Gaslighting as Epidemic

by Jacob Richards

We as a nation are sick. It is not another pandemic. This sickness is not a virus, it’s a mental condition that affects all of us. We as a nation have a pathological tendency to blame the victims and the powerless and to rally around and protect the powerful. Blaming the victims, is not a natural response. It is something foisted upon us—injected into every level of society—for the benefit large corporations, white supremacist, the mega-wealthy and warmongers.

We are being played, and the cure is to sus through the propaganda and fallacies of reason that dominate our political and social discourse, and then stand with the powerless, and not with their/our abusers.

Most of us are most familiar with victim blaming on the personal level. We hear these tired tropes trotted out against victims of rape, bullying, domestic violence, and police violence. “They had it coming?” “They were asking for it?” “Why did/didn’t they fight back?” “They were high/drunk.” “Why did/didn’t they run?” “Just comply.” “Look at what they were wearing.”

Zooming out we see similarly poor thinking on issues like homelessness, poverty, pollution, recycling, welfare, immigration, and even natural disasters, etc. We are being gas-lighted everyday on every level by every institution in this society.

A common refrain I hear from working class white folks here, in Western Colorado, is that immigrants lower wages. My response is always “I didn’t know that immigrants were in control of the payroll.” Who is really lowering wages? Your racist boss who is literally paying immigrants less, or the immigrants themselves?

Few of us barely question why it is expected that we give businesses a two-week notice, but they never return that courtesy.

We blame the homeless for being unsheltered, and the poor for being penniless. Yet never the business owners paying sub-living wages, or the slumlords for raising rents. We are told to fret over ‘welfare queens,’ without recognizing that the only ones putting zero’s in their bank accounts are Wal-Mart and Kroger.

Corporations use these same tactics to shift blame from themselves to individual citizens. Businessmen and economist like to call this externalization. Externalizing costs and liabilities away from the corporation and on to us the general public.

In 1971, the Keep America Beautiful, an industry group of polluters, in an effort to push back against multiple state and local measures banning single use beverage containers, launched one of the most famous commercials of all time. Known as the “People start pollution. People can stop it” campaign. It showed a Native American in a birch-bark canoe paddling through the increasingly polluted waters of industrial America. As he comes a shore, he encounters a mega-highway. A careless slob tosses a bag of trash from his car. The trash coming to rest at the Native American’s feet. It ends with a close up, as a single tear rolling down his cheek, and the Orwellian slogan, “People start pollution. People can stop it.”

This led to a widespread blaming of pollution not on who really produces it, but on consumers. Even mainstream environmentalist get trapped in this box-canyon. We will never curb our consumption of raw materials from the earth by recycling; just like we are not going to stop global warming by buying Tesala’s, even if you have the class privilege to do so. Paper straws not going to solve plastic pollution in our oceans when half of all waste in the ocean is commercial fishing equipment.

The government even finds ways to blame the victims of natural disasters for being in the way of nature. In 2006, the media was ripe with talking heads asking things like “Why did they chose to stay?” or even worse, “New Orleans is below sea-level, what to you expect?” No effort was made in NOLA to evacuate the 100,000 or so persons that did not have personal transport. From FEMA to CNN this narrative came to dominate and let George W. Bush’s administration off the hook for its deadly incompetence in the storms wake.

Again in 2018, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Trump’s first statement, on Twitter, stated “Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble. It’s old electrical grid, which was in terrible shape… ” Blaming Puerto Rico, for its own colonization and exploitation. It helps shift focus, blame, and liability away from those who are actually the perpetrators.

It has gotten so endemic that we even blame inanimate objects. Liberals blames guns for the actions of gun owners, and the reactionary right shot up their Budlight with said guns. Cause somehow their beer “went gay.”

We blame voters for voting their conscious, but we don’t blame the two corporate parties for not representing us.

The few people that seem to question these diseased lines of thinking—activists, dissidents, revolutionaries and dreamers, are almost always the ones that get gas-lit the most. “If you don’t like ‘murica, you can leave.” “You heat your home with fossil fuels, so you can complain.” “Oh, you’re a socialist, how did you buy your food at City Market.” “Why don’t you go live in Gaza.” “Did George Soros pay you to hold that sign?”

When our schools, media, corporations and government all use the same victim blaming rhetoric employed by wife-beaters, racist, and rapist. It’s a red flag, and it has reached epidemic levels, and needs to be addressed.  We can’t afford to be treatment avoidant.

Only when we actively see through these deceptions can we begin to take back our world.  Until then we will be trapped in a co-morbid cycle of gas-lighting and victim blaming that has infected and sickened our politics, our society, and planet.