Gaslighting is a form of abuse in a relationship by which one partner psychologically manipulates the other into believing they are mad. Wikipedia tells me it’s from a 1940s film called ‘Gaslight‘, which is why I sometimes find the term difficult to remember: I haven’t watched the film.

Though mainly focused on abusive sexual partnerships, gaslighting can also happen in the workplace as a tool for controlling employees when managers’ systems don’t work, or simply because some people are unpleasant and enjoy that sort of thing. For a brief spell, I acted as a union rep: the role is essentially to act as a companion for people when the workplace relationship has broken down. It is surprising how often people internalize problems that workplace management systems have failed to anticipate or handle well. Sometimes, people do go a bit mad — most commonly over-interpreting behaviours of others to look for signs that they are being singled out. (I hesitate to use the term ‘paranoia’.)

Managers of workplaces design systems to ensure they run smoothly and achieve the organization’s goals. Into those designs, they bring their worldview, culture and way of thinking. Coupled with the authority they are accorded, it can be hard for them to admit that their perfectly reasonable seeming system is flawed in a way that systemically prejudices some people from thriving in it. Hence, there is ‘something wrong’ with those who do not, and the temptation to abuse the power that comes with their authority in defence of the designed system.

Beyond the workplace, this can scale up to the national level, where laws are made that, to some extent or another, favour some people over others — not necessarily intentionally so. Unintentional discrimination isn’t on the same level as gaslighting. But the tools of psychological manipulation used by abusers to gaslight their victim are deployed by states and media corporations through propaganda and debating styles: withholding information, countering information that does not fit the abuser’s perspective, discounting information provided to them, jocular verbal abuse, and trivializing people’s sense of self-worth.

This is not to allow that every individual has a sacred right to behave how they please, with no regard for the welfare of others. This is not about ethics and moral conduct: the Global Ethic Project is about finding universal values that cut across all the world’s religions. Rather, this is a concern about how systems of management and governance can lead to individuals whose moral conduct is no worse than anyone else’s ending up believing there is something wrong with them, arising simply from ‘arbitrary’ personal characteristics. Further, it is the about the efforts taken by those wanting to defend the systems to reinforce such beliefs.

When we design the ecosystems in which we live, is there any reason to believe that similar phenomena will not occur? Think about how some engineers treat users of computer software who don’t understand how it works. When you log a helpdesk call, is there not a tendency for them to give you the impression you’re the one with the problem, not the software? What will happen when we live in designed ecosystems, then? When we have a problem with the way things work, with the ‘services’ ‘provisioned’ by the ecosystem (language too awful to comprehend but nonetheless used), won’t we be made to feel like we are the ones at fault? “No-one else has this problem,” you can hear them saying. And bit-by-bit you’ll be undermined and either learn to live with a permanent sense of discomfort that something about the whole world in which you live is wrong, or go mad.

Think about the portrayal of environmental protesters in the media: not typically as rational, sensible, ‘normal’ humans with legitimate concerns, but as luddites, NIMBYs, crusties, anarchists, marijuana addicts, and tree-huggers. Whether effective in making the individuals concerned feel undermined or not, isn’t it at least attempted gaslighting? And isn’t it really about defending a system that works very well indeed for some, but not for others, and especially not the environment?

At the same time, it is not as though Nature is entirely neutral, except, perhaps insofar as lacking intentionality implies neutrality. There’s a reason we have innovated over the millennia to make our lives more convenient, to cure the sick and to ease suffering. As a mother, Nature is somewhat harsh. The weak, the sick, the reckless, the unlucky: all can be victims of her whims. As humans I think we have the ambition at least ideally to be more compassionate and forgiving. Some ecosystems simply do not provide for the needs of humans without modification and invention. Arguably, and perhaps in her efforts to defend herself, Nature also has some gaslighting behaviours: she withholds information and certainly does little to give one the impression of being worth anything.