Will Gaslighting Carry the Day on November 3rd? In Post-Truth America, Does It Matter?

 

When it comes to gaslighting there's no master of this dark art like El Presidente, Donald Trump, and it could be his best hope for winning re-election.

Gaslighting, in which someone denies the reality that other people are experiencing—has become a greater threat than ever. Throughout a year of tragedy and strife, including the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, we’ve seen leaders and other public figures force people to doubt their experiences and thoughts. These manipulators don’t just ignore data and evidence; they deny their very existence.

How do we navigate what philosopher Kathleen Higgins describes as the post-truth era, where there is no longer even an expectation that politicians or pundits will be honest? This issue, we hope, will serve in some measure as an antidote to the poison of gaslighting and other forms of mendacity. Never has it been more important to understand the science of deception and what can be done to combat it.

Human perception is inherently subjective. 

We may believe that we are thinking in an open-minded way, but most people latch onto ideas that reinforce their own preconceived beliefs—even if doing so prevents them from literally seeing new solutions. Such ingrained implicit bias has served us well in the course of evolution, but in the modern era it more often than not leads us astray.

The Malignancy of Social Media 

Nowhere are our failings at objective reasoning more exploitable than on social media. Facebook and other platforms enable the spread of misinformation that sows social unrest—in particular, meme culture has been shown to propagate lies and increase polarization. We users are the unwitting vectors of this threat. (Watch our short documentary on the making of a deepfake video at https://bit.ly/3itSiek for a close look into another way that technology enables deceit.)

Malicious foreign agents invade those same platforms, and hackers could go further and tamper with vulnerable voting systems in this country, endangering the very processes of democracy. Civic life suffers because of these malevolent forces. Turmoil, anxiety and a sense that society is in jeopardy make people susceptible to conspiracy theories and the kind of polarization where winning an argument is more important than understanding opponents’ viewpoints.

Although the human mind comes equipped with built-in obstacles to objective thinking, it doesn’t mean we have to give in to ignorance and bias. Douglas T. Kenrick and his co-authors offer simple interventions that can make us more open-minded, scientific thinkers. In fact, scientists can look to philosophy to aid in some self-examination about how much, in the hands of subjective creatures, the tools of science can ultimately discover.

The common theme in many of these seemingly abysmal examinations of the state of our societal affairs is a heartening bright spot. By just being aware of how we perceive information, we can protect ourselves from disinformation and gaslighting. We don’t have to agree, but at least we’ll be anchored in what is real and what is not.

Where the author goes wrong is in overlooking the fact that many Trump supporters, his base in particular, don't mind gaslighting when it comes from their leader. They don't care how many lies he tells. Their bond is tribal. 

There is an abundance of evidence that Trump has failed to "make America great again," at least for the Gullibillies. He's certainly done well by the already well-heeled but, again, that doesn't matter to the faithful. Their bond is tribal.

Tribalism requires little more than a nurtured grievance and an identifiable 'enemy,' real or imagined. Pretty much any straw man will do. It's a "you're either with us or you're against us" paradigm that casts anyone not like-minded as an enemy or at least unreliable, untrustworthy.

In 2017 the New York Magazine asked whether democracy could survive tribalism.

Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous. I don’t just mean the rise of political polarization (although that’s how it often expresses itself), nor the rise of political violence (the domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and ’70s was far worse), nor even this country’s ancient black-white racial conflict (though its potency endures).

I mean a new and compounding combination of all these differences into two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other.

I mean two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country, each of whom scans current events almost entirely to see if they advance not so much their country’s interests but their own. I mean two tribes where one contains most racial minorities and the other is disproportionately white; where one tribe lives on the coasts and in the cities and the other is scattered across a rural and exurban expanse; where one tribe holds on to traditional faith and the other is increasingly contemptuous of religion altogether; where one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global; where each dominates a major political party; and, most dangerously, where both are growing in intensity as they move further apart.

The project of American democracy — to live beyond such tribal identities, to construct a society based on the individual, to see ourselves as citizens of a people’s republic, to place religion off-limits, and even in recent years to embrace a multiracial and post-religious society — was always an extremely precarious endeavor. It rested, from the beginning, on an 18th-century hope that deep divides can be bridged by a culture of compromise, and that emotion can be defeated by reason. It failed once, spectacularly, in the most brutal civil war any Western democracy has experienced in modern times. And here we are, in an equally tribal era, with a deeply divisive president who is suddenly scrambling Washington’s political alignments, about to find out if we can prevent it from failing again.

Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life.

Healthy tribalism endures in civil society in benign and overlapping ways. We find a sense of belonging, of unconditional pride, in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts. There are hip-hop and country-music tribes; bros; nerds; Wasps; Dead Heads and Packers fans; Facebook groups. (Yes, technology upends some tribes and enables new ones.) And then, most critically, there is the Über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.

...Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller, multiple loyalties; when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole; and when it turns rival tribes into enemies. And the most significant fact about American tribalism today is that all three of these characteristics now apply to our political parties, corrupting and even threatening our system of government.

... There is no neutral presidency here, and so when a rank tribalist wins the office and governs almost entirely in the interests of the hardest core of his base, half the country understandably feels as if it were under siege. Our two-party, winner-take-all system only works when both parties are trying to appeal to the same constituencies on a variety of issues.

Our undemocratic electoral structure exacerbates things. Donald Trump won 46 percent of the vote, attracting 3 million fewer voters than his opponent, but secured 56 percent of the Electoral College. Republicans won 44 percent of the vote in the Senate seats up for reelection last year, but 65 percent of the seats. To have one tribe dominate another is one thing; to have the tribe that gained fewer votes govern the rest - and be the head of state - is testing political stability.

...One of the great attractions of tribalism is that you don’t actually have to think very much. All you need to know on any given subject is which side you’re on. You pick up signals from everyone around you, you slowly winnow your acquaintances to those who will reinforce your worldview, a tribal leader calls the shots, and everything slips into place.