Gaslighting, Narcissism, and Authoritarianism

The weekend's news was dominated by Trump's executive order restricting immigration, which manages to be cruel and incompetent at the same time. But this striking actualization of a campaign trope comes after a week in which lying was the most notable behavior by Trump and members of his administration. Confronted with lies so blatantly false and easily disproved, some reporters created a slack channel to exchange tips for submitting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests regarding the Trump administration. While some observers sought to explain Trump's lying as learned behavior that had benefited him in his career as a businessman, others saw a more pernicious phenomenon.

In the 1944 movie Gaslight (based on the 1938 play Gas Light), Paula Alquist (Ingrid Bergman) comes to believe she is losing her mind as her husband, Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), manipulates her environment while denying that anything is amiss. One of Gregory's techniques of psychological abuse — causing the gas lights to dim — gave its name to an abusive pattern of behavior in which the abuser causes the victim to question their sense of reality.

Gaslighting "is a common technique of abusers, dictators, narcissists, and cult leaders," says Psychology Today, listing the following techniques:

1. Telling blatant lies. By asserting what the victim knows to be an outright lie the abuser is setting up a precedent to begin to untether the victim from their sense of reality.
2. Denying having made statements even though the victim has proof, with the goal that the victim begins to question their own reality and adopt that of the abuser.
3. Attacking something important to the victim's identity.
4. Employing their tactics gradually over time.
5. Saying and doing very different things.
6. Intermittently using positive reinforcement, although usually what the victim is being praised for benefits the abuser.
7. Creating confusion so the victim will question everything, leading him/her to increasing rely on the abuser.
8. Repeatedly accusing the victim of behavior that the abuser actually does.
9. Aligning people against the victim.
10. Asserting that the victim is crazy.
11. Asserting that everyone else is a liar.

Gaslighting is a tactic associated with narcissistic personality disorder (though not exclusively). The "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition," (DSM-5) criteria for narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) includes the following features:

• Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance
• Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
• Exaggerating achievements and talents
• Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate
• Believing that you are superior and can only be understood by or associate with equally special people
• Requiring constant admiration
• Having a sense of entitlement
• Expecting special favors and unquestioning compliance with your expectations
• Taking advantage of others to get what you want
• Having an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
• Being envious of others and believing others envy you
• Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner

The Mayo Clinic notes that some of the features of NPD may seem like confidence, but that in the person with NPD they cross over into "thinking so highly of yourself that you put yourself on a pedestal and value yourself more than you value others." 

Writing in The Atlantic in June 2016, Dan P. McAdams, chair of the Northwestern University Department of Psychology, observed that "For psychologists it is almost impossible to talk about Donald Trump without using the word narcissism." (An earlier article in Vanity Fair found Trump a textbook example of narcissistic personality disorder.) While historically narcissism in presidents has some positive associations, it has also been associated with "unethical behavior and congressional impeachment resolutions." "... [M]ore often than not," McAdams wrote, "narcissists wear out their welcome."

Over time, people become annoyed, if not infuriated, by their self-centeredness. When narcissists begin to disappoint those whom they once dazzled, their descent can be especially precipitous. There is still truth today in the ancient proverb: Pride goeth before the fall.

"Narcissists are like self-esteem black holes," wrote  forensic psychologist and attorney Dr. Tracey McCarthy, "and they require a constant human supply of self-esteem bolstering to feel a modicum of normalcy." The goal of gaslighting as employed by a narcissist, according to McCarthy, is to make the victim question their own sanity so that the abuser can gain cognitive and emotional control over them. Gaslighting is an extension of the narcissist's "ability to lie in ways that many cannot fathom." "Lies are used to undermine, to create conflict, to evade questions and accountability, and to damage relationships between people," she wrote. Narcissists "are very skilled at preventative lying to preclude being found out or to protect a planned future lie." If caught in a lie the narcissist "... may become enraged, blaming, or simply lie again, with a straight face." The narcissist "must win, at all costs."

Lauren Duca, weekend editor at the unlikely bastion of political resistance, Teen Vogue magazine, offered an early diagnosis of Trump's behavior as gaslighting. Duca highlighted Trump's perfunctory dismissal of the CIA's determination that Russia intervened in the 2016 election, and his transition team's assertion that he won "... one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history." "At the hands of Trump," Duca wrote,  "facts have become interchangeable with opinions, blinding us into arguing amongst ourselves, as our very reality is called into question."

