Gaslighting, Sexism and Gaza
When I was a child I was especially naïve and I thought
that if I could simply explain things to people, it would change the
world. It seemed so obvious that if we
love each other, we could live in the
mortal equivalent of paradise. I still
believe the pith of the argument is true and that the conditions, although
unlikely, are possible [1].
Our potential to shine makes our tenebrous descent all
the more tragic. A phrase that sometimes
pops into my head is, ‘The answer is simple, the solution impossible.’ It is impossible because people are far more
psychological than they are rational [2].
One of the most wicked
manifestations of our psychology is gaslighting. And in turn, the most disgusting forms of gaslighting
are those that serve the greatest of evils, such as genocide and oppression.
A simplistic, generic definition of these gravest forms
of gaslighting is: a manifestation of
dominant power that uses psychological techniques (repression, compartmentalization,
threat-reward, role-modeling, learned helplessness, pavlovian driving,
trojan-horse traditioning … ) to maintain
and manage a seamlessly deceptive, socially omnipresent irreality that denies
obvious truths and equities, while establishing certain evils as proper and
good.
As a child in elementary school, I was fed a Potemkin
Village version of American history. Pilgrims and Wampanoag natives sharing food
at Plymouth Rock, hand in hand, laughing and smiling. And yet, even as a boy, I wondered, ‘Where have
the Wampanoag gone?' The only “Indians” I
saw were on TV, often being shot off horses by innocent White settlers who had
rounded their wagons.
Here is the kind of brainwashing I grew up with as a kid
in the early 70’s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs2w4lwQRtc
(Schoolhouse Rock, Elbow Room (song))
I want to emphasize the insidious cruelty and sheer might
of gaslighting with a discussion of patriarchy, including both public and
private life. As feminists have long
declared, “the personal is political.”
Despite the vast power of a multigenerational mind control, humans
retain our moral agency, and are blameworthy if we do not challenge patriarchy. In the final section, I discuss President
Biden and the genocide taking place in Gaza.
I. Patriarchy and
Gaslighting
Patriarchy infects society at all levels, from family to schools
to media to the courts and the highest offices of the land. It controls money and military, and benefits
from norms that hail back to the start of civilization, when males established law
and religion. Twelve thousand years is a
long time to entrench attitude, habit and technique; to normalize and script
every institution of society. If you
raise someone sexist in a sexist bubble, they reinforce sexism and transmit it
to the future.
A fundamental task of patriarchy is to maximize the complicity
of citizens. Subconscious control is
optimal, for citizens aren’t even aware of what they are doing, and so are less
likely to question. The intent is to
make it feel natural and normal that men should lead. In Orwell’s dystopian 1984, individuals
are trained to forget the truth, and then to forget that they forgot. Given its historical tenure, patriarchy can
take it a step further: individuals don’t
even need to forget, because they are not granted access to the truth in the first
place.
To riff on Foucault’s panopticon: wherever
you are, public or private, everyone plays their instilled social part and, as
well, surveils and polices themselves and others. It’s a sealed, systemic degradation.
All this is Oppression Studies 101. It is the barest sketch of a colossal feat of
mass deception on a multigenerational scale.
We are taught about the ‘Seven Great Wonders of the World.’ But what if we dared to talk about the ‘Great
Anti-Wonders of the World,’ that is, the tremendous, longstanding monuments to
Ignorance and Darkness? If we did so,
one of those Great Anti-Wonders would be patriarchy. Not
only is patriarchy an achievement of dominance and acquiescence, but of complicity
and silence, one that has survived and even thrived for thousands of years.
In contrast, a society where women are seen as equals is
something that patriarchal inculcators never wants us to think about, much less
contemplate.
At the risk of being redundant, this is a dreadful power. The maintenance and countenance of a continuous,
global scourge. The Great Anti-Wonder of
patriarchy means that males often get away with felonious violence. Women
raped? Harassed? Stalked?
Beaten by their husbands? It’s all
swept under the rug because, after all, ‘boys will be boys.’
Even those who study feminism can lose track of the whole
picture, if only because it is so huge, this living, dynamic deceitful web of gender
apartheid. Imagine the overlordly power
and control of both mind and environment that is required to oppress women and
girls, so much that continuous violence against them simply goes ‘poof.’ Until 1975, it was legal in many States for
men to rape their wives. I was born in
1963, so for around 12 years of my life, men could simply rape their wives
whenever they wanted to.
If you look at all of the 120 or so countries on the
planet right now, it is still legal or culturally acceptable for men to inflict
all kinds of violence against women, especially their wives.
