psychology

Gaslighting and Psychopaths – Back to Basics

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Cute Little Thing — but NOT a Gaslighter

One of the words that has surged in popularity in the last four years is the word “gaslighting”. I think the reason for this is that since the pandemic, the popularity of the technique among politicians has also surged. I can remember working on timber issues back in the mid ’90s, when there was a shift in messaging by the US Forest Service from admitting there were lots of problems with various destructive timber sales, to wholesale denial and lying about the conditions on the ground, were a bellwether. Yet lying — even pathological lying — is not necessarily gaslighting.

The origin of the term comes from the eponymous play, and subsequent remake of a British movie of the same name. In the American version of the movie, Ingrid Bergman is a woman, married to a man, played by Charles Boyer, who, through manipulation of lights in the house (the gas lights) is convinced that she is going insane and cannot trust her own judgment. He does this with the intent of having an affair with the couple’s promiscuous maid. There are plot twists and turns, and if you’re interested, you can go watch the movie.

What is more salient is the concept of the psychopath twisting the information stream, directed at a particular target person, to remove their natural sense of grounding validity– the ability that a person has to assess their temporal and spatial surroundings, and establish their own reference frame. The end game of the psychopath is to make the person subject to the gaslighting to psychopathic control by the abuser. The reality the abuse victim experiences is reconstructed through the mental ground wire of the abuser. This is an important angle of gaslighting — by controlling the functional ground of the person who is the target of the manipulation, they also control their perceptions of their situation.

Gaslighting is often present in chronic battering love relationships, and can be executed by both women and men. In a battering situation, the gaslighter does not construct a negative image of that part of the relational dyad. Rather, the gaslighter manages to, through a combination of isolation and manipulation, a POSITIVE image of themselves, through some combination of dissolution of ego boundaries, and arbitrary rewards (often sexual) in their target’s mind. Most people external to such situations often wonder how someone in a chronic battering relationship can stay. But that’s not the correct view. The real conundrum occurs in how the mental models inside the target’s psyche are constructed by the controlling party. It becomes how can they leave? These memories can linger long after the gaslit party is removed from the abuser. They are deeply limbic, and as such are not easily removed.

Much has been written about cult behavior, and how gaslighting is a primary tool of programming (and subsequent deprogramming) from cults. My experience is that one doesn’t need to go all the way into a cult in order to see various psychopaths executing disorienting strategies toward potential victims. Gaslighting can, and does, happen all around us — especially when the larger cultural zeitgeist promotes it. The recent COVID pandemic, had the public been led by anything other than a group of crazy psychopaths, would have ended in April of 2020. Instead, the psychopaths in charge (various members of the CDC, NIAID and the heads of the federal government) seized upon the chaos to dismantle the public’s ability to ground itself.

One of the best scare tactics used was the promise that hospital availability in general, and Intensive Care Unit rooms in particular, were always in short supply. Yet there was an application developed by MIT where one could look up ICU or regular hospital availability, using crowdsourced data, that showed there was no availability crisis. The mainstream media played a dominant role in this warping of reality, enlisting late night talk show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, who served as a moral arbiter of the nationwide vaccine campaign, going so far as to say policy development should exclude the unvaccinated from receiving health care.

All of this gaslighting fell under the umbrella of what I called Elite Risk Minimization — a governing philosophy manipulated by elites whereby others outside of elite communities should be deprived of various agency-based health care decisions, if the end result was greater health protections for elites. Elite Risk Minimization is alone not evidence of gaslighting. But when facts and circumstances are directly manipulated in order to place a burden on others outside the elite group, it most certainly is. The worst of the COVID gaslighting was directed at children, with false prophylaxis of forcing young children to wear masks, attend school remotely, and suffer extreme isolation.

The worst of these excesses have not even come to light. Because of complexity issues, especially when dealing with the larger public, there’s a tendency to focus on the top-level intervention — e.g. the actual wearing of masks interfering with children’s speech development. While this was bad enough, what is always ignored is the punitive disciplinary regime necessary to get kids (especially young ones under the age of 10) to even wear masks. This allowed psychopathic teachers, crippled by their own OCD fears, to lash out at children who simply couldn’t comply because of their own neurodivergent problems. And the continuing lack of addressing these issues is psychopathic gaslighting at its finest. Professional societies, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, still refuse to acknowledge pandemic abuses. And what that does is elevate those inside their organization who are more than happy to play yet another gaslighting charade against their membership. Hateful, abusive relational modes start piling up, and move entire professional organizations away from working to regain the public trust, and shifting back into data-driven trust-based relationships.

