When people state that they don't understand gaslighting…there are people who now voluntarily won't understand that this is gaslighting on a global scale.
They're literally seeing what they're seeing, have easy access to high-quality evidence and information, yet they're stating that the evidence of their eyes and lifetime experience to date can be supplanted by "official information" and the #BeKind mantra.
Some people embrace the pre-conditions to totalitarianism while deceiving themselves as to their role in this. See Arendt or Levy on Arendt. Or this essay on Arendt's association of loneliness with totalitarianism.
"To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition."
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
"Totalitarianism destroys man’s ability to think, while turning each in his lonely isolation against all others"
Totalitarian movements use ideology to isolate individuals. Isolate means ‘to cause a person to be or remain alone or apart from others’. Arendt spends the first part of ‘Ideology and Terror’ breaking down the ‘recipes of ideologies’ into their basic ingredients to show how this is done:
- ideologies are divorced from the world of lived experience, and foreclose the possibility of new experience
- ideologies are concerned with controlling and predicting the tide of history;
- ideologies do not explain what is, they explain what becomes;
- ideologies rely on logical procedures in thinking that are divorced from reality;
- ideological thinking insists upon a ‘truer reality’, that is concealed behind the world of perceptible things.
The way we think about the world affects the relationships we have with others and ourselves. By injecting a secret meaning into every event and experience, ideological movements are forced to change reality in accordance with their claims once they come to power. And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world. Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right.
https://aeon.co/essays/for-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-is-rooted-in-loneliness