"Reject the evidence of your eyes and ears"

'Gaslighting' is Merriam-Webster's 2022 word of the year - and what this reveals about the state of the information society.

Photo by Alex Wolowiecki on Unsplash

Merriam-Webster announced ‘gaslighting’ is its 2022 word of the year. Gaslighting earned the honor with a 1740% increase in dictionary lookups and sustained popularity throughout the year, remaining in the top 50 searched words for 2022.

The dictionary formally defines gaslighting as

psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time 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

or more simply,

the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage.

The colloquialism was inspired by a 1938 play in which an abusive husband manipulates his wife into believing that evidence of his deceptive behavior is all in her head. And while gaslighting often refers to an interpersonal phenomenon, it takes on a whole new timbre when the gaslighter is the establishment.

‘Gaslighting’ and the state of the information society

I find it unlikely that enough of the Merriam-Webster-searching public suddenly found itself in a psychologically abusive interpersonal relationship to account for the term’s dramatic surge in popularity over the past year. I’m much more convinced that people are using ‘gaslighting’ to characterize their experience with legacy media, government agencies, and other information institutions in recent time.

Examples of establishment gaslighting abound. Whether one considers the Hunter Biden laptop, January 6th, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, gender ideology, race hoaxes, any number of official lines regarding the pandemic, or the general likelihood of government collusion with ad tech companies to censor participatory media, people of all political persuasions are increasingly awakening to the realization that neither government nor media deserve their trust.

The state of the information society in 2022 is one in which the establishment believes it noble to lie, and the public finds it necessary to doubt.

“The heresy of heresies was common sense.”

At what point does establishment gaslighting constitute information warfare?

RAND defines information warfare to include “dissemination of propaganda in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an opponent,” and psychological warfare as “the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”

Could such techniques be used against a domestic civilian population? Might we find ourselves in a civil information war?

It’s easy to point fingers at adversaries and opine about their propaganda campaigns. I find it amazing that we can even see that speck in their eye beyond the plank in our own.

Evidence can be difficult to discern in the fog of information war, but let’s use the pandemic as an individual case in point. Consider that the US government spent more than a billion dollars on a pro-vaccine public relations campaign that specifically targeted individuals based on attributes like their political affiliation, religious belief, and race. Federal, state, and local governments worked with “an army of influencers” to spread pro-vaccination messages to young audiences, paying some as much as $1,000/month for their social media content. Researchers at Yale studied a range of rhetorical techniques to persuade the vaccine-selective to accept the mRNA injection, including guilt, embarrassment, and anger. Public health officials were a frequent, knowing source of pandemic misinformation, while relying on the media to amplify and legitimize their messaging. It’s worth noting that much of this activity was concurrent with the censorship of alternate expert views and the decision in other Western nations to limit vaccine distribution to young people based on risk-benefit considerations, an approach that has since become policy.

Following a particularly damning inventory of COVID claims that were flagged or censored as misinformation and later demonstrated to be true, controversial retired neurosurgeon-turned-medical curmudgeon Russell L. Blaylock observes

Throughout this “pandemic” we have been fed an unending series of lies, distortions and disinformation by the media, the public health officials, medical bureaucracies (CDC, FDA and WHO) and medical associations. Physicians, scientists, and experts in infectious treatments who formed associations designed to develop more effective and safer treatments, were regularly demonized, harassed, shamed, humiliated, and experience a loss of licensure, loss of hospital privileges and, in at least one case, ordered to have a psychiatric examination.

But an information war requires more than propaganda, more than mere state-sponsored public relations campaigns, more than controlled media assets and unwitting agents, more, even, than censorship, scapegoats, and sacrificial lambs.

An information war requires an opponent.

Could the public be the ‘opposition group’ on the other side of an information war?

To the extent that we resist the emergence of a bio-security state, we just might be.

“Reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” and “The heresy of heresies was common sense” are quotations from George Orwell’s 1984.

Sarah Hartman-Caverly is a co-moderator of HxLibraries and a reference and instruction librarian at Penn State Berks. She previously wrote about COVID and information warfare for Root Quarterly; her article was reprinted in full by Kosmos Journal. She also wrote about the ethics of campus COVID mandates for heterodox: the blog, and about information warfare for ACRL’s Libraries Promoting Reflective Dialogue in a Time of Political Polarization.

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