Monday, June 9, 2020
Gaslighting is a common technique to cement over any unpleasantries in an institution. For example, if you recognize there are lots of problems, and then try to tell someone who has power, there is a good chance they will say something like, "I don't know what you are talking about, concerning students being unhappy. I don't see any evidence for that. Do you really think that's true?" (And then, later, when it's more socially acceptable to show they support activism in the matter, they say the exact opposite, that it's a pressing problem.) Or, chances are, knowing that I am not in a position to effect change, they will say, "Why don't you take the iniative, then, and try to do something about it?"
"Doing something about it" entails persuading people, and leveraging "connections". In my department, all the power to persuade is locked-up with about 5 key people, and I happen not to be one of them.
Not only do I not have the needed connections, but I also don't have the managerial and executive skills to initiate a program to see the change through to the end. Any time I get assigned a "leadership" role, there's always something I forget to do -- like I will do task A before completing task B, and then later it is discovered that I have to throw out most of the work, and start back and do task B first.
But enough about me... Gaslighting not only hides the dirt of institutions, but also has the effect of making people think they are deluded or insincere or out-of-step with everyone else. The "deluded" and "out-of-step" parts are obvious; an example of the "insincere" part: if one believes there is a problem, then when told that one should be the person to take the initiative (often with a smug sendoff), and one doesn't do it -- and knows one *can't* do it -- it makes one self-evaluate. One asks oneself, "Why do I have these feelings that this is wrong, yet don't and can't do anything about it?... Given that I'm so disconnected from it, and powerless to change it, shouldn't my emotions reflect that somehow? What's wrong with me?"
The way to reduce gaslighting of the sort I described is to make community bonds much stronger. The more people know and understand each other -- as human beings, warts and all, not as producers of serious research -- the harder it becomes for people to say, "I don't know what you are talking about..."