Gaslighting is weaponized bullshit. Where the bullshitter seeks to impress, for whatever purposes, the gaslighter seeks rather to destroy.
The Game of Truth in Politics: Realists and Anti-Realists
In my prior post called “Mourning in America: Notes on Gaslighting,” I started to try to come to grips with the monumental gaslighting that went on during the 2016 US presidential election campaign. I thought it was important to begin to focus on the gaslighting phenomenon itself, especially in its relation to Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the experience of what some call “Narcissistic Victim Syndrome” because I thought, and still think, that something awful is happening to our relationship to truth itself, as a value, and specifically as a political value.
Politicians lie. That is to say, they distort, they manipulate, they mischaracterize, they revise, they recast, they distract. They do these things in order to pursue their self-interest: to show themselves in the best possible light, and their opponents or adversaries in the worst. However, while most of us recognize politics, however vaguely, as generally belonging to the realm of value discourse, to what used to be referred to stuffily as “the human sciences” where the game of truth concerns meaning and value rather than relations of truth and facts about the world, it is still in the nature of this game that lying comes with certain risks.
In the context of our contemporary experience of political gaslighting, something else entirely is now going on. Now, when the politician or the politician’s surrogate lies to us, they do so with both a twinkle in the eye, and a sneer upon the lips.
For example, the politician, having woven his or her pretty web, can get caught having deliberately lied about a matter-of-fact, having asserted the truth or falsity of something while knowing the opposite to be the case. The consequence is usually a total loss of credibility, since it is one thing to be wrong about a thing (something of which all of us, as human beings are sometimes guilty) and another thing to have misrepresented your mental states, saying in effect “I did not know” when in truth, you really did.” The other risk for the lying politician is the risk of an assessment in the aggregate, once the data are all in: A non-trivial subset of the electorate conclude, over time, that while he or she does not lie outright, and he or she does have quite a colorful mixed history of both accomplishment and controversy, nevertheless in the main, and in the aggregate, he or she can’t be counted upon to be truthful, and so is, in short, a liar. In both cases, what we see are two species of realism, whether we are talking about bare facts in the world, or meaning in the world of value statements. We have people who tell the truth, and people who lie for some purpose, and both are concerned with the difference between true and false.
The Twinkle in the Eye and the Sneer Upon the Lips
Or so it used to be. In the context of our contemporary experience of political gaslighting, something else entirely is now going on. Now, when the politician or the politician’s surrogate lies to us, they do so with both a twinkle in the eye, and a sneer upon the lips. The twinkle in the eye refers to the aspect of communication to a privileged audience out beyond the scene of the local interaction. To this audience, what is being communicated is a shared understanding that the local scene of the interaction is an arena of cynicism, and a theater of the absurd, because the activity of querying one another with concern for the truth is the big lie, since we all know that there is no truth, but only opinion, and the ubiquitous opinion is everywhere motivated only by self-interest. The Twinkler is saying to his or her privileged audience just this: “I am the only one who tells you the truth, namely that truth itself is a lie.”
As for the sneer upon the lips: the sneer is reserved for the individual with whom the politician or surrogate is speaking, and by extension, anyone who is invested in the question about truth. The sneer upon the lips says, “I could care less what you think. I also could care less whether you realize it or not, because I hold you in complete contempt. Present social convention compels me to sit here and interact with the likes of you; I can bring myself to engage in this pointless exercise today only because I know that these days are surely numbered.” In this new “irreality,” distortion, manipulation, and outright lies are told in joyfulness, without any particular concern for truth and falsity, because where truth is concerned, the gaslighting politician is actually anti-realist. He doesn’t care. The implications of this should be clear enough; language is just a game we play in pursuit of our self-interest, and more’s the pity for anyone who thinks otherwise.
Gaslighting as Weaponized Bullshit
In his influential 2005 work “On Bullshit” Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt performs a conceptual analysis of bullshitting, in order to distinguish it from lying and from other similarly used terms, like for example, “humbug.” Frankfurt is interested in bullshit, first because there seems to be so much of it, and secondly, because we seem to feel and react differently in the face of it than we do when we identify someone as a liar in the strict sense. Frankfurt is at pains to explore how it is that the bullshitter is not so much a liar as he is someone who misrepresents what he is about – he pretends to care about something, when in fact, he does not. Liars are careful and crafty; bullshitters are careless, expansive, and ad hoc. Where the liar lies twice, once about the thing in question, and a second time, about his state of mind (namely that he believes the lie he is telling) the bullshitter is distinctive in the manner in which he misrepresents his convictions. This is why we go easier on bullshitters than we do on liars – the bullshitter is misrepresenting himself for the most part, and he is doing it in order to make an impression because he is seeking recognition, and is in some sense out of his depth.
