Essay: Gaslighting, Sexism and Gaza

 

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 19^th 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

 

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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.

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6/20 ... two cosmetics

 6/17 ... a sprinkle of cosmetic edits