By Thorsten J. Pattberg for the Saker Blog
This is Part 3 of a series: “This concise text will introduce to our distinguished readers the most deadly ways to subvert, to demoralize, to lobotomize and finally to liquidize someone‘s brains… until they are reduced to nothing more than another helpless Schizo Fran or Mona Loser ready for suicide or the local madhouse. “
The most ruthless emotional abuse of all is gaslighting. It is extremely common, but rarely brought to such sadistic perfection as in certain toxic personalities – relatives or spouses or celebrities – which we typically and colloquially render psychopaths – that is: predators who are without empathy or concern for the well-being of others. Those rare monsters attack and attack the mind of their isolated victims and drive them insane by a single-minded, ridiculously easy yet most effective trick: “You must be hallucinating your pain!”
In colloquial language we use the term gaslighting too lightly for about any incidence of white lie or having somebody on, when in psychology gaslighting is not your average natural excuse or defense mechanism, but really an inborn genetic predisposition of a criminal mind toward subduing his fair game. Receivers, unfortunate victims that is, of relentless gaslighting will require medical treatment eventually, as they suffer from depression and reality-loss and sleeplessness.
The gaslighter is doing something to the victim with the intention to break her trust and say he hasn‘t done it. And herein lies the unspeakable horror: The insane are really just sane persons who were driven to the psychiatric ward by a truly insane abuser. So, having acquired those all-important sleep aids and hypnotics and enzodiazepine drugs through their doctor of confidentiality, the poor victim crawls back home and into the den of their remorseless abuser, waiting to receive some more humiliation.
The psychopath did not acquire his gaslighting skills through an how-to-do book-club reading any more than a natural player acquired his gift to pick up insecure women through a book on pick-up artistry. He is a natural and gaslights effortlessly. He does or he says the most unimaginable cruel things and denies flat-out and on-the-spot, even if caught lying on camera, that he never did so or said so, and that “you must be imagining things” and that “you are crazy!” Seeing the impact of his abuse, the terror in the eyes of his victim, gives him a sensational, almost erotic satisfaction. So he will do it again and again.
A natural-born slut, herself having been abused by her sex-working single mommy from Wan Chai in Hong Kong and countless sugar daddies in the British colony, had over 1000 sex partners in her golden years, and is now – 10 years later in Ford Lauderdale, Florida USA – suspected by her clueless American boyfriend of carrying the smell of another man’s semen.
She did it because she is strong, fearless and independent. When her boyfriend was away, she hooked up with one of her many Tinder dates (a popular dating app). She didn’t clean up, went back home, and wanted to continue having sex with her boyfriend upon his return home later that evening. He clearly smells and tastes another man’s odor and junk.
She dismisses him as being paranoid and crazy. She even shouts at him, he is probably cheating on her! The drama doesn’t end here, of course. Since he got together with her after using an online dating app called Tinder, he now caught a genital yeast infection. Like with herpes, there is no cure. He dares to bring up his itching and ailment to her, which she now puts on him: “Who knows where you got that from, it wasn‘t me!“ all the while scratching her purse.
When he asked her politely about her past in the British colony, she put it on him and called him a dirty accuser and a racist fag. To her surprise, he takes it. He takes it all. Wonderful. She is gaslighting him, and he is terrified and overwhelmed. Nobody ever did this to him. What a strong, fearless and independent woman she is! And because this ‘surreality’ is fascinating, he stays. This is nature’s way of saying a master and his servant have found each other. They are complementary.
Although psychopaths make barely 5% of the population, they are never complete without 5% of the population totally ruined by their manipulative ways, and the rest 90% who can’t take their eyes off them. Gaslighting works, and works all the time. There is no prevention, no vaccination, no cure. For example, in the age of the Internet, we see hundreds of depraved psychopaths setting up video channels and basically calling everyone stupid. EVERYONE! From scientists to politicians to their parents and their old friends. They are all stupid!
Now watch what is happening in real life. People are emotionally affected. Vulnerable, easily impressionable people are getting hooked. He must be very smart because he calls everyone stupid. How can anybody be so bold and honest! Wow. I have to watch more of him.
Ironically, healthy people – whether by nasty computer algorithms or by their own curiosity-that-kills-the-cat – click on those psychopathic videos, thinking that they are immune. “Hey, I cannot be affected. Not me. I went to university!” How wrong they are. Nobody is resistant to gaslighting. If an intelligent person is called an imbecile, he will eventually give in to negative thoughts and self-doubt. If a good person is called evil, he will reflect on past regrets and failures. If a sane person is called insane, she will immediately feel a rush of hormones and chemical reactions in her brain. That’s because in all those cases, their minds are under attack. They are in danger.
