I’ve never liked the term gaslighting. In case you’re not aware, the term comes from the 1944 motion picture Gaslight, directed by George Cukor, a studio director at RKO Radio Pictures. In the film, the villain, Gregory Anton, convinces the victim, Paula Anton, that she is loosing her mind by incrementally dimming the gas lighting in the house all the while insisting that nothing has changed. Naturally, he’s after the inheritance. Naturally, he gets his comeuppance in the end

It’s a diverting melodrama, with cartoonish villains and helpless heroines.

And almost no one in the real world behaves that way. To truly gaslight, is to deliberately and maliciously try to convince someone that they are crazy for believing what they do, or not believing what the manipulator desires. It is the nefarious example of of the Marx brothers skit, “who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes.“

When you accusing someone of gaslighting, you are not accusing them of misremembering something, or even remembering with advantages. You are accusing them of deliberate, calculated evil.

Casually tossing a term like gaslighting around creates the impression of a culture of evil calculation teeming with master manipulators. The truth of human interaction is usually much more banal, but we seem to crave the drama. People seem to have come to enjoy the idea of gaslighting as a form of dark entertainment.

And where there is entertainment, there are profits to be made.

Social media influencers, who live by impressions and clicks have stepped into this role. And to understand how, I need to digress a bit and discuss the idea of “parasocial relationships.” These are one-sided dynamics where a social media follower feels a deep, personal friendship with a content creator who is unaware of them as an individual. From this position of unearned intimacy, influencers can and do pathologize normal human behaviors to keep their audience hooked.

To see how this works, lets look at the interactions of “gaslighting,” “TikTok,” and “Influencer” as reported by Google Trends.

Source https://trends.google.com/trends/

TODO – something about how gaslighting was early influence peddling. It seems to have reached its peak as TikTok hit its stride in the early 2020’s, but by 2023 gaslighting had become embedded enough in the culture that it couldn’t be used to get attention any more, and the influencers (and TikTok) moved on to other things.

This dynamic creates a bizarre, self-sustaining feedback loop of gaslighting narratives, driven entirely by engagement algorithms that reward psychological buzzwords and outrage. As platforms push these sensationalized relationship analyses to the top of our screens, audiences are systematically trained to see psychopathy in every routine disagreement and misunderstood text message. The relentless repetition manufactures the illusion of a widespread, catastrophic behavioral epidemic, when in truth, actual malicious manipulation is quite rare. We are being systematically convinced to believe in a reality that doesn’t actually exist. Indeed, if anything is gaslighting us, it’s the algorithms that curate our feeds.

There is another movie, that is a better fit to what many of us mean when we accuse someone of gaslighting.

That movie is Rashomon, by one of the great directors of all time, Akira Kurosawa.

Released in 1950, the film centers on an unseen event, the murder of a samurai in a forest grove. The fil never gives us an objective view of the crime, Kurosawa presents four wildly contradictory testimonies from the people involved, including a bandit, a woodcutter, the victim’s wife, and even the dead man speaking through a medium. Every single account is entirely different, warped by the teller’s ego, shame, or self-interest. They aren’t spinning calculated webs of psychological torture to break each other’s minds; they are simply trapped in the prison of their own subjective experience.

The point of Rashomon is that everyone has their own version of the truth. The most important part of the film, in my opinion, is that there is never a final definitive answer or what happened. We must assemble our own, potentially flawed representation. The lesson of Rashomon is that we approach the truth by listening to all the points of view, and incorporating those aspects that fit the collective pattern of events the best.

In other words, we do best by working together, by supporting others and helping the group approach the truth together. There are no villains in the Rashomon world, there are only people with incomplete, biased, and perspectives that are more self-centered or less self centered.

Think about that the next time you want to accuse someone of gaslighting.