Nathan Radke

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.

The American military, of course, much stronger than the Iraqi military.

But the Iraqi people had a minister of information, al-Sahaf, and he became known in Western media as Baghdad Bob because he would be on TV constantly, every day, telling the Iraqi people how well the war was going for the Iraqi government.

On the daily, you would have all these brave stories about how the Americans were being furiously routed and they were being driven out and any second the Iraqi troops were going to be in Washington, D.C.

And he was saying this despite the fact that the Iraqi citizens, of course, could just look out their window and see how things were going.

They could see American tanks in Iraqi cities.

But despite that, up until basically the moment that he was captured by American forces, Baghdad Bob was on the TV and on the radio telling everybody, what you see isn't real.

What's actually happening is we're winning this war.