Nathan Radke

It's not just concealing the truth.

It's way more insidious.

It's way more dangerous than that.

Gaslighting is a kind of power play in which somebody tries to get you to believe them instead of your own experience and reason.

And so to do this, what they do is they deliberately present you with a distorted reality while trying to make you think that the real distortions are coming from your own brain.

Yeah, no, exactly.

And when you talk about abusive relationships, this is a terrible form of abuse.

It's a form of manipulation because it tries to throw uncertainty into a person's own perceptions and thinking.

And so obviously when this happens in a relationship, it's an awful, terrible thing.

And it's also a terrible thing when it comes from people in political power.

And where we often see this coming from, in the same way we see it coming from terrible partners, we see it coming from terrible leaders.

Authoritarians in particular find the gaslighting move to be a really tempting one because authoritarians tend to act in ways to protect their own power, even when that comes at the expense of the public.

And so to a tyrant, the public's there to serve them, not the other way around.

But if you do that long enough, the people might get fed up with it and they might rise up against you.

So both lousy leaders and lousy partners, rather than changing anything about the way that they act or their actions or themselves, they try to change the way that we see reality itself.

And we've got some pretty wild examples from history.

Oh, yeah.

Good old Baghdad bomb.

So back in 2003.

The American military is invading Iraq.