Our “Gaslight” Economy

Yesterday I described our gaslight financial system. Today we’ll look at our gaslight economy. Correspondent Jason H. alerted me to the work of author Thomas Sheridan ( Puzzling People: The Labyrinth of the Psychopath), who claims to have coined the term gaslighting.

As noted yesterday, gaslighting has often been used in the context of personal relationships to describe a manipulative person’s attempts to undermine and control their romantic partner.

In a larger context, these manipulative techniques can also be applied to our perception of the entire economy:

1. Questioning, belittling, discounting and undermining our experience of economic “animal spirits” and general conditions.

2. Overwriting our memory of the economy of the past, again by undermining, questioning and belittling our memories.

3. Discrediting and marginalizing our definitions of economic well-being, in favor of the manipulator’s definition of our well-being.

4. Using authority and “experts” to disqualify and discredit dissenting views.

5. Denigrate and deny our lived experience of economic conditions by repeating the institutionalized authority-approved narrative of “what actually happened.”

6. Disorient, discredit and destroy dissent with a torrent of false statistics, false narratives, false accusations and false claims of our errors.

It seems obvious to me that we are being gaslighted to forget the widely distributed prosperity of the past and accept that the stagnation of the past 16 years is equivalently prosperous–in direct contradiction to the lived experience and memories of the bottom 80%.

Please compare the following four charts of unemployment, real hourly pay, inflation and full-time jobs with your economic experiences of the past two decades. The mainstream media and financial media are saturating us with claims that the economy is doing great: unemployment is a historically low 4.6%, real wages rose an astonishing 5% this year, millions of new jobs have been created, interest rates are at all-time lows, inflation is subdued and all in all, the U.S. economy is doing great–and if you disagree, well, you’re a Russian propagandist because legitimate dissent is impossible.