I want to highlight the horror with a neon marker of
outrage: one in three women and girls
suffers sexual assault in the USA. And
yet survivors are often left to deal with the trauma alone. Mothers shun them. Fathers disown them. If the assault goes public, they typically gets
blamed. It’s her fault because … she
dressed wrong, she danced loose, she smiled too much, she was drunk, or had a
drink, took drugs, wore lipstick, flirted, was out too late… on and on. While the female victim gets shunned and
mocked, the male perpetrator typically avoids blame and punishment, and often
receives sparse negative attention at all.
To emphasize, patriarchy is a Great Anti-Wonder of the
World, a towering construct that to this
day overlords societies and manages minds to venerate Evil as Good. Most people who read this will never hear
patriarchy given an overview again. You aren’t supposed to hear this.
II. The Great
Paradox
Logically, it shouldn’t be hard to acknowledge or even
dismantle patriarchy. In terms of game
theory, it’s a “prisoners dilemma” where, if all sides act to benefit the
other, everyone wins. If we can escape
traditional gender bifurcation, we flourish as free and unique individuals in
mutually beneficial relationships.
It is difficult to conceptualize this semi-utopia, because
we’ve never experienced it. Imagine people
encouraged to be themselves without the constraint of gender, racial or sexual
prejudice. This is a world where
gaslighting isn’t the collective norm.
Those in the oppressor group would benefit as well. In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Ruth
Whippman writes:
Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except
the thing that’s most worth having: human connection.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/opinion/boys-parenting-loneliness.html
Anyone who reads this blog already knows that some
progress has been made. Over the course
of the last few hundred years, brave women and their male allies have gained a
little ground. Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of
Women in 1798. USA suffragists
achieved the national vote in 1920. The
#MeToo went global in 2017. These
milestones and others required long, brutal struggle. In the 19th century women were
legally the property of their husbands. Suffragists
likened Victorian women to slaves. In addition to being property, women could,
like slaves, be beaten and assaulted; like slaves, they were named in relation
to the male of the household.
In the last fifty years or so, the snowball effect of
change has accelerated, facilitated by light-speed communications. Once you get into a certain headspace--the ethical
acuity that feminists call a ‘raised conscious’--the old ways are revealed as
parasitic and egregious. The cruel norm
of devaluing someone due to simply being female is exposed as delusional and
deleterious; that is, insane.
It is still weird for me to hear someone ask why I am so
passionately concerned about oppression.
In response, I say this: if not
for social programming, we would all be passionately concerned. We humans are capable of deepest moral
veracity. The large majority of us want
justice and cherish it as a standard.
We also have a tendency to be compassionate and open-minded. The skill of mindfulness, often recommended
as a therapeutic technique, brings this out in practice.
And yet, sadly, humans
have a tremendously hard time being fair.
To claim that a woman is incompetent because she is a woman, or that a
Black person is incompetent because of their skin, is to claim something as
absurd as ‘the sky is fuchsia’ or ‘the moon is made of swiss cheese.’
Here we have a great paradox. What should be clear and simple for our powerful
brains to solve has been turned into a formidable puzzle, one that we are
trained to not even consider. To many, the truth of equality is nigh on
inaccessible. To even broach the topic
is a stimulus for shutting down the dialogue, whether through withdrawal or
attack.
It is a pitiable, wretched state of affairs. We humans trod through life as deceived
creatures, cloaking ourselves in dark dogma and pulling up the cowl of self-deception.
If I seem to be riding a high horse, let me point out
that I too am a gaslighter. I too am
deceived and a self-deceiver. Despite
decades of study and listening, I have to watch myself and self-monitor. Do I talk over women? Expect them to listen? Am I listening to them? Do I hog space, both verbal and physical? Do I assume someone else will clean up for
me? And so on. There is no doubt that the
culture I was immersed in, starting in the 1960’s when I was born, still
affects me.
It would be ridiculous pride for me to say I am better
than anyone else. I am, though, proud of
one of the greatest achievements of my
life, that I attained some level of raised consciousness. None of this journey was easy or even
consciously sought after. I wandered
mazes of despair and dysfunction, immature and acting out in my victim-rage;
for I am a victim of gaslighting myself, in the form of child abuse. Having grappled with that for decades and, as
well, the gaslighting in our society in general--the general abuse of women,
people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community, I feel a little like Neo when he
finally escaped the Matrix. Neo had
plenty of help on his journey. And I
continue to benefit from empowering and educating relationships, even as I
stumble along through life, leaving a wake of both sorry and hopeful behavior
behind me.
III. Agency,
Blame, Praise (aka ivory-tower philosopher stuff)
We are born into a society that immediately begins to
shape and co-opt our minds for its own purposes. I have labored to bring out the ugly, extreme
power of social programming. Given how
powerful the programming can be, some thinkers, those of a deterministic bent,
might say that we are doomed to be puppets. This is a skeptical and cynical way of looking
at the world, one which links back to ancient Greece. It manifests in Calvinism and other
theological determinisms. This skeptical
view, as well, is entirely wrong.