If you are being humiliated by gaslighters, if you have a healthy sense of inquiry and want to know why Oh-Lord-please-help-me that person said that to you, cold-blooded and without remorse, you naturally feel a strong desire to stay around and design a plan on how to get even. You think: For justice’s sake, this asshole must never get away with it. But of course, now you are insane. And as to the question of why he or she did this to you… well, they said it a thousand times: “You were imagining things!”
Many, many relationships crash because of permanent gaslighting. Take Aaron, a college drop-out who nevertheless turned into a hard-working, honest car mechanic and now small business owner and, because of his exuding trustworthiness, attracts a trophy wife who refuses to work. Aaron is constantly told he is lazy and useless, but he makes nothing of it at first, because obviously this can‘t be true – right?
Over the next months that quickly turn into years, once stable and self-confident Aaron, who unfortunately keeps his emotional life to himself, is viciously targeted and sees his reality – past and present and future – crumble before the beak of this unholy lying harpy.
Why can‘t she flush the toilet? “It wasn’t me!” But it is only you and me here. “You are stupid, it wasn’t me!”
Why is she always checking his phone? “I didn’t do it, you left it open on the table, stupid!”
She watches television or her mobile screen for 16 hours a day for years, yet in front of friends and family she lies she is a busybody and works for important clients. How can she lie so blatantly, while she is just standing right beside him? “I didn’t say anything, you are crazy, you want to ruin my life!”
Gaslighters kick their spouses like our Aaron here in their sleep, smash the doors at night, mess with his food, steal money, even cuckold him with another man’s child… and will not only deny all of it but urge the poor bastard to seek medical treatment or, in the cruelest possible way to finish him off, report him as the abuser to the authorities.
Sooner or later, the patient’s reality collapses. He might resist one year or even ten years, for the sake of his young children perhaps, or with a plan to man-up and retaliate by making the gaslighter’s life a living hell. But after all those years, the mind is broken and the brain is addicted to drugs. The victim has lost his job, his self-respect. He falls ill, suffers strokes, heart attacks, memory loss and severe panic attacks when she is around. He stops speaking, because his words will be turned around and used against him. He believes now he deserved to be treated like this, because ‘reality’ is what the strong impose on the weak. Like she always said: “It is your fault, you made me treat you like this!”
The government and the military, the secret services and many of those classified, state-funded psychological warfare institutes have studied gaslighting and its effect on the human psyche. It is well understood in individuals and can be applied on a massive scale to millions of victims.
A text-book example of geopolitical gaslighting were Hitler Germany’s endless accusations that Poland was crazy and Germany would never start a war and invade Poland, despite the war-preparation going on for the whole world to see, basically from February 1933 to September 1st, 1939, when brutish Germany finally blitzed Poland. And even then, it was all the fault of the Polish who foolishly attacked first.
The term gaslighting entered pop culture allegedly with a 1938 script and 1944 film starring Ingrid Bergman, who herself was half Swedish half German. But let us not deceive ourselves over the fact that this form of mind savagery was with us long before the Holocaust, the Great War and the advent of modern psychology. All over the world, and perhaps just across the road, predators prey on poor Aarons and little Ingrids.
The obsessive suspicion, alas, is on you. Your tormentors are already making up new names for gaslighting. How about plausible deniability, conspiracy theories, counter-propaganda or just fact-checking. Whatever you think the government is really treating you, it is your crazy imagination that was the problem.
And as to the gruesome metaphor of a waning dim light, your light of course, that is slowly dying in your abusive relationship, remember that nobody is going to believe your twisted story, when it silently and irrevocably ends.
The author is a German writer and cultural critic.
Wow, or rather woe what can one reply to an essay like this except perhaps quote the words of Christ when He said while having his feet washed by an adulterous woman, He said, whoever has been forgiven much Loves much while at the same time making the comparison to someone who has little to be forgiven for Loves little. Luke 7:47
There is a great deal of truth in that yes?
It is getting terribly difficult to find love and give love these days in an environment of such gaslighting and is that why we also find Christ saying:
Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. Matt. 24:12
When Love dies the world dies.
Thanks Dr. Pattberg
The Polish were perps of the sneaky tactic of Prometheism , also remember Zbig’s dad was Polish ambassador to Germany, before fleeing to our Beaver toothed necro-neighbors to the North. Pls read Matt Ehret and Cynthia Chung.