Instead, they rely on psychopathic assertion of authority. And the end result of that? As I’ve commented elsewhere on this blog, when psychopaths initially show up on the scene, there is a hue and cry for the contamination of the information channel. But over time, societies and social networks shift towards exclusion of these organizations. No one may speak against their ostensible authority. But no one pays attention to their recommendations either. COVID booster shots now run about 10% for kids under 12. Once the ground wire is seized away from psychopathic organizations, it is almost impossible for them to control the debate again.

One of the main things to be aware as a cautionary tale regarding gaslighting is one’s own belief in the potentially conscious or deliberate nature of psychopathic messaging designed to seize control of the victim’s ground wire. If you watch the various psychological thrillers involving individuals gaslighting others for various goals, you might believe that most gaslighting is conscious. But psychopaths often do not operate with conscious strategies — it is very difficult, if not impossible, to predict accurately the outcomes of the psychopathic mind. In a person with fractured, or hopelessly destroyed ego boundaries, strategies are often ad hoc and enacted to stimulate cortisol or other hormonal rewards buried in the limbic system. And psychopaths are different than normal people in that they have extremely poor habituation responses. What that means is just like the hamster hitting the cocaine water repeatedly in the lab experiment, psychopaths can continue to go back to the well over and over. And whether that is a conscious strategy or not is open to fair debate.

One of the key elements of understanding gaslighting strategies is to also understand psychopathic projection. Projection is the phenomenon whereby the psychopath projects onto its victim its own predilections. It appears to be a process of self-justification — “I’m not the only person that wants this bad thing to happen, so I’m going to guess that this other person is thinking this.” Gaslighting supplements this as a strategy, because once the control victim is established, if the psychopath can get the target to also do something bad, what happens next is a self-justification loop built around the victim’s response. Here’s a lighthearted display (I need this about this time writing about gaslighting) of projection and deflection at work, with one of my cinematographic heroes, Pee Wee Herman. “I know you are, but what am I?” indeed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfeLsPRl3so

Finally, one thing the master gaslighter takes advantage of is information complexity. In large-scale, conscious manipulation strategies, the psychopath-in-charge may indeed realize that the issue they’re using to manipulate public opinion has multiple levels of complexity — from the day-to-day effect of the issue, to long-term outcomes that may not be desirable at all to the target. Yet the psychopath basically chops out the nuance of the issue, with the goal that the target has no real way of knowing the detail, and the psychopath can fill that in, in a way beneficial to the psychopath’s control, at a later date. As I write this, the Democrats are attempting to use a canned set of talking points (obviously manufactured from a central source) to disavow the fact that the current government shutdown is a result of their filibuster of the Republican’s offered Continuing Resolution to fund the government at Biden-levels of dollars until a compromise is reached. It’s certainly not like Republicans, placed in disadvantageous positions, haven’t tried similar strategies. But this one will certainly come back with loss of support for Democrats in the long run, mostly in the context of people, once again, moving away from relational disruption in order to get on with their lives.

To sum up — gaslighting is a hallmark of psychopathic actors. It is a control strategy whereby the perpetrator attempts to grab the ground wire, in order to change the perception of the victim and leave them open for abuse. It also is fundamentally relationally disruptive, involving isolating the target from other grounding inputs, such as other people. It also often involves triangulation of external sources into making the isolated victim fill with doubt. We are seeing, for example, a proliferation of Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy cases related to mothers in the trans issue, declaring their 3 year old toddler gender-diverse or other such nonsense, gaslighting the infant through dressing them up in gender-inappropriate clothing, and then leaning heavily in the public sphere on maternal authority to continue to perpetrate the abuse.

Oh boy. Now I’m exhausted.

Transgenderism and its Context in Society

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 7 Comments
White Sand Lake, Clearwater NF, Idaho

It’s been more than a year at least since the issue of transgenderism, and its effects on divisive politics, have been raging in our society. But even with the passing of that year, there seems to be little clarity on how society should move forward. Red states are passing bills making, essentially, child mutilation illegal, while various Blue states are attempting sanctuary legislation that will make parental rights moot if a child, or worse, a child’s guardian wants to “transition” a child to the opposite gender.

