“If you want to change the world, the objective chance that you will prevail is probably bleak,” write the political scientists Eric Beerbohm and Ryan W. Davis of citizen mobilization efforts. “So it is unsurprising that citizens collectively engaged in efforts to put a dent in the world have to adopt and maintain beliefs that—in some ways—extend beyond the evidence available to them.”
Beerbohm and Davis describe such beliefs as “audacious.” In this sense, to “play an important role in successful democratic efforts,” citizens must be able to maintain a distance between their beliefs (and hopes) and the bleak evidence before them. They must have personal confidence that they can achieve their goals and be a part of a collective confidence, even overconfidence, that their tasks can be done against seemingly impossible circumstances.
When, for instance, Jo Ann Robinson mimeographed 52,000 leaflets for what was planned as a one-day bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 5, 1955, to protest Rosa Parks’s arrest, she was working in the face of tremendous odds in an armed apartheid state.
“It was far from clear that the boycott could succeed as a one-off protest,” write Beerbohm and Davis. The boycott ended up lasting 381 days and involved tremendous logistical organization to transport thousands to their jobs in hundreds of cars.
But, the authors warn, a great “distance between beliefs and evidence is also symptomatic of victims of gaslighting, whose perceptions and attitudes are at odds with reality.” The tyrant is audacious, too. It thus becomes essential that “citizens protect themselves from the gaslighter without rendering themselves insusceptible to the mobilizing efforts central to democratic politics.”
The term “gaslighting” stems from the 1938 play Gaslight by Patrick Hamilton, subsequently turned into British (1940) and then American (1944) movies. In the story, a Victorian husband attempts to drive his heiress wife insane by subtly rearranging reality, most notably by dimming their house’s gas lighting. When she sees the lights dim, he works to convince her that she is imagining it. “Gaslighting” emerged in the 2010s with such force that it became a buzzword for the manipulation of someone’s reality.
Beyond the personal/therapeutic use of the word, Beerbohm and Davis explore gaslighting as a political phenomenon. It’s a “higher-order attack, threatening its victims’ identities” because it is intended to make people “doubt their own attitudes or capacities.” Political gaslighting works to make people “doubt the sources of their evidence.”
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Beerbohm and Davis narrow down the definition of political gaslighting. It occurs when “[a] political actor wrongly induces a group of citizens to limit the exercise of their belief-forming and revising capacities in ways that serve the political ends of the gaslighter, in order to bring about that the group becomes epistemically reliant on the gaslighter.”
Historically, we’ve seen the one man/one truth formula in dictators such as Stalin, but more recent history shows democracies are hardly immune. The hazards of enough people not thinking for themselves, not viewing evidence/facts/reality rationally, accepting “post-truth,” and parroting whatever their leader says, however contradictory, are all real threats to democracy.
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“Gaslighting and mobilizing both target how citizens handle evidence about their political world,” Beerbohm and Davis write. The difference is that one is oriented towards authoritarianism and reaction, the other towards greater participation and progress.
With citizens having to “hold beliefs, or evidential policies, that protect them from a sense of futility and hopelessness,” the authors conclude that the “standing challenge” for effective mobilizers is “to remain open to the bully pulpit” while being vigilant against the tyrant’s gaslighting.
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