Gaslighting, strategic lying, and fabulism: A taxonomy of deception
[plus a word about bullshit]
One of the last conversations I had with my father before he died in 2021 was about the concept of gaslighting—what it is and what it isn’t, and in particular how it differs from other forms of lying and deception. A gaslighter, I explained, engages in psychological manipulation undercutting the victim’s confidence in their own judgment and making them dependent on the gaslighter to interpret reality for them.
I remember the particulars about this exchange largely because our youngest, M, then eight years old, revealed how closely he was listening when he burst into the room saying, “Papa, you know who does that? Shift with Puzzle.” And, after a moment’s reflection, I exclaimed, “That’s true, M! Shift is a gaslighter!” The reference to Shift the ape and Puzzle the donkey in The Last Battle, the seventh and final volume of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, was both apt and helpful, being as familiar to my father as to me and all my children.
I was proud enough of M’s insight to throw it up on social media, leading to further discussion regarding which other villainous characters of the Narnia stories are or aren’t gaslighters. (The Silver Chair’s Lady with the Green Kirtle: gaslighter on magical steroids—almost with real gas, or at least magical smoke. Uncle Andrew: not so much; he tells lies and believes lies, but that doesn’t make him a gaslighter. Nor are the White Witch and Rabadash gaslighters. Uncle Miraz in Prince Caspian is complicit in a shared denial of reality that is at least gaslighting-adjacent. As for Puzzle, he isn’t just gaslighted1 himself; he becomes involved in Shift’s scheme to gaslight the rest of Narnia with a distorted moral universe justifying atrocities in the name of Aslan, the divine Lion.) I hadn’t realized the proximity of that discussion to my father’s death until I looked for the post on Facebook.
Unfortunately the term “gaslighting”—although an important term for a specific phenomenon, and one with no adequate synonym—has become watered down through overuse, particularly on social media. Accusations of “gaslighting” on social media often amount to no more than accusing the other person of denying or questioning something the accuser considers important or obvious. At the same time, correlating with its overuse and watering down, the term itself has become a point of contention. At the very mention of gaslighting, some people immediately shut down: “Anyone who talks about ‘gaslighting’ is obviously an ideologue and can be disregarded.”
Both the overuse and the reactionary rejection of the term would tend to make me prefer to use another word if there were a good synonym, but there isn’t. It really does pick out a specific phenomenon for which there is no other word, so I think it’s worth fighting for the term against both overuse and defensive resistance. Dictionary entries, descriptively following usage, may include watered-down definitions like “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage,” but longer treatments typically do some kind of justice to the more robust concept.
It’s important to recognize, to begin with, that gaslighting in the most useful sense of the word is not just gross or egregious lying, nor is it merely proposing a false picture of reality or contradicting someone else’s accurate understanding of reality. It is a mistake to think that all offenses against the Eighth Commandment (as reckoned by Catholics2) are essentially the same sort of thing. Lies differ enormously, not only in matters of degree—in gravity, art, and consequence—but also in kind: in motivation, in psychological genesis, in function.
There are many ways of classifying falsehoods: lies of omission or comission; self-oriented vs. other-oriented lies; “beneficial” or “protective” lies; etc. There are also different types of liars: natural liars, pathological liars, compulsive liars. Two categories I’ve found helpful are what I call strategic lies and fabulistic lies.
Strategic lies are either a) denials of materially damaging or inconvenient truths or b) affirmations of materially attractive or convenient falsehoods. People tell strategic lies when the truth won’t do, or at least when it isn’t good enough—when they are compromised and want to cover a specific truth, or when the potential reward for a specific falsehood is great enough.3
Fabulistic lies are different. Here the goal is not specifically strategic, but a storytelling gloss, often of one’s own past, burnishing one’s character or accomplishments. A fabulist makes stuff up—exactly what doesn’t necessarily matter—because it sounds good; because it’s entertaining; because they enjoy feeling important and impressing people with dramatic experiences they never had; because they enjoy the sound of their own voice and holding people’s rapt attention in the palm of their hands.4 (Fabulism in this sense is similar to, but distinct from, bullshitting, which I take to be5 a discursive method aimed at persuading hearers without regard to truth. Compared to fabulism, which is more concerned with creating an effect than persuading, bullshitting tends to be more tactical and goal-oriented and is not necessarily narrative in form. In a word, the fabulist wants to captivate; the bullshitter wants to win.)
Gaslighting is something altogether different from any of the above. There can be overlaps, but none of these terms implies any of the others. Gaslighting is connected, of course, to the 1944 thriller Gaslight starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer (a remake of the 1940 British film adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage play Gas Light). In this story, a woman marries a charming scoundrel who manipulates her into doubting her own sanity. Wikipedia defines “gaslighting” as “manipulating someone into questioning their own perception of reality.” More expansively, from a previous iteration of the Wikipedia entry:
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes, including low self-esteem, thereby rendering the victim additionally dependent on the gaslighter for emotional support and validation.
