Gaslighting

(Deception,  Social Control,  Statecraft)
Playing tricks on others and telling them they must be imagining things.

Gaslighting can be a form of intimidation or psychological abuse. False information is presented to the victim as truth, making them doubt their own memory or perception over time. It involves a person or a group of persons that work against a victim.

Gaslight, a 1944 MGM film adapted from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play Gas Light, showed systematic psychological manipulation of a victim by her husband.

The way the corporate media complex operate, in withholding of factual information and its replacement with endlessly repetitive false or fictional information designed to confuse and disorientate, is a form of gaslighting.

Techniques

Gaslighting depends on convincing the victim, that [the victim's] thinking is distorted and persuading [the victim] that the victimizer's ideas are the correct ones. Gaslighting induces cognitive dissonance in the victim and makes the victim question their own thinking, perception, and reality testing, and thus tends to evoke in them low self-esteem and disturbing ideas and affects, and may lead to confusion, anxiety, depression, and in some extreme cases, psychosis. After the victim loses confidence in their mental capacities and develops a sense of learned helplessness, they become more susceptible to the victimizer's control.

The classic example of gaslighting is to switch something around on someone that you know they're sure to notice, but then deny knowing anything about it, and to explain that they must be imagining things. A more psychological definition of gaslighting is:

An increasing frequency of systematically withholding factual information from, and/or providing false information to, the victim - having the gradual effect of making them anxious, confused, and less able to trust their own memory and perception.

Sociopaths / Psychopaths / Narcissists

Sociopaths frequently use gaslighting tactics to abuse and undermine their victims. People of that nature consistently transgress social mores, break laws and exploit others, but typically are also convincing liars, sometimes charming ones, who consistently deny wrongdoing. Thus, some who have been victimized by sociopaths may doubt their own perceptions. Some physically abusive spouses may gaslight their partners by flatly denying that they have been violent.

In COVID-19

Most countries saw very widespread gaslighting during the COVID-19 event, particularly about jabs and vaccine passports

The original story of the so-called "COVID-19 vaccinations", only effective in early 2021 until people saw that those who received jabs still got infected

The COVID-19 event has featured a lot of gaslighting, so much so that Michael Senger wrote in late 2022 about the "revisionist, gaslighting style that’s become the journalistic norm on the response to Covid".

Initial uncertainty

In early 2020 many people mistook the constantly changing and self-contradictory narratives as a result of COVID panic and confusion. However, as time went on, many observers detected a pattern indicative of a complex psychological operation. By late 2021, universal mandatory COVID vaccination had been identified as a key goal of the fear porn and gas lighting.

Caitlin Johnstone on the Method Used

“This is also the model for the greater imperialist propaganda construct, not just with regard to Syria but with Russia, North Korea, Iran, and any other insolent government which refuses to bow to American supremacist agendas. It works like this: first, the oligarch-owned establishment media, which itself is chock full of Council on Foreign Relations members, uses other warmongering think tanks and its own massive funding to force deep state psyops like Russiagate and “Saddam has WMDs” into becoming the mainstream narrative. Second, they use the mainstream, widely-accepted status of this manufactured narrative to paint anyone who questions it as a mentally defective tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist. It’s a perfect scheme. The mass media has given a few elites the ability to effectively turn a false story that they themselves invented into an established fact so broadly accepted that anyone who doubts it can be painted in the exact same light as someone who doubts the roundness of the Earth. The illusion of unanimous agreement is so complete that blatant establishment psyops are placed on the same level as settled scientific fact, even though it’s made of little else but highly paid pundits making authoritative assertions in confident tones of voice day after day.”
Caitlin Johnstone (February 12, 2018)  How The Establishment Propaganda Machine Gaslights Us Into Submission

 

An example

Page name	Description
"Vaccine passport"

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Vanessa Beeley	“The gargantuan apparatus of mind bending and controlling is being put into hyper drive by the ruling elite. We are inundated with propaganda that challenges our sense of reality but only after being “tenderized” by the fear factor. Fear of “terror”, fear of war, fear of financial insecurity, fear of gun violence, fear of our own shadow. Once we are suitably quaking in our boots, in comes the rendition of reality that relieves our anxiety. If we challenge this version of events we are labelled a conspiracy theorist, a threat to security. We are hounded, discredited, slandered and ridiculed. We are isolated and threatened.”	Vanessa Beeley
Cass Sunstein	“Once we know that people are human and have some Homer Simpson in them, then there’s a lot that can be done to manipulate them.”	Cass Sunstein
WHO/Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health	“The TAG is composed of renowned experts representing a broad range of disciplines relevant to behavioural insights and sciences, including psychology, behavioural economics, anthropology, social marketing and more. The group also brings together extensive experience in designing and implementing national health policies and programmes informed by behavioural insights and sciences; in evaluating the impact of behaviourally informed public health initiatives in low- and middle-income countries; and in setting up or running behavioural insights units in organizations. WHO published the open call for experts in February 2020, soliciting proposals for members to serve on its TAG to inform the work of WHO’s newly established Behavioural Insights and Sciences Initiative. The group will provide expert advice for the development of a road map for WHO to define a mechanism to systematically include behavioural evidence in its work and in national health policies and programme planning. The recommendations of the expert group will be addressed to WHO across the three levels of the Organization (HQ, regional, and country offices). The TAG shall have the following functions: Advise WHO on how to adopt behavioural insights and science perspectives to support WHO’s 13th General Programme of Work and how to identify priority areas for implementation within WHO and in Member States; Make recommendations to WHO for the development of an operational framework for the mainstreaming of behavioural insights and sciences into WHO operations, particularly in the area of providing technical advice on national health policies and programme planning; Advise WHO on potential challenges and risks for the Organization related to the recommendations made by the TAG.”	WHO	2020

Rating

12 December 2021 Terje 

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References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 21 October 2020.
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