In Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gaslight, a husband manipulates his rich wife into thinking that she is going insane. Fast-forward to the present day and gaslighting has become a psychological buzzword – defined by the website Everyday Feminism as “the attempt of one person to overwrite another’s reality”. A subtle but powerful syllogism has taken place. The husband in Gaslight did not attempt to overwrite his wife’s reality: he attempted to overwrite reality itself. But the new definition dispenses with the idea of a single reality in favour of multiple ones. In this context, mere disagreement becomes a form of gaslighting. A term once dedicated to defending reality has thus become a means of escaping it – especially the hard-won compromises on which society is built.
As a result, disagreement today has come to be seen not as a constructive process but as an attack on the individual psyche. This drives a weird world-view where the cry-bully complex thrives.
Such brittleness was a central feature of the 2016 US Election campaign. Both sides appealed to voters’ egos – particularly their sense of victimhood – rather than their empathy. The domestic terror of Charlottesville, Dallas, and Washington DC, has since testified that such Freudian techniques do not belong in political campaigns. The tearful online appeal of one of the “Unite the Right” organisers indicates how far aggression is now co-dependent on self-pity. Reality came as a similar shock to the Antifa activist arrested while giving a press conference about a felony. The law had infringed on her reality: it had gaslighted her.
Into the space left by a shared, objective reality flood the projections of the individual. The conspiring and conspiracy-obsessed Hillary Clinton persuaded her supporters that negative stories about her were the result of a “vast, right-wing media conspiracy” – a brilliant, self-reinforcing tactic. The subtext was to make unreal whatever impinges on “your” reality. Since the election, Donald Trump has been proffered to voters as gaslighter-in-chief. Along with all such social-justice overstretch, the inflation of the term betrays its original beneficiaries: victims of actual domestic gaslighting.
Nowhere is reality-blocking more evident than in the public response to Islamist terror. This used to consist of adding a flag to your social-media profile (combining virtue-signalling with the publicising of terror without stepping out of a Western frame of reference). The recent terror attack in Barcelona saw the comfort blanket of unreality pulled even tighter. Twitter users responded by “hashtag flooding” the subject with cat pictures. Ostensibly this was to help the police: really it conformed to the de facto political ban on sharing terror images.
The flight from reality has touched down firmly on the shores of the UK. Young voters are gorging on the fantasies of Jeremy Corbyn, whose commitments – most recently on tuition fees and welfare – are unreal. He exhibits a calm moral superiority while remaining ambivalent towards violence carried out against others (most recently the starving, unarmed Venezuelan public). Like clicktivism and social-media sniping, it is the perfect placebo for a generation numbed by decades of comfortable relativism. It fills the space hollowed out by consumerism and pop culture, yet requires no action or sacrifice beyond a walk to the polling station. The acute moral hazard of discussing class action and class guilt – when precisely such thinking once cost millions of people their lives – is ignored. Personal morality – in the sexual sphere, for example – is shouted down as reactionary. Consumers’ professed environmentalism is similarly externalised, in this case onto governments and international treaties.
The triad of victimhood, unreality and fake morality is proving to be a deadly combination. Not just for Western societies – but for a developing world which once looked to the West for compassion and economic partnership. As the West sinks deeper into self-pity, this role is being eroded. The feminism of Hillary Clinton’s campaign took little interest in Middle-Eastern women because those women had no votes in the US election. The European trade partnerships which once lifted other continents out of poverty – a seminal study in 1902 shocked Britain by revealing that its biggest trading partner was South America, where it had few Imperial interests – are in danger of being sacrificed to EU and US protectionism.
This points to the great irony of the so-called globalised age: that the West – still a beacon of progress and development to millions around the world – is closing in on itself. Well-fed Antifa and Momentum protestors consider their own ideological traumas to be the West’s most pressing issue. For all the flag-waving of Corbynites and Democrats – Palestine! Tibet! Anywhere! – the real focus of their attention is at home.
The breaking of the Western psyche was once a means to an economic end. Since the failure of Marxist utopias everywhere – most recently Venezuela – it appears to have become an end in itself. As such, Jeremy Corbyn’s increased minority is his dream ticket – giving him more power to destroy but no responsibility to create. And here lies a clue to the real purpose of our cultivated flight to unreality: that to cut off the branch you’re sitting on, you mustn’t look down.