In the end, we do have moral agency. We do earn blame or praise for our choices.
Recently, a woman named Lori Vallow Daybell was convicted
for murdering her children. She claims
that her children had been taken over by demons, who possessed their
bodies. Killing them, according to
Daybell, allowed her children to rise to heaven. The evidence suggests Daybell believed this horrific
fiction. Still, she was found guilty. Even when people are deluded and refuse see
the truth, we usually hold them accountable and culpable, even more when the
truth is blatantly obvious [3].
Yes, the human mind is labyrinthine and byzantine. Mazes within mazes, the partitions moderated
by other partitions, the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, all of
it embellished with prettified lies--
And yet still--still--we earn blame or praise for our
actions.
You cannot kill someone and get off scot free because you
believe they are a demon. And you cannot
proclaim women and Black people are inferior, and then enslave them, justifying
it, say, with your Biblical beliefs, and not, through your bigotry, participate
in the evil of oppression.
When it comes to equality, the truth is obvious. The core of the idea was grasped by ancient
peoples, who enshrined it in the Golden Rule:
Do unto others as you would them unto you.
It is not a shocker.
We are all the same kind of animal. To
realize that others feel pain like I do is not some quantum leap. The Golden Rule contains a fundamental
empathy, seeing others as the same, as like me.
Someone might now point out that ancient peoples did see
women as inferior, even though they believed in the Golden Rule. And I would respond that, yes, that is
exactly what I was saying above about the Great Paradox. A sealed culture of control can divert us
from obvious truths.
Indeed, the Asch conformity studies show that peer pressure
can exert an immediate reality-denying effect even among strangers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
I wonder, does any other species deceive itself as much
as we do? And, furthermore, transmit,
elaborate and canonize that deceit down through the ages, such that it becomes necessary
to function or even survive in society?
There is other evidence that those who embrace false moral
beliefs in the face of obvious truth know that what they are doing is wrong. Guilt, shame, remorse, and something that
psychologists refer to as “cognitive dissonance,” a highly uncomfortable
state--can be telltale signs. We can’t
know directly what other people thinking; and yet body language can offer
strong indication. We can see guilt, shame, remorse and tension written in others’
features.
Sometimes guilt erupts onto the surface. Apparently, one of the judges at the Salem
Witch Trial Judges admitted his shame and blame:
In the paranoid summer of 1692, Sewall joined the
other trial judges in a special court in condemning 20 men and women to death
for witchcraft. Nineteen were hanged and one subjected to the barbaric cruelty
of being pressed to death under heavy stones. The evidence was flimsy, often
absurd, and the Salem witch case would forever stand as an emblem of state
injustice.
Five years after the executions, Samuel Sewall stood up
in his church and bowed his head as his minister read his apology. Sewall
wished to accept "the blame and the shame of it."
https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/news/local/portsmouth-herald/2007/12/30/feel-guilt-salem-witch-judge/52695340007/
From this case and many others--and, in fact, most of all
from our own everyday experiences--it is clear that people can know what they
are doing is wrong, without admitting it, sometimes even to themselves. And yet, at some later time, the guilt erupts
into confession and contrition. The
mazes and partitions can keep the truth hidden deep inside us, but only so much,
and often only for a while.
Women are not inferior because of their anatomy. Black people are not inferior because of
their skin tone. In general, everywhere,
at some level people know this to be true.
We know what we are doing, deep in our hearts. Equality is as obvious as the sky being blue.
To end this section, it strikes me as a sad, self-afflicted
curse that someone can know the truth, but lock it away so much that they become
unaware. Their purpose is to avoid
feeling guilt and pain. And yet, what a
brutal blow to your own soul What a maiming
strike to the loveliness of your own self-expression. What a terrible act, to lock away and mute
your very conscience.
Such self-crushing force cannot be applied without karma. Fissures form in a cage of repression,
releasing shoots of pain into the mind and psychosomatically into the body. And since those pains won’t be dealt with
honestly, they are dealt with by destructive acts, whether to oneself, as through
addiction to drugs, or to others, a projection of your own deep rage and misery
from living in a psychic cage.
IV. Genocide in
Gaza
I am not going to describe in detail the horrors taking
place in Gaza. I’ve discussed them in
other blog posts. You have an entire
population of people trapped in a landscape that is largely rubble, 80% of the
population displaced. Huge numbers live
in tents without even clean water. The starvation
has reached famine proportion, because Israel throttles the checkpoints where
food could get through [3]. There are
accounts of numerous vicious acts by the IDF that make no sense except in the
most perverse way as a means to express raw hatred for the Gazans. Journalists, paramedics and volunteers in
relief agencies, such as the World Kitchen, have been shot or bombed. The death count is currently around 37,300
people, mostly women and children, and climbing daily. Over 1% of the entire population has been
killed or critically wounded. And,
again, the civilians are starving and can’t get out. Masha Gessen, who recently won the Hannah
Arendt Prize likened the situation to the Warsaw Ghetto.
