The Psychology of GaslightingAsk me to explain the details in the molecular physics and mathematics behind the actions of GHGs and I will be at a loss. On the other hand I think I was blessed to have some good teachers about human behavior and psychology. With many opportunities to practice and observe some of the things I was shown at work and in social settings among groups of all kinds of different people. I have also seen those very same things I had learned being played out in the media and especially politics where life can become very stressful indeed.
When people feel under pressure, are being criticized or are stressed there are 4 default communication modes that are typically adopted unconsciously. The most common one is to become a Placater, to be submissive. We all learn this mode from the moment we are born from our parents, our families and in kindergarten especially. The template is laid down in our neural pathways.
The next most common response mode is to become a Blamer back. This has been called by some the Blamer Blamer mode. The best form of defense is to attack. Behind school yard bullying and peer-pressure is this Blamer communication mode. Why? It tends to work a treat. Especially if one can do it successfully without any guilt and with self-righteous indignation. It too becomes a template laid down in an individuals neural pathways when a child or a teen.
Understanding how this can operate on a personal level helps by also understanding that typically when someone is pointing the finger against another for some poor behaviour or harm that has been (perceived) to be done, then 3 others fingers are pointing back upon themselves. Try it - point to the wall and see what your three little fingers are doing. It's a physical representation of a psychological truism. This is what the DNC and the Hillary Clinton Campaign have essentially been doing since 2016.
Part of my observations have involved seeing how individual people function within Institutional settings eg when in schools, colleges, Government departments, businesses, corporations, political movements, bikie groups, religions and churches. While they can adjust the personal behaviours to fit the framework in which they are operating once there is excessive stress involved they all tend to default back to their individual modes of communication.
An Institution that is being criticized, outed or is under attack therefore mimics as a whole entity similarly to what the people inside are feeling like and how they are reacting when stressed.
The analogy is to imagine an unfaithful husband. The wife gets a 6th sense something is not quite right. She tries to ignore the changes she has noticed but eventually, upset, stressed, she confronts her husband with her unproven evidence free suspicions. Knowing she is right and therefore immediately triggered by the stress of being found out the husband switches immediately to Blamer Blamer mode -
"How dare you accuse ME of such a thing!" - "I have had all this extra work to do, I am doing my best, but it's YOU who hasn't been paying me enough attention or supporting me through it." And they're off.
People can only defend themselves based on what they already know. They cannot be instinctively creative when under stress. Unfaithful husbands know what they have been doing and how they have tried to avoid being exposed. Knowing that, they will automatically begin to recall examples in their wife's own behaviour that 'mimics', looks very similar to, the things he has done himself.
In blamer blamer mode the husband can turn the tables and lay out all these examples of how 'suspicious' some of the wife's own 'changes' and odd behaviour have been lately. She knows she has not been unfaithful, and so what she is presented with is a very powerful case of
Plausible Deniability on the part of the husband. Gosh, maybe she was just being paranoid and reading too much into it, she thinks.
The key point here to remember is that the guilty party
knows exactly how things work when one is covering up secrets, nefarious, underhanded or unethical behavior. Even more than this, this is precisely how they generally think. It's their basic Psychology iow.
However usually, the wife will immediately switch to the Placater mode because she feels guilty - she can see well yes, what he says could be true too. Maybe 5 years later she finally come across the hard evidence she was right all along.
All Institutions are made up of people. As such whole Institutions operate in a very similar way. They too point fingers. But all of them find 'placating' an impossibility. Their default position when under stress is always to defend, to attack, to blame the accusers as much as possible. You've seen this happening all your life - from both sides of the fence. Maybe you never thought about it at a human personal level before or ever imagined some core default human communication mode being in play by an Institution.
How do you think the Catholic Church and the thousands of other Institutions who have avoided their complicity and cover-ups of child abuse for so long? Every Institution operates in the same ways. It's in their 'nature' do be like that. Because they have all been 'created' by human beings to a particular standard design for centuries.
So knowing all this and being able to see it play out in the real world up close and at distance one can get a really good hint about what may be going behind the scenes even with a total lack of hard evidence. But when people are unable to even become suspicious about anothers behaviour they have little to no chance of ever thinking about what kind of evidence might even exist or where to go find it.
Placaters simply accept what someone tells them at face value. They do not wish to be seen as accusatory or radical or argumentative. Silence works to decrease one's stress levels and help them turn away from things they do not wish to even contemplate could be true.
So if you really want to gain some insights into the possibility of the guilt or innocence of the DNC and the Clinton Campaign then I suggest the following. To understand what they know, and to understand how they think about things in general, and what their ethical standards may be, go read their Court submission for their Lawsuit against Wikileaks and the Trump campaign. It's an 'open book'.
You see, I posit that it's more likely than not that the DNC et al know exactly what it is like to be thinking about and doing those things they are blaming the others for. They also know how to go about it in practice. They are speaking about things they already intimately know about from their direct first hand experience.
It has been said 'the eyes are a window into the soul.' I say people's words (and the words of Institutions) are a window into their mind and how it thinks.