Writing on the website of the libertarian Niskanen Center, McGill University political science professor Jacob T. Levy examined "Trump's barely comprehensible volume of untruths." Levy found that some of Trump's untruths only rose to the level of "bullshit," identifiable according to Princeton emeritus professor of philosophy Harry Frankfurt by the "bullshitter's" indifference to the truth.  The "bullshitter," wrote Frankfurt, "... does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose." Trump's assertion that Ghazala Khan had not spoken during her husband Khizr's address to the Democractic National Convention fell into this category, according to Levy. Trump "didn't have any idea, and didn't care" whether that was true.

But, Levy concluded, the same assertion about the electoral college that caught Duca's attention fell into a different category, along with Trump's claim that he would have won the popular vote "... if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally." This, Levy suggested, is not bullshit. Nor is it gaslighting "It’s too big, too obvious, and too free of any evidence," Levy wrote. People who already believe anything Trump says might believe it, "... but the people disinclined to believe him won’t believe this for a second. It doesn’t throw his opponents off-balance, or make them doubt themselves."

In order to understand lying on this scale, Levy wrote, one must look to scholars of totalitarianism. Citing Orwell, Havel, and Hannah Arendt, Levy concluded "[A] leader with authoritarian tendencies will lie in order to make others repeat his lie both as a way to demonstrate and strengthen his power over them." Forcing subordinates to repeat lies with a straight face, as, for example, when Trump forced press secretary Sean Spicer to assert that the inauguration was viewed by "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration —  period" is a display of power. It also morally compromises the subordinates and makes them complicit in the leader's actions.

In "The Origins of Totalitarianism," political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote:

From the viewpoint of an organization which functions according to the principle that whoever is not included is excluded, whoever is not with me is against me, the world at large loses all the nuances, differentiations, and pluralistic aspects which had in any event become confusing and unbearable to the masses who had lost their place and their orientation in it.... The claim inherent in totalitarian organization is that everything outside the movement is "dying," a claim which is drastically realized under the murderous conditions of totalitarian rule, but which even in the prepower stage appears plausible to the masses who escape from disintegration and disorientation into the fictitious home of the movement....

 

The chief value, however, of the secret or conspiratory societies' organizational structure and moral standards for purposes of mass organization docs not even lie in the inherent guarantees of unconditional belonging and loyalty, and organizational manifestation of unquestioned hostility to the outside world, but in their unsurpassed capacity to establish and safeguard the fictitious world through consistent lying. The whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naive fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member, depending upon his rank and standing in the movement, is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.

A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

As Yale philosopher and student of propaganda, Jason Stanley wrote recently in the New York Times, "Donald Trump is trying to define a simple reality as a means to express his power."  In Stanley's analysis Trump knows that reality is inconsistent with his raging pronouncements about crime in inner cities, but his goal is "to define a simple reality that legitimates his value system..." — in this case one where nonwhites and non-Christians are the main threats to law and order — "... leading voters to adopt it. Its strength is that it conveys his power to define reality. Its weakness is that it obviously contradicts it."

Writing in response to the January 21 women's march, Virginia Commonwealth University sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom suggested that it is not uncommon to find oppressed people afflicted with this kind of institutionalized gaslighting. Racism, she suggests, is a manifestation of this phenomenon. She points to the history of black activism in suggesting ways to combat it: challenging every fiction, making strategic alliances, building affirmative identities.

The Center for American Progress's Neera Tanden echoed McMillan-Cottom's call to resist in her recent essay "The Method to the Madness." Popular protest, she wrote, is an important weapon against Trump because it shows his weakness "even to his base, because they see the strength of the opposition with their own eyes." Trump will feed lies to his supporters for as long as he can, she wrote, because of the importance to them of his image of winning. "And if he loses control of that image, the whole thing could crumble."

So we cannot just call him a cry baby or dismiss these lies as a crazy conspiracy. We have to show it.... We have to keep the marches and protests going to show that the majority is not with him. His support is a minority, and it may always be.

 

We have to keep showing up, because that’s our most powerful weapon. Trump can dismiss polls, but he can’t ignore people. He can yell at the media, but he can’t erase the photos and videos of millions of Americans taking to the streets to fight back.

From this moment forward, resistance must be routine.