I disagree with the author’s labeling of gaslighters as psychopaths. The author says, contradicting himself, that gaslighters are “predators who are without empathy or concern for the well-being of others.” A predator is definitely interested in and concerned about others. Psychopaths, in my experience, have zero interest in and concern for others, unless those others try to thwart them. I think that what the author is describing here is someone with a narcissistic personality disorder. Such people are very much interested in and concerned about others, whom they invariably use simply to fill the absolute hollowness of their own ‘souls’. These people are very dangerous. Psychopaths, not so much (despite all the Hollywood movies).
However, the author is primarily speaking about the phenomenon of gaslighting and its effects and I cannot but agree on that. The impersonality of social media is catastrophically compounding this problem, in my view.
But I don’t think the psychopaths are the biggest problem. They probably mostly go online simply to try to make money or hook up with someone for a one-night-stand. For the narcissists, on the other hand, social media presents infinite opportunities for drawing others into their sticky webs.
This is a very thought-provoking series. Thanks for posting it.
Good essay–thank you for this. I think the only thing you can do when you are getting gaslighted, plausibly denied, conspiracy-theoried, fact-checked and so on is to distance yourself and avoid feeding the troll. A really well moderated blog like the Saker’s catches these shenanigans before they get too destructive. Likewise, at this point in a society’s demise (I’m speaking of the West), it is important to disengage. Trying to deal with the inanity only feeds it.
I’m posting this anonymously, which I normally never do, because I’ll mention personal experience, which I never do on-line. The victims are not just people who can walk away from these obsessive relationships. These monsters have children, and they carefully cultivate those children to serve for their own psychological benefit.
Sarcophilus, commenting above, said they are mostly narcissists rather than true psychopaths, and that is intriguing to me–I’d like to read more about that and consider it. After I extolled my mother to my husband as some kind of angel, he spent some time with her and then declared her the most dangerous person he’d ever met. He described her as a psychopath, without knowing or using that term. We both saw evidence later on that she may have killed my father, and I have not been back to see her since.
I don’t judge people who are too close to me, because I feel I have “a pony in the race” and I am incapable of impartial judgement. Likewise, too far and you don’t know what’s hearsay and what’s real. There is a Goldilocks zone, and I have identified several typical psychopaths. One thing I note with them, as Andrew Lobaczewski described the urge to gargle with something strong after talking with them, is what I would call a consistent search for the remote control button, and that is true of my mother as well.
Thank goodness for all the books on psychopathy! If you are a sucker for these people, you have to understand that and watch out, because they do sense the potentially “useful.” (Useful eaters.) A decade or more ago, I read someone was going to publish a helpful book on the normal children of psychopaths. That would have been an immense help to me, but I still have not seen anything. Lobaczewski mentioned depression and neurotic behavior resulting from having to grow up with such a twisted version of reality presented to you as the truth all the time. But he also mentioned that once they’ve matured, these normal children of psychopaths know how to navigate in a society dominated by psychopaths and can help others cope. If that could be fostered, these people would be valuable.
My mother sent me off to one psychologist after another in my early teens, and all that happened was I became suicidally depressed as time went on. I wonder if most teen suicides are people like me. I honestly thought the world would be a better place without me–the psychologists did not do a blasted thing to help that. After college (I had to fight to stay in a dorm, not at home where my mother was leaning on me emotionally) I realized I’d be dead if I had to stay in that home for any real length of time, and arranged for quite a distance. It took me quite a while to unfold my cramped psyche and learn which lessons of my childhood were pertinent and which were self-defeating or even downright antisocial (e.g., you have to lie or sneak). I did eventually get a good honorable husband, who is more valuable to me than my own life.
Without him, I might still be thinking of my mother as an angel (nearly everyone around her says so) and that I am hopelessly flawed and deserve to be unloved.
‘I am hopelessly flawed and deserve to be unloved’
this is the best thing that can happen to a hu-man in the grand karmic cycle. congratulations!
This article is extremely sexist, constantly using the term ‘he’ for the abuser.
I am a male who has been gaslighted, tortured, abused, call it what you will by at least 5 women over the years, both in the family and in the place of work.
Female psychopaths exist and flourish in the west…..
That not accurate Rhys. What about the example of Aaron. It is balanced between the ‘he’ abuser and the ‘she’ abuser. The 2nd example is a ‘she’ abuser. I mean we’re talking about “poor Aarons and little Ingrids”.
Yes, I agree with you that female psychopaths exist and it is everywhere.
Look at Hillary Clinton.
What is interesting about a full blown exposure to psychopathy is the way it can highlight particular nuances, tendencies, hints of of behavioural psychopathy in so many, and from this one can learn a great deal.
