"Gaslighting" has emerged as the word of the year, declares Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
The declaration came after the dictionary firm found that lookups for "gaslighting" spiked dramatically this year.
It "was a word looked up frequently every single day of the year," Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor at large, told Associated Press.
News of the word of the year is straightforward enough, timely enough to perhaps bring out later as a Christmas party parlor game question.
But anyone who bothers at all with words or language will see "gaslighting" ultimately must have social and political causes.
Particularly when one considers that our present age of blatant disinformation and misinformation has put public political discourses in a pretty bad way.
In fact, so ghoulishly misshapen is our misinformed age by the roaring success of fake news, conspiracy theories, and trolls that the common enough proverb "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me" isn't nowadays germane at all.
In these misshapen days, being fooled many times over by weaponized social media constantly reminds us daily of our ordinary failures not to be politically stupid.
Anyway, "gaslighting" comes from a 1938 play (that then became a movie) where a man convinces his wife she is going insane by lying to her that their home's gas lights are not dimming. The lights did dim.
Striking was this "gaslighting" story, mental health practitioners later used it to clinically describe a form of prolonged coercive control in abusive relationships.
Merriam-Webster's top definition for "gaslighting," for instance, is the psychological manipulation of a person, usually over an extended period that "causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator."
But in recent years, the word's clinical description is being replaced with the newer, broader definition that better fits our present social and political realities: "The act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one's advantage."
Doesn't that exactly describe the baneful lies pervading our political discourses every single day of our lives in the past six years or so?
Still, as a heinous tool frequently used by politicians and their enablers to abuse our malleable political beliefs, "gaslighting" is more than just damn lies, however.
"Gaslighting", in fact, fills a space between the word "lying," which is typically among individuals, and "fraud," which usually involves organizations.
"Gaslighting" then is the handy word for describing "lies that are part of a larger plan" explains Merriam Webster.
Filipino politics is always about larger plans.
Needless to say, we are all familiar with politicians who lie, break promises, or obfuscate the truth to gain power.
But "gaslighting" is far more aggressive than any politician's lies — often megaphoned by his or her enablers — as it's an elaborate scheme undertaken with the end goal of gaining control over people, for accruing even more power.
"Gaslighting," therefore, in its essence is about allowing another to have power over our emotional vulnerabilities, with the sole intent of convincing all of us that our grasp on political reality is "tenuous at best and that what we think we saw or heard simply didn't happen."
So, "gaslighting," psychologists say, succeeds only when we all allow some people to abuse us when we agree they have more power than we have. They don't.
At any rate, we shouldn't allow anyone the pleasure of heaping emotional and mental abuse on our persons.
Happily, we're doing something. With many, presumably including us Filipinos, now actively scrubbing ourselves clean from "gaslighting" abuse through mundane dictionary searches, it indicates a good many of us want emotional resilience back not only in our personal relations but also in our larger social and political relations.
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Email: nevqjr@yahoo.com.ph