There is plenty of literature out there on what I call the “societal top level” of this issue, and no need for me to repeat much of this. What I’ll attempt to do is explain the societally disruptive forces in play. I also have no interest in discussing the microscopic number of people inflicted with legitimate chromosomal disorders that need help treating their condition. The few that exist are trotted out as a psychopathic weapon for reasons we’ll discuss below, and whose rights and needs should not be in play. I’m referring to the much larger cult of “souls of people born in the wrong bodies” which is the real, relevant issue to be discussed. Hardware is hardware folks, and software is software. It is utterly amazing to me how little this is really considered.

First off, just a cursory look at the transgender statistics, though rarely cited, involve women=>men. Not so long ago (20 years?), transgender issues were really discussed only in the context of those children with genetic disorders, and middle-aged men with gender dysphoria, who after a lifetime of mental conflict, wanted to undergo formal transition. That might have included everything from wearing dresses, and some form of autogynephilia, or surgical removal of sex organs. There is a whole comedic backlog for this kind of thing, like the famous Monty Python song “He’s a lumberjack…”

An old classic…

What we’re talking about in the current milieu is not the campy, vampy drag queen shows that are historic. It’s much more radical than that.

By my sensing of the issue (not scholarly, but I am paying attention) there really are a number of categories for people dealing with gender dysphoria. They are:

  1. Middle aged men seeking transition for mental peace in their middle/old age.
  2. Adult males suffering from autogynephilia — the process of finding yourself sexually exciting through transition to the opposite gender.
  3. Butch lesbians wanting to assert themselves as actual males in their relationships with their partners.
  4. Teenage girls seeking transition likely because of a past of sexual abuse.
  5. Teenage boys seeking transition because of inherent homosexual tendencies, in the context of the social media stream elevating the status of transitioning.
  6. Parents with some version of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, looking to use their children as virtue-seeking social props in the public eye.
  7. Adolescent and post-adolescent males seeking perversion/narcissistic supply in women’s private spaces through manipulation of current social norms.
  8. Deliberate psychopaths seeking out paths for destructive abuse and pedophilia of young people.

There are probably more that I’ve missed, but I think these are the big ones. Note that while all of these categories may be bound together on the top level of ostensible gender dysphoria, once you get off the projection image of moving from one gender to another, the causal reasons are dramatically different. 

And therein lies the rub. It’s far more useful to understand this list in terms of individuals who are seeking some version of peace of mind for themselves (1, 3, 4, and 5, probably) and those who are looking for a manipulative advantage in their immediate social networks for impulsive self-gratification (2,6,7, and 8.)

And when you add three more categories to the mix —

  1. The medico-pharmacological complex that will profit off all of this, because any gender transition will involve lifetime medicalization.
  2. Unwitting virtue seekers looking for life meaning through a projection of the continuation of the civil rights movement.
  3. Pathological virtue seekers/politicians looking to exploit the issue of the day.

You have a pretty compact representation of the public space of this issue, that is serving as both a pathway for creating more damaged people, as well as distracting whole societies from solving more pressing problems that affect far more people than those immediately suffering through gender dysphoria, or looking to gain social/financial advantage from it.

One of the most interesting aspects of this that I noticed early on in the social media sphere is that if numbers mattered, there would be far more focus on young women and girls in the transition space than there is. I’ve read varying statistics that the number of female->male transitions vs. male->female transitions run as high as 10:1. I’m relatively convinced that the thing driving that adolescent/post-adolescent transition F->M is sexual abuse and trauma. There is simply no question that sexual abuse is one of the worst things that can happen to any young female, or male for that matter. It is a gross boundary violation, and has the strong downstream potential to disrupt an individual’s ability to form healthy attachments to other people in their social sphere. It’s bad whenever it happens, but it must be absolutely catastrophic when it occurs inside one’s familial group, and is the reason that there are mythic taboos against incest of any variety that spread across cultures and developmental stages. 

And as I wrote in this piece, it likely was part of forming psychopathic corps of individuals inside tribal societies that were strangely enough required for tribal persistence. If you didn’t create enough psychopathic warriors for your tribe, the tribe over the mountain would come over and wipe you out. Or on the feminine side, if you didn’t have enough women with disrupted attachment styles, your genetic variability would suffer, and you would also go extinct.

