What Gaslighting Is and Is Not

Pentachlorphenol, CC BY-SA 4.0

*(Audio version here)

It has become very common now within the realm of online political discourse to see people who are in disagreement accusing each other of 'gaslighting' them. This, I believe, is just one manifestation of a growing tendency to dismiss those with ideas one disagrees with as bad faith actors with nefarious motivations rather than engage with the ideas or accept that differences among well-intentioned and sincere people can exist legitimately. It seems necessary, then, to define what gaslighting does and does not mean.

The term ‘gaslighting’ comes from the 1938 play “Gas Light” by Patrick Hamilton in which a man manipulates the lighting in his home to convince his wife that she is going insane in order to control her.

Therefore, gaslighting means:

The psychological manipulation of another person to get them to question their own perception of a reality which the manipulator also knows to be a reality. A deliberate attempt to make someone doubt their own judgement or even sanity in order to control them in service of the manipulators own agenda.

What gaslighting does not mean:

1.Genuinely thinking that someone else is misperceiving a reality - thinking they are factually wrong - and saying so.

2.Genuinely disagreeing with somebody else’s ethical stance - thinking they are morally wrong - and saying so.

3.Genuinely not feeling the same way about an issue as another person - having different moral intuitions and emotional responses than that person - and saying so.

This distinction is important. It is the difference between being dishonest and manipulative in order to get others to believe or pretend to believe things that are not factually true or pretend to hold ethical stances that they do not hold and honestly disagreeing with them or thinking/feeling differently to them.

People being untruthful or engaging in intellectual dishonesty and psychological manipulation or exerting social pressure on others to get them to falsify their own beliefs is bad. It is abusive of an individual and also impedes the honest and productive debate we need to determine what is true and resolve complex moral issues and conflicts.

People genuinely thinking other people are wrong or disagreeing with their moral reasoning or simply feeling differently about an issue and feeling able to say so openly is good. Having social norms which facilitate this upholds people’s rights to their own views, encourages addressing them as they actually are which is essential to that honest and productive debate that produces knowledge and moral progress.

This is, therefore, an issue of respecting freedom of belief and speech and valuing viewpoint diversity and a thriving marketplace of ideas on a psychological and cultural level. Because accusing someone of gaslighting does not seek to ban any views, but simply dismisses them as insincere and the speaker of them as ill-motivated, it is not a legal or institutional denial of freedom of belief and speech. It is a lazy and dogmatic way of avoiding thinking about and engaging with ideas one does not like while smearing the character and motivations of those expressing them.

Accusing others of 'gaslighting' you when they are actually disagreeing with you or feeling differently on an issue than you do assumes that only insincerity and malice on the part of the other person can explain your differences. It indicates not only utter certainty in the rightness of one's own view but a belief that one is so obviously right that everybody else really knows this and dissenters must be bad actors trying to manipulate the situation for their own nefarious agenda. This is a symptom of ideological zealotry that can only escalate disagreement into hostile polarisation and tribalistic warfare, and impedes mutual understanding and conflict resolution.

In recent months, I have increasingly been accused of gaslighting by people on the left and on the right and from activist groups which do not fit neatly into either.

I was most recently accused of gaslighting for genuinely disagreeing with people’s perceptions - thinking them to be factually wrong - when I wrote that Elon Musk’s gesture at Trump’s inauguration was probably not intended to be a Nazi salute. I was informed, overwhelmingly by people on the far-left, that I was gaslighting them because ‘they saw what they saw.” They assumed that I really knew it was intended to be a Nazi salute too and my motivations for suggesting otherwise were antisemitism, ethnonationalism and sympathies with Nazism generally. This was despite the piece being overwhelmingly negative about the influence of Elon Musk, his relationship with the truth and his ethics.

