The Gaslighting, It's Getting Worse

You know, it's almost funny when you think about it.

Recently, we found a black widow outside our daughter's bedroom. It rappelled from the attic door into the hallway and started crawling toward our cats. The discovery has taught us a lot, not just about spiders, but also people.

Read this:

Honestly, I get comments and emails like this every day. I'm not kidding. Every day. But this one goes a bit further than most of those.

Until today, the only thing that sounded more unlikely than finding a black widow outside your daughter's bedroom at 4 am was someone writing a comment like this. It seemed almost impossible someone could craft a single statement demonstrating so many different biases and fallacies at once, and then post it under an article that was directly addressing these exact problems.

And to do it with such vicious indifference...

On top of all that, this person has been reading the newsletter for more than two years. So, everything we just talked about, something going deeply wrong with our responses to threats, seems to be panning out. The comment begins with, "Google AI told me this thing is no big deal..." AI has also been telling people to eat rocks, that they live in the matrix, and that they can fly, if they truly believe they can.

For the record, my information comes from an article I found in the NIH's National Library of Medicine, not an AI summary.

Next, the comment moves into classic gaslighting.

"Do you have arachnophobia? I grew up in Texas and we often went camping where the sanitary facilities were outhouses. I took reasonable precautions when using them. I examined the outhouse for spider webs and used a stick to rattle around in the opening to the cess pit. Black widows are very shy creatures. I am not surprised that one came out of your attic. They are reclusive and do not like huge animals barging around in their habitat. Did you kill it? It is pretty easy to squash them with a shod foot, a broom or a stick."

"If one is going where it is known that spiders, snakes and scorpions like to hang out or floods may happen, earthquakes are known to occur one takes reasonable precautions against the dangers. This is the silliest and most pointless essay I have ever read from you and I follow your work and like almost everything you say, but this is weird and smacks of fear mongering to me."

I'm sharing this because it's a case study in how someone can be exposed to abundant information about our collective biases, spend years watching all this play out in several arenas of society, and still respond like this.

In other words, they can learn nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

This comment resonates because it's more than just some random troll on the web. It embodies everything we're fighting against. It's also typical of our friends, our family, our coworkers, our neighbors, our bosses, our leaders.

If they're not talking like this to our faces, they're often thinking it. They're often talking like this about us, behind our back.

It's really something...

It represents the most dangerous kind of gaslighting, because it comes from the kind of person who, apparently, did agree with you and your worldview at one point. What happened to them? What made them suddenly turn on you, attack you with such ferocity? What made them forget that, no, you shouldn't just rely on AI summaries for life and death issues? What made them think their lack of encounters with a threat gave them more insight and experience than someone who was actually dealing with the threat?

So, I'm digging into it.

Not every gaslighter directly accuses you of mental illness. Some pretend to be your friend. In that vein, psychologists have named three different kinds of gaslighting. Glamour gaslighters control someone through pandering and flattery. Good-guy gaslighters control someone through the illusion of comfort and protection, although they're providing neither. Intimidator gaslighters control someone through direct bullying, often through harsh criticisms and insults.

These different kinds of gaslighting share the same goal, to warp your perceptions of reality and make you question your own judgment.

They want you to rely on them for everything.

It probably doesn't surprise too many of us that gaslighting behaviors and personality traits overlap heavily with those of psychopaths. Gaslighters tend to be angry, manipulative, impulsive, and irresponsible in general.

It's not a stretch to assume that gaslighters also demonstrate a high degree of reactance, the psychological tendency to dismiss threats while exaggerating a perceived loss of freedom. Reactance explains why so many Americans express more anger and anxiety toward basic precautions than they do toward the threat itself. They're afraid of losing control. They regain that sense of control by refusing the precautions and belittling anyone who takes them. It's why so many narcissists and psychopaths respond to any kind of proactive solution to a problem by yelling about tyranny.

We've seen this movie, and its sequels.

Gaslighters also tend to suffer from normalcy and optimism bias, which convinces them to underestimate their personal risks compared to the general population. As one article in Current Biology explains, "when it comes to predicting what will happen to us tomorrow, next week, or fifty years from now, we overestimate the likelihood of positive events, and underestimate the likelihood of negative events."

People routinely underestimate their chances of everything from getting a divorce to winding up in a car accident. In fact, optimism bias "is one of the most consistent, prevalent, and robust biases documented in psychology and behavioral economics." In other words, it's the worst thing about humans.

It's our most consistent weakness.

It's interesting how far psychologists go trying to frame optimism bias as an "adaptive trait" and threat sensitivity as a "maladaptive trait." Even if that were true, the world is changing. The people who underestimate the likelihood of negative events happening to them are the ones who end up dead from preventable causes.

I've learned a lot about black widows this week. Here's the thing. A black widow born in your attic doesn't know it's in a house. It doesn't know the difference between a bed with blankets and a woodpile. They're likely to find your closet, your shoes, your cat's litterbox, your child's basket of stuffed animals, or a toy bin an appealing place to hide out, and you don't want that.

One of my readers found a black widow in a bag of grapes. Even Google AI agrees with me that black widows can hide there.

So, there you go.

If a black widow would settle for a bag of grapes as their home, then they'll settle for anything. They'll lay eggs anywhere, including your old worn attic insulation. Fortunately, standing our ground is working. We've found a more responsible pest control company that knows a lot more about what to do. Friends and family are supporting our decision to treat, and we might have to replace some of the insulation. Yes, there's worse things that can happen, but that's not really the point.

So, not everybody is crazy.

This essay isn't about black widows. It's about what happens now when you find something deadly in your life and try to do anything about it.

Our black widow ordeal provides a nice metaphor for the times we live in. For instance, consider the threat of fascism, which the gaslighter cares about so much more. The two situations have a lot in common.

The time to deal with the fascists was ten years ago, when the first one rappelled down from our attic into the hallway. Many of us tried to do something. Instead, tens of millions of Americans scolded us. They called us fearmongers.

For ten years, the fascists laid eggs everywhere. Millions of Americans preferred to do nothing. They spent more time attacking liberals and progressives while complaining about snowflakes and cancel culture.

Now, those eggs have hatched. The fascists are everywhere. They're infesting every corner of the house. They're biting our pets. They're biting our kids. Now millions of Americans want to call pest control. They want to act like there's still a chance of containing the situation, and they still won't do what's necessary.

There's one big difference between black widows and fascists. Black widows want to be left alone. They want to leave you alone. It's just unfortunate that you can't explain to a black widow where it belongs before it bites you. Fascists don't want to leave you alone. They'll never leave you alone, and you can't talk to them either.

So, that was the point of my last essay. Whether it's fascists, climate collapse, a deadly disease, or just a deadly spider, we're always better off dealing with the threat before it becomes an undeniable crisis. And yet, one of humanity's defining features is that we routinely refuse to do exactly that.

So, what happens when you spot a threat in your life?

Apparently, people gaslight you.

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