Gaslighting or the art of living a lie

This year the constant lies, contradictions, confusions and deep skepticism about the validity of truths that we took for granted and were previously unquestionable, were replaced by false narratives and a constant attack on society’s self-esteem. The promotion of insecurities, the concealment of information and the persistent use of falsehoods were the tactics used by the manipulators to push us into the cesspool of mistrust of everyone against everyone and among everyone.

We were and are victims of Gaslighting!

For the American dictionary Merriam Webster, the most searched English word on the Internet was Gaslighting with an increase of more than 1742 percent of searches, compared to the previous year. In fact, it was among the 10 words, constantly, most searched for on the networks.

The word is used by psychologists and psychiatrists to describe the mental weakening of a victim subjected to a systematic campaign of manipulations to vitiate their perception of reality and, therefore, corrupt their decisions. Gaslighting is, then, a psychiatric method to refer to the traps used by those who hold power to make a person or a society doubt their reality and question what they feel, believe and do.

The great exponents of the efficient use of Gaslighting are, without a doubt, Vladimir Putin and his false war against Ukraine, China and his permanent attack on the democracies of the West, Kim Jong-un in North Korea is the epitome of the creation of a narrative false that has kidnapped an entire population for three generations now.

In Latin America, the efficient cartels of lies are the San Pablo Forum and its false narrative of 21st century socialism, thanks to which dictators on duty like the drug-trafficker brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro in Cuba; the corrupt Ortega couple in Nicaragua; the miserable Chávez and Maduro from Venezuela; the nefarious, pedophile and undemocratic Evo Morales and a group of corrupt people like Cristina F. de Kirchner are the most emblematic models of the distortion of narratives, the massification of lies and accusations together with a gigantic capacity to set up scenarios of constant victimization in front of enemies of all tastes and flavors.

The main challenge for these autocrats is to psychologically weaken the victim in order to influence their perceptions, behaviors and decisions. It aims to kidnap it in a narrative that is completely delinquent with reality in order to later subjugate groups, unions or populations. This was what happened in the criminal Soviet regime of Lenin and Stalin and their secret police; in Iran today, and its moral police that decrees who should be publicly hanged. They are politicians who dehumanize their followers, turn them into cannon fodder and see the contrary as an enemy who must be eliminated at all costs.

This is the reality that the people of Santa Cruz must deal every day with the permanent smear campaign of those who hold power temporarily, with the verbiage of outrageous and gorilla-like soldiers, with the masista prejudices towards a thriving, free department that has every right to fight – always respectful of the law -, a new relationship with the centralist, corrupt and degraded State of the MAS.

We are intoxicated from Gaslighting. One another. Post-truth, the large-scale dissemination of lies, acquired unusual strength and aggressiveness. The new information technologies now make it possible to contaminate en masse and spread poisons to trails and mochas. We have fallen into a vortex of mass self-destruction.