yourself to it. Don’t be overly ambitious at first. You don’t want to strain yourself. But just be sure it is something that will command your ongoing devotion since you may be pursuing it for an extended period. Finding a suitable cause may be closely coordinated with step 2.
2. Find a target. This will be related to or even dictated by your cause or vice versa. Your victim can be an individual, individuals, or even a large group, such as the fine citizens of the State of Florida. There is no need to concern yourself with whether your intended target is naive or savvy. In fact, intelligent people can be highly susceptible to gaslighting just as they are to con jobs. Use their hubris against them. If you already have some authority over your target, such as being the boss, you are that much better off!
3. Start out with some bullshit. See what you can get away with. Then push it some more. Success with bullshitting is not a perfect predictor of success with gaslighting, but you can learn from your bullshitting experience quickly while risking little. Be sure to appeal to people’s better angels or, if you prefer, their inner sucker. And don’t be afraid to amp up the bullying just for fun!
4. Decide if yours is a solo project or if you could use one or more allies. If the latter, don’t ever tell them what you are up to, but bring them into it through subversive persuasion. Start by identifying a fellow jerk who shares your cause or holds ill-will toward your target and then lead by example. This conspiracy is best never openly discussed or overtly planned so that you have all the power. Remember, you have to be perfectly self-serving to succeed!
If you are an experienced gaslighter, a novice gaslighter, or an aspiring gaslighter, I trust my advice will prove useful to you in your endeavors. Of course, to implement this advice properly you must be a soulless monster, so do us all a favor and drop dead.
As for those of you who are no fans of gaslighting, are worn-down victims of gaslighting, or are committed to human decency, perhaps you will find what I have written helpful in identifying, exposing, and eliminating such beasts from your life and from the world. Rest assured, though, ignoring them is not an option. As Abraham Joshua Heschel says,
The opposite of good is not evil. The opposite of good is indifference.
How familiar are you with the forms of deception? How willing are you to reject deception and join the fight for human decency?
To be a great leader with a values-based mission focus you must actively commit to decency, and I can help. Click below for your free consultation and gift.
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