Gaslihting a Nation
by Tisaranee Gunasekara-Thursday, July 18, 2013
“All the gang of those who rule us,
Hope our quarrels never stop.
Helping them to split and fool us,
So they can remain on top.”
- Brecht (Solidarity Song)
( July 18. 2013, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The practice has been around for millennia, but the term was born in 1944, out of a movie. In ‘Gaslight’1, a man uses a series of manipulative tricks to drive his wife insane. These include surreptitiously increasing and decreasing the gaslights in the house while pretending that the lighting has remained constant. As his wife moves from doubt and perplexity to terror, he cuts her off from friends/allies, so that her dependence on him becomes complete.
‘Gaslighting’ in psychology denotes a form of brainwashing, “the systemic attempt by one person to erode another’s reality”2.