The problem is that these patterns, while necessary down on the hardware level of human societies — both Survival v-Meme and Tribal v-Meme consistency, have little use in more developed societies. In fact, more evolved social structures likely became emergent just to counteract these tendencies, and proved to be successful. Sequestering women and children, for example, might appear in the contemporary societal context to be extreme and abusive. But if your next door evolutionary neighbor one click down in the Tribal v-Meme is allowing those women and children to be raped, you might not think it’s such a bad idea. And then emergence of these patterns will take over, regardless. Taboos are formed, social organizations, institutions and religions start popping up that enforce these things, and societies march onward and upward empathetically, hopefully out of the need for that transitional behavior.

But back to the main point. The focus of the current media stream is NOT where the majority of the problem is. The focus is mostly on disruptive young men, either directly exhibiting violent behavior in the context of their transitioning, or being used as psychopathic mental models in the name of “civil rights” for power and control in current societal debates. They are young and energetic, and will say everything from “I’ll kill myself if I’m not allowed to transition!” (a classic Borderline Personality Disorder trope) or “I’ll kill you if you don’t let me!” Straight out of the Narcissistic/Anti-Social Personality disorder description. 

These types of personality types, especially when coupled with modern social media, and hooked to historic themes of civil rights progressions, are especially potent. And not just for the young men seeking some type of advantage to fuel their narcissism, ranging from winning sports competitions by competing in women’s leagues, to a delusional belief in increased sexual access by becoming a woman.

And then there are the pure psychopaths in the ranks of the ostensibly afflicted. These are young men strutting in dresses, sporting beards in high fashion. These individuals, with their ensembles of what I call “reflective personalities” — meaning they have an extremely poorly formed sense of self, and reflect off others in power through some form of mimesis — are gravitating to a profound change in the power zeitgeist of modern society. In the past, the image one might map to/reflect off of would be some version of a tough guy. But with the profound shift toward feminine power, they are serving as a North Star for who really runs the show in our society. And it ain’t men.

This maps back very well to this piece I wrote about ossified mental models co-opted by psychopaths for reasons of power and control. When a society cannot successfully update its social change revisions, then it makes itself extremely vulnerable to installation of rigid hierarchies, primarily controlled by psychopaths. Rigid, complicated hierarchies are characterized by lots of titles and externally defined relationships, where agency is suppressed or eliminated in terms of social control. They inflict long periods of stasis on cultures (the various dynasties in China are great examples.) 

And the younger trans M->F are the Praetorian Guard of these people. They don’t have to understand exactly what’s happening inside the social system. Their impulsive, violent behavior serves to intimidate others. And when layered with a historic righteous cause that the vast majority considers as morally good — in this case, in the U.S., the Civil Rights movement– it’s a powerful force. 

It also pleases those controlling power in that it strikes profoundly at the heart of relational development in an agency-based society. If you can’t even understand the rules on who a male, or female is, through visual and interactive observation, what can you know? You will need to be told. And as with all psychopathic systems run by psychopathic actors, normal people just gravitate away from it.

But that isolation has its costs. If you believe the primary pretext of this blog — that relational networks create information at the complexity level a society can maintain — that isolation also works to kill the brains of people who need to handle a rapidly changing environment. That fundamentally leads to downshifting of well-being of people in that society, and potentially population reduction, either through people not having kids because of general despondency. Folks should talk to young people today about how they view their prospects. Or, of course, direct extermination and killing each other.

So why should you care? We are all maintained in modern society by the level of complexity that this society runs on. Though rarely discussed, it creates the food and clean water, as well as transportation, and social connection that we depend on to persist. 

And while I’ve constantly voiced the opinion that we should show compassion for folks suffering from gender dysphoria, in no way shape or form should they be the ones running the show. Because the ones who really are just seeking relief from whatever hormonally induced distress are not the problem. But their suffering is easily co-opted. And it turns to have brain-scrambling implications, which play right into the hands of our Reptilian Overlords’ handbook.

And if you think that their backers, especially the powerful ones, don’t have a larger agenda, I’d urge you to reconsider that perspective. Our society’s stagnation is being created by a whole ensemble of psychopaths that the vast majority of people can’t even seem to acknowledge they exist. And there’s no question in my mind that this is one of the biggest hacks in the Matrix we’re dealing with right now.