Gaslight has become a very trendy term in today’s world for describing a very cruel form of human interaction. As far as I can tell it was first used in a very public way in a 1944 suspense movie starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. In the movie, without going into details, Charles Boyer manipulates Ingrid Bergman’s mind in such a way that she begins to doubt her sanity. This is gaslighting. In today’s world, it seems to be far more prevalent than in times past, which is why the term seems to be so popular. It is used for relationships that are romantic, as well as those that aren’t. Now the question is how and why did gaslighting become such an important vehicle for interacting between people today? And was it as important a vehicle for human interaction in traditional natural societies?
First of all, the whole notion of sanity implies that there is one intersubjective reality that everyone can agree upon. In societies that are as immersed in notions of science and hard physical evidence as those of today, the idea of being able to engage with a reality built on such notions is very important for one’s cognitive and emotional health. So, people select out all the defined discrete stimuli in their fields of experience, and focus on them to create their foundations of reality, and, by extension, sanity. This is particularly important, because there aren’t too many flowing blendable continual organic stimuli in modern technological society to distract a person anyway. And because there are so relatively few organic stimuli, a person loses his natural capacity to absorb them and his mind becomes reconfigured to absorb primarily the defined discrete stimuli that are more plentiful in modern technological society and that supposedly contribute to his sense of sanity.
On the other hand, in traditional natural societies, people are inundated with flowing blendable continual stimuli and tend to focus on them within their fields of experience as their foundations of reality. But without the strong definition provided by defined discrete stimuli, the forms and shapes that are created by all the flowing blendable continual stimuli tend to blur together including the form and shape of a person’s sense of self. And because there is greater fluidity in a person’s sense of self in a traditional natural society, it would become much harder to play with his foundation of reality in such a way that he would experience gaslighting. If someone would try to play with his sense of reality by bending the truth, his own fluidity of focus would just flow with the changes that the first person tried to make. In a field of experience filled with magic and unexplainable mystery, shifts in perceptions and explanations would just be written off unconsciously as part of the flowing nature of magical mysterious reality. As for a person’s perception of himself, a person can tolerate shifts in it as long as he feels fully grounded in a living environment with lots of flowing blendable continual organic stimuli. A need for an objective truth to cling to becomes very important when one is floating in an experiential vacuum the way we all are in today’s world. Hence this explains how hurtful gaslighting can be to someone living in a vacuum field of experience. It means destroying the one thing that can hold a person together in a world lacking meaningful organic grounding.
Of course, ghosting can have a similar effect on a person to gaslighting. In gaslighting, a person is stripped of his cognitive supports, while in ghosting a person is stripped of his emotional supports. With these two processes, people have learned today how to totally undercut the people they dislike psychologically. And as far as I know, neither gaslighting nor ghosting are human problems that are discussed at any great length in any of the Jewish holy writings. They just were not considered to be major moral problems in the traditional societies at the time. If a person was angry with someone, he would be far more likely to take direct physical action, against him, or else have a shouting match with him, both of which involve intense emotional expressions using lots of organic stimulation. And it was these kinds of primary experience interactions that when they got out of hand were the subject of discussion and debate in Jewish holy writings as well as the holy writings of other traditional religions.
This was very different from what happens today when defined discrete intellectual stimuli work to isolate a person cognitively through gaslighting or else to isolate a person emotionally through ghosting. In both cases, a person ends up suffering from a terrible numbness as a result of having been cast into a terrible experiential vacuum.
Hopefully, one of these days, religious leaders will start focusing more on the serious effects of these crimes and hurts of numbness, so that appropriate punishments can be created for them.
©2024 Laurence Mesirow
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