The World Is Illuminated By Gas Light
Nothing Makes Sense and Everyone Insists That It Does
We’ve all heard by now about the concept of gaslighting, the practice of pretending that something objectively true doesn’t even exist. The phrase came from a Hitchcock film in which a malevolent husband was changing the lighting and pretending that he wasn’t so that it would drive his wife insane.
Here’s the thing about gaslighting: A person has to actually understand what’s going on and then patently, and convincingly, deny it. As someone who lives on a spectrum of confusion from “WHUT?” at one end and “Maybe I know something” at the other, I find that level of focus even more frightening than the malice.
I believe most of what is called ‘gaslighting’ is simply a disagreement about what the heck is going on. Maybe you thought one thing and I thought another and we’re arguing about what really happened. You’re not gaslighting me and I’m not gaslighting you. We’re both confused and upset, but nobody is intentionally trying to sabotage the other’s mind through trickery and misrepresentation.
But there is something gas-lighty about some experts and their expertise. This is something that I really do not like about pundits and Life Coaches. Life is murky, reality is hidden, and we’re all desperate for clarity. The unscrupulous among us exploit that need and tell us what is going on. They spin a yarn, cut away the mystery, and offer us the comfort of understanding. The expert voice underlies bullshit reddit posts, TikTok voiceovers, advice columns, and, perhaps, even Free Life Coach. Everyone sounds so damn convincing. Certainty is the seasoning that makes everything better.
Ambiguity, indecision, and uncertainty — these are extremely difficult states, but they are the vapors that enshroud us as humans. Don’t believe me? Look up at the night sky with a skeptical eye! The universe is poorly lit. We live in the shadows cast by twinkles a million miles distant. The meat between our ears can’t possibly discern the reality around us. Our brains can only suck in hazy signals and attempt to unscramble them into a story. We hunger for it to all make sense. We ache for agreement. But the Earth is spinning too fast. We’ll always be where we were trying to understand where we are.
Historians like to say that great powers are always fighting the last war. So it goes with everything we do. To live moment to moment is to blunder under the fog of war forever. People who succeed are not good at knowing what is happening, they’re good at not knowing what is happening. While people like me sit and try to make sense of it all, they try, fail, adapt, and try again. And the sleazy among them pretend to know what’s going on, package that gaslight, and sell it to the rest of us.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that gaslighting, in my opinion, requires a degree of clarity and malice that I don’t think most folks possess. I do think people are more often selfish, deluded, confused, in denial, ungenerous, and lacking empathy. I can and have been all those things. But most of us don’t know enough about what’s going on to lie about it to someone else, we’re simply getting it wrong together.
Squinting at you through the smoke of the gaslight,
I am,
Sean Sakamoto
Good advice is always welcome, when it's pertinent and well presented, as this column is.