Systemic gaslighting

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.

3%

The Brazilian dystopian sci-fi series 3% imagines a future where selection for a life of luxury (as opposed to one of squalor for the 97%) is based on a supposedly meritocratic ‘Process’ taken by twenty year-olds each year. The Process reminded me of taking exams and going to job interviews, with the Krypton Factor and the Hunger Games thrown into the mix. The desperation to succeed, with all that meant for a relatively easy life, is certainly reminiscent of the pressure young people are put under to find their place in society. Thankfully some of the more sadistic and potentially fatal elements of the Process are not typically part of the process of getting qualifications and a job in contemporary society.

But I was less interested in what might be seen as a commentary on our shared ‘belief’ in the system that ends up with a few having lives of privilege and many not. It was the architecture that fascinated me. The Wikipedia page on 3% says the location for filming scenes depicting the Process are at a stadium in São Paolo called Neo Química Arena. The Process is brutal — it seems amazing the eponymous 3% who make it through don’t spend the rest of their supposedly privileged lives needing therapy for PTSD. What I found interesting was how believable it was that such a Process could take place in the building depicted.

I doubt there are many buildings that have not, at some point or another, been the scenes of one or more acts of violence or dehumanization. But clearly, to me at least, some buildings provide a context in which such things are more plausible. There’s more to it than that, however. While any house, even ones depicted on chocolate boxes, could be places where domestic abuse happens, only certain buildings get the special status of being places where systemic dehumanization occurs: where people are given identification numbers, and are measured, assessed, quantified, and traded off against each other. To me, rightly or wrongly, such buildings are scrupulously tidy, with glass, concrete and steel much in evidence. There are long corridors, big spaces, high ceilings, and the audible ‘clop-clop’ of power-dressed women strutting about in high-heels.

Does architecture beget violence? At the risk of tripping myself up over Godwin’s Law, Nazis (and fascists generally) had distinctive architectural styles, as indeed did Stalinists. Minimally, it’s supportable that architecture and politics are not orthogonal. Space can be used to manipulate your feelings. Maybe large spaces make you feel smaller. Often you have to be careful what you say in such spaces because the sound carries so well. These diminish your ego that bit more — you restrain yourself; who knows whether that might be just enough to topple you over into docility? Perhaps tidy spaces make you anxious about your humanity — the shed skin, hair, snot, burst spots, sweat, farts and earwax you cannot help but leave in a trail behind you everywhere you go. And you adopt behaviours and routines that diminish that anxiety in response; behaviours you would not otherwise have done. The design of the space has made you do that. The architect has controlled you without ever having met you.

Interestingly, however, research by Stephan Trüby reported in an Archinect article points out that right-wing extremists often like remote rural areas, where they can enclose themselves away from the multicultural complexity of urban life. The same article also cites a study by Neeraj Bhatia correlating population density with support for Hilary Clinton in the 2016 US election, and lack thereof with support for Donald Trump. Indeed, in the UK, the results of general elections when depicted on a map often look like a sea of blue (the colour of the Conservative Party) in rural constituencies with a few dots of red (the colour of the Labour Party) in urban areas, even when Labour wins.

Are we then to infer that rural scenery — forests, meadows, marshes, mountains, bogs, lakes, hills, rivers, beaches and fields — somehow inspire right-wing sentiments? Is God a Tory? Nature can make you feel small, but not in a way that is dehumanizing, I think. At least the ‘trail’ I referred to before that you leave behind you is welcomed in natural environments as something will feed on your detritus. I suspect other factors are at play in why rural areas have more right-wing politics. But then, can I sustain the argument that buildings can turn us into compliant little fascists?

Before rushing to the conclusion that violence is everywhere, regardless of space, and besides observing that the emotions and feelings natural environments inspire in us should not automatically be seen as ‘good’, it’s worth asking about the alternative. If we can design spaces that make us violent, can we design spaces that make us peaceful? From a quick search of the internet, it seems this question has been the subject of a conference in 2019, and an initiative in California, with an interesting leaflet articulating some of the ways people are psychologically affected by space, and the potential for them to be discriminatory. Interestingly, that leaflet suggests that views of nature reduce stress and anxiety, making people less inclined to violence.

With apologies to those who are right-leaning politically, as I regret to say I cannot dissociate violence, dehumanization and environmental destruction with such views, it then seems all the more remarkable that those in rural areas would be more rather than less Conservative. I can understand a desire to conserve (with a small ‘c’) the nature that surrounds them every day, and perhaps the fear is that ‘others’ will destroy the nature they hold dear. Another view would be that insofar as such people are lords and masters of all they survey (even if that is just a large garden), they have lost all sense of anything other than themselves. Besides, rural areas are not all natural landscapes; instead (in the UK at least) they are mostly industrial. Nature is no less subdued by insecticides, artificial fertilizers, fungicides, weed killers, muirburn, ploughs and chainsaws than it is by concrete and tarmac. In that sense, rural is just another kind of urban — urban with different materials — and we should ask the same questions about the effects these environments have on our psyche that we do of architects and the environments they design.