I could keep going here with accounts of
horror. Civilians--children, women,
men--trapped under rubble from bombed buildings, and slowly dying there. Evidence suggests the IDF conducted mass executions
and buried bodies in mass graves. The
horrors don’t end. All I’ve sad above is
a feeble attempt to convey even a scintilla of the misery, depravity, death and
terror being inflicted. Judged
by their actions, not their words of denial, Israel is enacting a malevolent
strategy of ethnic cleansing.
I’ll share just one video link. This is Chris Hayes on MSNBC interviewing a
volunteer surgeon who recently spent two weeks in Gaza. Warning.
Graphic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4BEHn5U9Ck
Poignant, heartbreaking news comes out every day. Here is just some of the last few days:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/06/14/israel-gaza-hamas-food-water/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/06/15/gaza-rafah-evacuations-injured-israel/
If you even glance at these links you will see intentional
starvation and other strategic sadisms.
You will see an entire people reduced to nomads starving amid the rubble
of what used to be a functioning region for a population of 2.2 million.
Biden Gaslights the Genocide
President of the USA, Joe Biden, refuses to see the
genocide. He calls the International
Criminal Court’s recent indictments against Israel for war crimes “outrageous.” Most of all, he continues to supply Israel
with weapons and thereby makes my country, the USA, complicit in the ongoing Holocaustic
horror.
All my life, I was taught one thing very honestly: that
the Holocaust was an unspeakable horror of the highest magnitude, and should
never be repeated. “Never Again” was
drilled into me, even in secondary school.
I learned that international laws were instituted after the Nuremberg
Trials to specifically ensure “Never Again.”
And yet, starting in October 2023, Israel has been conducting
a campaign of Biblical proportions against the Gazans. Netanyahu, the country’s Prime Minister, issued
words of vengeance, quoting 1 Samuel 15:3.
It is a passage that basically says ‘kill everyone and everything and
salt the earth’:
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that
they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and
suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass
All my life, I was taught “Never Again.” It was enshrined in US culture. I was schooled in Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel,
Viktor Frankl and other classic writers on the Holocaust. There is a Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Countless movies and TV shows have featured the
Nazis as atrocious and barbaric, with genocide as the greatest of all evils.
And yet, “Never Again” is no longer enshrined in our
culture. Our wonderful President, Joe
Biden, is refusing to see a genocide for which the USA is supplying the weapons. Joe Biden is gaslighting. He denies the obvious. He says things like, ‘Israel has a right to
defend itself.’
His foolish lies are destroying my country’s moral
integrity. How can we say we are
guardians of humans rights, protectors against genocide, when we are involved
in a Holocaustic slaughter? If the USA
is a democracy, how is democracy better than dictatorship, if we are inflicting
such unspeakable, infernal atrocity?
I don’t know what else to say.
I am speechless about our capacity to be so ignorant and
cruel.
This ability to be wicked, despite the human capacity for
conscience, allows us to be stupid and blind; to never accept blame for our own
behavior; to never see truth; to always blame someone else. The price is hatred and rage. We project our self-loathing--for our own weakness,
our own lack of integrity, our own disgusting failure--onto scapegoats.
Hate and rage. At
this magnitude, they lead not just to personal defilement, but toward all-consuming
war. Which reminds me of a song:
How many times can a man [4] turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
===============================================
Footnotes
(1) “Trillions of happy people, it’s doable”:
https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2023/11/op-ed-trillions-of-happy-humans-its.html
(2) I don’t mean
to denigrate emotion or passion. They
can be blind, but they can also be wise and reasonable. Martha Nussbaum argues that sometimes
emotions are “evaluative judgements.” Objectivity, as well, can be either blind or
wise. Objectivity is best thought of as
a mode of observation that we assume; and yet, still, we remain fallible animals. Emotion, on the other
hand, is more natural and draws from the constant dance of lightning storms in
our brains.
(3) In rare cases, suspects can be found 'not guilty' do to an insanity defense. This requires "not knowing or understanding" what you're doing and being unable to fathom right from wrong. This is a very high bar, one that requires diagnosable mental disorder or disease of a psychotic nature. Simply believing something, even with all your heart, is not enough.
(4) As Rafah
Offensive Grinds On, Hunger in Gaza Spirals
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/world/middleeast/rafah-gaza-aid-hunger.html
(5) The sexist pronoun is in the original song, Bob
Dylan (1962). It is, however, mostly males
who are in charge in our patriarchal world, and leading us toward WW3, so in a
way using the masculine is somewhat appropriate.
===================
6/20 ... two cosmetics
6/17 ... a sprinkle of cosmetic edits
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