You are welcome. There is an old movie called "Gaslight" that may have been the source of the term. It was a great movie.
REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 1:21 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Re: Don't worry and try very very very hard to be happy! REH wrote: > Today, even billionaires talk like they are poor. It's disgusting. > With them it's a strategy that the police and psycho-therapists use > called "gaslighting." Well! Never heard the term "gaslighting". Wikipedia says it's appeared frequently on several TV shows and: Gaslighting has been used colloquially since at least the late 1970s to describe efforts to manipulate someone's sense of reality.... [Weinshel & Wallerstein] explore a variety of reasons why the victims may have 'a tendency to incorporate and assimilate what others externalize and project onto them', and conclude that gaslighting can be 'a very complex, highly structured configuration which encompasses contributions from many elements of the psychic apparatus'. Guess I don't watch enough TV. But wait! Isn't that just what TV (in highly engineered particular) and mass media in general do? Isn't that what "marketing" as it's practiced to day is all about? "Police and psycho-therapists" may use the technique in a finely targeted manner but the media do it en masse. Individual targeting involves personal observation of the victim. Media replace personal observation with statistical parameters so it's less efficient. But given the bell-curve distribution of psycho-social variables, it's more than efficient enough to distort reality for society. A reasonable surmise is that the fearful/hostile response to the internet of certain powerful elites is that it can't be coerced to implement the gaslighting mechanism, to stay on-message with the synthetic Consumer Reality. Insofar as the net becomes advertising dependent and insofar as that advertising reaches the eyeballs of the public, the net can to some extent be entrained in the gaslighting agenda. (Do you still want to support JoCI with advertising, Mike? ;-) Of course, if the Real Reality(tm) -- access to food, shelter, clothing, medical care -- is disintegrating, that may not matter much any more. Or maybe it matters much more than it did in better times. Thanks for the new word & concept, Ray. - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