Mass Production in a Star Topology

High-speed transport networks, the internet, land line, satellite and mobile phone networks, and television and radio broadcasting networks create channels of communication and interaction physical and remote that are not an option in ‘natural’ spaces that have not been thus enhanced. Interactions become less regionally localized, and ever more globalized, and information disseminated more and more quickly.

The internet is a ‘distributed‘ network designed to be resilient through adopting a structure of connections and nodes that meant the whole could keep working even if individual nodes or connections were taken out. Since the late 1990s, when the World Wide Web was popularized and businesses worked out how to make it pay for itself using advertising, it has threatened more traditional information ‘star topology’ broadcasting networks that operate from a single point. This democratized broadcasting — anyone, no matter who they were or what training they had, could upload a video, create a webpage, and publish their story. Through breaking spatial barriers to meeting like-minded people, the internet also enabled extremists world-wide to connect and organize.

But all this democratization did was change the set of ‘stars’ with whom we had one-sided friendships, beyond the TV and radio celebrities beamed into our living rooms, to bloggers, vloggers, and other internet ‘sensations’. People turned themselves into products for their viewers to consume, and can now even make a living from the advertising revenue. And the advertisers turned the viewers into data products to sell to businesses. The internet did not change the star topology, it gave it a more robust foundation, allowed it to become more niched, and has begun the process of digitizing us. It becomes that bit less of a stretch of the imagination to believe we could disembody ourselves and live as holograms.

The sinister side of being a product is the idea that we are made, moulded and manipulated. The ideas of radicalization, deradicalization, and cognitive behaviour therapy suggest we can be programmed. If we assume an agenda to this process, mass production is about creating a body of people willing to buy consumer goods and services, or who will adhere to religious or political beliefs, or carry out acts of terrorism. The politics of identity may seem to be a reaction against this — reasserting our own ideas of who we are rather than being told. But even this feels a bit like packing yourself conveniently in a box so people know how to target messages to you, whilst also creating an in-group/out-group dynamic making you more suggestable and reinforcing your group identity.

The increasing physical isolation and social interaction through electronic devices is conditioning us for a life of separation from the social as well as the natural environment. This separation will be essential in the early stages of space travel. People will leave their home planet and their loved ones behind, possibly never to return. However, if we interact with each other sporadically through social apps, the time lag associated with the spatial separation of the space ship with earth will be nothing new.

Food Politics

Human control over the production and distribution of food has led to there being food politics. Eating is one of the simplest and most basic pleasures of human existence. Now you cannot enjoy a meal without offending someone. If you eat meat, you offend those interested in animal rights, or those concerned about climate change, water conservation, rainforest destruction, or food inequality. If you do not, you offend those farmers who take a pride in their husbandry. If you eat fish, you offend marine conservationists; if you do not, you offend fishers. Conventional or organic; GM or GM-free; fair or free trade; wild, local or global?

For the ethically aware, food packaging is now covered with the icons of various labelling schemes. The market asks you to pay a small premium for the fair treatment of workers, avoiding overexploitation of the environment, giving animals better conditions, and so on – which turns morality into a luxury commodity, and hence a weapon for all sides in the class war to beat each other with.

That is before the thorny issue of nutrition is tackled. Marketing boards for virtually every foodstuff from blueberries to mackerel have funded or drawn on research proving the nutritional benefits of the product they push. They are not the only ones: charities representing special interest groups also fund research. Thus, it is impossible to know, without a Ph.D. in the biochemistry of digestion, whether, for example, veganism is a natural, healthy diet, or a suburbanite fantasy propped up by vitamin pills.

It might be argued, indeed it has been argued, that all that matters is price. Food labelling is consistently resisted by industry. It is astonishing how our society’s leaders can promote an economic ideology that works only if everyone makes decisions with complete knowledge, and then allow themselves to be lobbied so as to prevent consumers from accessing information. That said, we clearly don’t entirely trust the market when it comes to food, as testified by various governments issuing incentives to farmers. Food security is a discourse that has emerged relatively recently. As well as concerns about whether we can actually grow enough food to feed everyone (whether now, or later this century), there is also the potential weaponization of food. In the latter case, countries with a food surplus could use that to their strategic advantage against countries that need to import food. Alongside all that is speculation by investors, believed by some to be responsible for the Arab Spring through causing a spike in grain prices. The market has no answer (except, “Devil take the hindmost“) for what happens when it fails to provide everyone with enough to eat.

Contrast all this with picking a blackberry from a bramble (assuming, for now, the bramble is on public land, on uncontaminated soil, and a respectable distance from chemical sprays – perhaps we should imagine picking a blackberry from a bramble several millennia ago). The blackberry has no label telling you it is suitable for vegetarians, has been fairly traded, grown by labourers working for a workers’ co-operative, is free of artificial colours, flavours or preservatives. It has no breakdown of its salt, carbohydrate, protein and fat content. You pick it, you put it in your mouth, you chew it, it tastes delicious.

If we can make such a mess of food, if we can turn eating from heaven into hell (unless you are willing, and indeed in the luxurious position of being able, to ignore the issues), what happens when all ecosystem services are provided through engineered biomes?