Of course, needless to say, this attitude elicits much less levity in the context of serious matters involving life and death decisions then it does when it appears as part of some drinking game. Frankfurt makes this point as well, looking at related terms like ‘bull session;’ in a bull session, (typically males) are seen to be posturing, trying on opinions and attitudes in order to feel what it’s like to hear themselves saying various things and to discover how others respond. In the ‘bull session,’ individuals are encouraged to speak their minds, without being too worried about whether they will be held accountable, because it’s a social space where the usual assumptions about what people say and what they believe are suspended.
So why go down this bullshit road. I’ve gone down this bullshit road in order to show the close family resemblance between bullshitting and gaslighting, and their mutual (subtle) remove from simple lying.
By contrast, in order to examine the “no bullshit attitude,” Frankfurt turns to various anecdotes about Ludwig Wittgenstein. Per Frankfurt, Wittgenstein once said that a bit of doggerel from Longfellow could serve as his motto: “In the elder days of art, Builders wrought with greatest care, Each minute and unseen part, For the Gods are everywhere.” The intent of these lines should be clear; if one assumes, as craftsmen did in sacred times, that the Gods were always watching you at your work, then any lapse would be recognized as impiety. So, no bullshit!
Frankfurt also relates an anecdote where Wittgenstein, who had devoted his intellectual labors to the singular task of eradicating all forms of nonsense, reacted adversely to a friend who, feeling poorly after a tonsillectomy, said to Wittgenstein that she felt “like a dog that had been run over.” Whatever mutual teasing aside, Frankfurt writes, Wittgenstein was likely quite serious in feeling disgust; not because his friend was lying (for example because she actually felt quite well and nonetheless said she felt like a dog that had been run over) but rather because she was claiming, however whimsically and sympathetically, to feel something that, strictly speaking, she could not possibly feel – specifically what it feels like to be a run over dog. As such, the claim amounted to pure bullshit, something that Wittgenstein, because of his extreme probity could in no way tolerate. Admittedly, the image of Wittgenstein reacting to a mere figure of speech in this manner is perhaps as ridiculous as the bullshitter going about his bullshit. Nonetheless, I am very clear about who I would prefer to trust with matters of serious importance. Where matters of importance are at stake, serious people remain connected, in thought, word, and deed, to the value of describing reality as it is rather than making things up. For Frankfurt then, it is indifference to reality, a lack of connection to a concern with truth, that is the essence of bullshit, coupled with a will to hide the fact that the truth value of his statements are of no significant interest to him. The bullshitter selects the things he says, or makes them up, to suit his purposes.
Gaslighting and Bullshit
So why go down this bullshit road. I’ve gone down this bullshit road in order to show the close family resemblance between bullshitting and gaslighting, and their mutual (subtle) remove from simple lying. The difficulty in dealing with Trump and surrogates on the campaign trail has to do with the fact that the media plays a fact check game, and the Trump campaign had little to no interest in being truthful. They were content to thinly-mask this fact by playing games with them, and doing so with no consequences, because they did it with a twinkle in the eye and a sneer on the lips, and their supporters, corn fed on reality TV, ate the slops from the trough of total cynicism.
To this dissembling disinterest in truth, one must now add the intention of harm, in order to understand where the bullshitter and the gaslighter part company. Gaslighting is weaponized bullshit. Where the bullshitter seeks to impress, for whatever purposes, the gaslighter seeks rather to destroy. We see this clearly in the gaslighter’s sneer — “I could care less what you think. I also could care less whether you realize it or not, because I hold you in complete contempt. Present social convention compels me to sit here and interact with the likes of you; I can bring myself to engage in this pointless exercise today only because I know that these days are surely numbered.” Where democracy demands that we interact with one another while at our politics, through the common bonds of being citizens of a democratic republic, the gaslighter breaks these bonds, by making it clear that the business of politics is not about rational persuasion in a contest of ideas; instead, politics is about manipulating public opinion and undermining and discrediting the opposition by whatever means possible.
What process leads to weapons-grade bullshit? What is it about the pathological narcissist, with his false self, and his infinite thirst for supply, that leads to patterns of relentless abuse and victimization? In my prior post, Mourning in America: Notes on Gaslighting, I said that we urgently need to understand the dynamics of the pathological narcissist, because the gaslighting behavior and other signature behaviors of the narcissistic disorder show no signs of abating post-election, and all attempts to deal with it thus far have been an abysmal failure. In the next post in this series, I turn to directly to the significance of POTUS as Pathological Narcissist.