Perhaps most importantly : the ability to self reflect honestly back on oneself, as we live in a time of marred consciousness of reality, of distorted vision. This exists now almost as alternative form of reality.
From this point of view, arises the philosophy of ‘right standpoint’ of standing firm, which means not feeing from evil, but facing it and being centred and rational.. All one can do is practice this, one step, one day at a time and not put it off until tomorrow, as survival and growth depend on this inner resolution and freedom to evolve.
Hmmm, I perused the posted article and thought about Joe “encephalopathic senile dementia” Biden.
And wow! Those whom God wants to destroy, He first makes them demented. And that delineates ‘Muricas current trajectory…
After a great deal of reflection and sleepless nights on this topic of menticide I find myself looking back at how God was Himself gaslighted. What you say? How? Well, to that one need only look back at the events surrounding the cannibal Armin Miewes. What a truly unprecedented act of criminality and sadism he committed against his best friend! What stopped me cold however, reading the news is the unbelievable confession of his:
“I prayed for him, and for myself and then I did it.”
What you say? He has the presence of mind to “pray” – to say something like this and then proceeds to do the unthinkable?
What we are faced with here is demon possession pure and simple. This is a demon possessed man giving the middle finger to God. It is a demon or more likely demons mocking God for his saving ways. This victim Miewes was being controlled by demons and the demons used the occasion to stick it to God by getting him to the seat of Christ and perhaps even into heaven as a forgiven cannibal for his sins because he “prayed?” Can you imagine?
One need only go back to the book of Job where Satan mocks God to His face for praising Job’s faithfulness. Satan knows what man is really like that a man would indeed give all he has for his life. That God would therefore bless and or even save human beings for their lives of sin and rebellion / disobedience is such an illogical matter. And indeed in many ways it is when one realizes that before God there is no forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood! And so the crucifixion of Christ. But righteousness even this wasn’t enough to get human beings to live such lives before God and this really gets under Satans skin. It is why he is called the accuser of the brethren. He always attacks us before God which he hopes will result in God giving it authority over man like Job. That all changed when Christ came and removed that authority and placed it back where it belongs with Him and His father. That demons would use cannibalism and such only proves their contempt for God and for man really and this unfortunately brings me to disagree with the author especially with the sentence:
“but really an inborn genetic predisposition of a criminal mind toward subduing his fair game.”
It’s not genetics its spiritual!!! What we are facing with human beings and human nature really is what the Bible calls Spiritual Warfare. We are indeed in a war with demonic spirits and I know of what I speak of having seen the possessed and have had angelic experiences. The real expert however was Dr. Walter Martin who had first hand encounters with the demon possessed and was involved in hundreds of exorcisms. this is an excellent introduction to the subject:
https://youtu.be/l2jMKp2zy3k
The further a man or woman delves into sin and becomes polluted by that sin the harder it is to extract oneself from it but O the glory of finding true forgiveness and then having the Baptism of His Holy Spirit is what changes us into vessels worthy of honor. It is why we find written:
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. 2 Timothy 1:7
Nice explanation of psychopathy with interesting cases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgGyvxqYSbE
Re-watch this video and as you do replace the word psychopath which Stefan uses with the word “sin” as the Creator has been doing since the beginning of the world. After you’ve done that go to Ezekiel 14:12–14 and as you read that ask yourself woe only three men out of 10’s of millions maybe even billions of souls? 3 men 3?!
Further, where Job is concerned was he Asian, Chinese even is something I have pondered since my youth. Thats the one thing about the Bible which so often perturbs me it just doesn’t give us enough or all the information we need! Job Chinese? lol Raises some intriguing questions doesn’t it about “above philosophy and religion?”
I do love his words:
“But now they mock me,
men younger than I,
whose fathers I would have disdained
to put with my sheep dogs. Job 30:1
and from Job we learn the great truth that Gold is a military commander with His own weapons like hailstones as an example or as Christ said as well ‘do you not think I can call to my Father and he can put at my disposal 12 legions of angels’ or in today’s vernacular aliens! nice eh? Aliens? Thats how we disrespect God today! An alien?
The world I’m afraid is going to learn the terrible truth written:
It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of a Living God.” Hebrews 10:31
b4 you decide to vote for the Return of DJT…
The gaslighting of America
By Bob Weir
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/the_gaslighting_of_america.html
you should question…
1) Is he a good father?
2) Is he a good husband?
if he fails, and falis both, how can he be a good man, fit for the highest office, of a proud nation?