Shortly before this, I was accused of gaslighting for genuinely disagreeing with other people’s ethics. I’d said I was not going to engage with people who used ‘gay’ or ‘Jew’ as an insult. I think it is profoundly morally wrong to demonise whole groups of people and that neither being same sex attracted nor of Jewish ethnicity has any ethical component and that people who are either or both are worthy of the same dignity and respect as everybody else. My detractors, overwhelmingly on the far-right, believed me insincere and ill-motivated and to already know Jews and/or homosexuality to be socially detrimental but deny this for some nefarious totalitarian agenda of my own.

I have frequently over the last year been accused of ‘gaslighting women’ by the subset of gender criticals who can more accurately be understood as gender traditionalists. This was because I did not have the same moral intuitions and emotional responses that the women I was speaking to did about men wearing dresses, heels or makeup (for any reason). I was not claiming that women who express feelings of disgust and moral outrage about this don't really experience these feelings. I accept that they do even though I don’t. People have every right to feel their own feelings and express them (including me). I only object when attempts are made to ban, threaten or harass men wearing perfectly decent dresses on the grounds of moral outrage and disgust feelings. (Jane Clare Jones outlined the problem with legislating disgust here beautifully).

This mentality of utter certainty that one’s own position is objectively correct and that all dissenters must be bad faith actors with nefarious motivations is the attitude we most commonly associate with "woke." It has the element of “This is not up for debate” and the belief of adherents that they can see a reality that other people cannot or will not because of their own ideological bias or agenda. However, it is clearly not confined to any one political group, but can be expressed by members of the dogmatic fringes of a multiplicity of them. (We might also think of the position of dogmatic Christians that atheists know that God exists really but just want to sin).

The examples I have chosen are all rather extreme. I do not suspect that many of my readers will need convincing not to read Nazi sympathies into, at best, ambiguous arm movements, nor to refrain from antisemitic and homophobic conspiracy theories, nor to reject the implementation of Taliban-style sex-specific dress codes. However, the temptation to assume that somebody who is disagreeing with something that seems so clearly right to us must be dishonest and ill-motivated is common in much more mainstream conversations. I suspect it might even be more natural to us to do this, especially when we feel strongly about something. It might be resisting the temptation to leap to this conclusion and instead trying to engage with those with whom we strongly disagree on the assumption that they are sincere and well-motivated that requires conscious effort and practice.

I strongly urge people to make that conscious effort and practice it and to strive to increase this as a cultural norm. For the most part, people who express the opinion that your perceptions of reality, ethics or intuitions are wrong will genuinely believe this and, if they do so in a reasoned way that seems worth engaging with, the best way to do that is ask them why they think so. To dismiss them as ‘gaslighting’ cannot possibly lead to a productive conversation. Such lazy and dogmatic dismissal of other views is damaging to one's own habits of thinking. In order to be truly confident in the truth and/or ethics of a position one seeks to convince others of, one needs to seriously consider the arguments and evidence for contrary positions.

When addressing the ‘particular evil’ of silencing an opinion, John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, wrote that it harms those who disagree with it in two ways. Firstly “If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth” and secondly, “if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” I would suggest that when we shut our own minds down to all contrary opinions to our own with dismissals like ‘gaslighting’, we are inflicting that evil on ourselves. We deprive ourselves of the opportunity to change our minds when that is warranted and become less able to be truly confident in our own opinions because we have not taken the opportunity to defeat an attempt to falsify them.

As the ‘not up for debate’ mentality continues to proliferate among myriad cultural groups and be seen as virtuous, I fear that we are seeing a diminishing ability to make well-reasoned arguments, especially among young people. We need to work to reinstate expectations of being willing and able to make arguments if one wants to have one’s view taken seriously and recognise spurious accusations of things like ‘gaslighting’ as a way to avoid thinking and honest engagement. A concept that breaks down to "If you don't admit you know I’m right, you are dishonest and a bad person” is not worthy of respect. It indicates that the speaker cares less about what is true and more about signalling their tribal allegiance in a culture war of narratives that are not open to critique. Don’t take part in that kind of war. It cannot be won. It can only shut down debate, escalate tribal warfare, increase polarisation and diminish the possibility of peaceful resolution to a vanishing point. A liberal society cannot survive it.