That’s a good definition of the most useful sense of the term, particularly in interpersonal relationships. Expanding on this definition, gaslighting can be described as a kind of psychological warfare intended to disrupt the target’s independent, critical access to reality, making the target psychologically and emotionally dependent upon the gaslighter for their construction of reality.
Gaslighting need not be limited, I think, to the extreme scenario of seeking to brainwash the target into literally doubting their sanity. Systematically persuading someone to distrust their own memory, perception, or judgment as well as that of their friends, to consider the gaslighter the only reliable source of truth, is enough to qualify. Applied on a wider social level to influential individuals or outlets with sufficiently prominent platforms, it may entail inducing people to doubt or disbelieve any critical sources or any constructions of reality at odds with the gaslighter’s own.
A gaslighter in a personal relationship works to cut off the target from family and friends, either discrediting them so that they can’t be trusted or even literally severing ties with anyone who might offer a reality check for their victim. A platform gaslighter works to undermine the authority or credibility of anyone and everyone who could offer a contrasting narrative or a critical perspective (e.g., experts, news media). In either case, the goal is to establish the gaslighter as the indispensible arbiter of truth.
I suspect many gaslighters are psychopaths or narcissists who use language in purely transactional ways, to negotiate their own preferred outcomes. They don’t think about what is true or false, but what they can say that will get them what they want. They may also be pathological liars, preferring lies to truth and bent on creating an entire alternate reality of their own that they control and try to impose on others.6
A particularly aggressive form of gaslighting has become popular in political propaganda. Gary Kasparov described it this way: “The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” When this strategy becomes widespread, then you have the crisis described by Hannah Arendt:
If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer … And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
For more on the term and its dramatic and cinematic origins, see my friend
’s short explainer (written for Vox back in 2017).As opposed to “gaslit,” which
wisely proposes is more indicative of “the illumination of Victorian parlors, streets, and stage performers” than “what Charles Boyer does to Ingrid Bergman in the 1944 MGM film Gaslight.” I agree, although I’m not altogether happy about it. The sad truth is that “gaslighting,” like “troubleshooting” (which I used a lot more in my 20-plus years in IT than I do now as a teacher) is a verb that sounds best to my ear as a gerund, and that I can deal with in the present tense, etc., but that makes me uneasy in the past tense. Both “troubleshooted” and “troubleshot” sound wrong to my ear (I know “troubleshot” is not wrong, but I can’t help how it sounds to me), and while neither “gaslit” nor “gaslighted” sounds quite wrong, neither sounds entirely right either. As often as possible, therefore, my expedient is to rewrite sentences using these verbs to avoid the past tense, like a coward.The commandment against bearing false witness is reckoned ninth, not eighth, in most Protestant traditions, as well as in Jewish and Eastern Orthodox reckoning.
Publicly available examples are not hard to come by. It is widely recognized that all politicians lie—but political lies are not all equal. Strategic lies—“I am not a crook”; “I did not have sex with that woman”; “no quid pro quo”; etc.—are perhaps most common, or at least most prominent.
For political examples of fabulistic invention, see, e.g., Ronald Reagan’s repeated claims of witnessing the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, Hillary Clinton’s vivid account of ducking sniper fire in Bosnia, and Joe Biden’s many tall tales about his illustrious Civil Rights history and other past activities.
In keeping with the account set forth by Harry Frankfurt’s famous little book On Bullshit, though Frankfurt is more concerned with what bullshit isn’t (i.e., how it is distinct from lying) than with what, precisely, it is.
If these remarks leave you thinking of any particular presidential candidates, draw your own conclusions.
This is a good, clear exposition of why gaslighting is not the same as other forms of deceit. All forms of deceit involve a violation of the demands of intersubjectivity: we are dependent on one another for the common world that we inhabit, and when people deceive they always falsify some small part of another person's world, undermining their reality to shift the landscape in their own favour. (I don't generally count so-called "white lies" as deceit, because they shift another person's world in that person's favour.) But gaslighting is a much more extreme usurpation that deprives the victim both of their own sense of reality and also of the ability to form a common lifeworld with people other than the gaslighter.
Your observation that this is currently happening on a social level is helpful. You have a lot of people now who live in a world in a world of "alternate facts" who have been taught to exercise a pathological distrust, and even hatred, towards any other sources of truth. It really disrupts our ability to work together, to form consensus or engage in compromise, because gaslighters train their victims to believe that their safety and sanity depends on fully interiorizing the gaslighter's interests and the gaslighter's lies. So as soon as you try to build a common space where different viewpoints can come together and compromise, the victims feel like their whole world is under attack.
Good stuff! I certainly never thought through all these subtle differences in forms of deceit. Especially gaslighting. I couldn’t have offered a good definition.
Where you refer to the psychopath, which is a relatively rare disorder, I think the next term down should be sociopath, which, sadly, is far less rare, and neither need be a narcissist, although perhaps most are. Also, I think there are hoards of narcissists who don’t have either of those deeper disorders.