“Who are you going to believe, me or your eyes?”
— Groucho Marx.
Animal scientist and author Temple Grandin has spent much of her life explaining how her mind works differently from others. Through her descriptions, she’s helped explain how autism shapes perception. While pondering something about her description of her perception, along with a few things going on in South Africa, I started thinking again of our Age of Gaslightenment, which is, I’m sorry to say, not yet over. Whether it’ll ever end remains to be seen. I’d guess that, with our general overreliance upon news and entertainment media, together with the widespread obliviousness to being, we shouldn’t expect too much to change. But we can still make some attempts to understand what is going on.
In her book Thinking in Pictures (1995), Grandin says that when someone mentions a concept like dog, she doesn’t immediately conjure up a generic or symbolic image of a dog, like a cartoon outline or a simplified archetype. Instead, her mind flashes through detailed images of specific memories of dogs she’s encountered, with all their unique traits intact. This is not by choice or preference. It’s just how she naturally processes impressions.
She says that most people’s ability to transform impressions into an iconic form, what we call abstraction, is profoundly difficult for her because her thoughts naturally gravitate towards concrete particulars. I’ll say more about this below but, for now, let me just reframe this idea via Gestalt psychology: her mind struggles to locate the ground but fixates on specific figures.1 This is where the title of Grandin’s book comes from. She says she thinks in pictures more than in words. Her rather un-Platonic, detail-oriented perception homes in on specifics, neglecting generalised forms or patterns.
There are some perks to this unusual way of perceiving things. Most notably, it grants the autist the ability to attend to specifics with remarkable exactness. Such a perception is part of why many autistic people excel in fields requiring precision. It’s the ability that helped Grandin, famously, to design more humane systems for working with livestock. And yet, the downsides of this way of perceiving are many.
Most of us, when walking into a room and finding it rearranged, will not be bothered by what’s out of place. There’s no obvious contradiction between what we’re perceiving directly and the nature of the room in general, as we’ve come to understand it. But for the autist, the rearranged room is experienced, often, as an entirely different room, and not just as a modified version of the original room. A chair out of place doesn’t just mean a chair out of place but an entire room out of place—a whole world of meaning displaced, with the autist displaced along with it. To arrive in a room that’s been shuffled around can be like not arriving at all.
Such a discontinuity can be jarring—not just extremely jarring but also continuously jarring. After all, our world is often in flux, shifting and changing. Our world is far more variable than most of us tend to realise on any given day. We don’t notice this because our perceptual capacities adjust readily and unconsciously to environmental alterations. All of us struggle with dramatic changes, of course, but for the autist, all changes are dramatic. Even delicate alterations can be indelicate. The autist is dealing less with subtle alterations than with substitutes, replacements, and aberrations. An adjusted element of any picture changes the picture completely.
It is no wonder, given this tendency in autistic perception, that people are so tricky. Neurodivergence is, even in its mildest forms, a very real social disability. People are highly changeable beings, irregular and inconsistent, although some are more changeable than others. Very few—if any—of us operate with anything close to clockwork regularity, even at our most consistent.
While pondering Grandin’s perspective on the perspective of autists, I was reminded of a story I heard from a high school teacher a while back about a teenager with autism in a particular classroom situation. One day, one of the autist’s classmates decided to mess with him by telling him that he was sitting in their chair. Quite understandably, his response was one of anxious confusion. I can only imagine what must’ve gone through his head. Where was he? Was he in the wrong chair? No, wait, this was the chair he was sitting in yesterday in this same classroom. But then why was this classmate of his telling him that he was sitting in the wrong chair? Had the seating arrangements changed without him noticing? Had he missed a teacher’s instruction about seating arrangements? The autist had access to the particulars but the context was lost to him—the context being, in this case, the cruelty of his classmate.
To make this worse, when others called the bully out for picking on him, the bully replied with standard gaslighting: “But I’m not doing anything,” he said. And by saying this, he effectively shifted the gaslighting of his autistic classmate to others. Everyone was wrong, not him. They weren’t in the know and he was. By implication, he was accusing them of being mean—he, by implication, was the victim. Isn’t it interesting that this is the kind of thing we say playing out so commonly in the sphere of media and propaganda in our Age of Gaslightenment?
I hardly need to point out that gaslighting is one of the signs of our time. I think people started really noticing it around the covidification of media-space a few years ago—a revelation, perhaps, of what’s been happening for ages—but almost any issue that crops up these days might become the subject of gaslighters and gaslightees. I also can’t help but see this in connection to the widespread autismification of being.
Autism has been used a great deal as a metaphor for our time, and this is worth understanding if we are to understand something of the specific nature of the gaslighting that’s become so frequent. The very word autism originated in the Greek autos, meaning self, and suggesting a withdrawal into one’s inner imaginings. The very idea seems paradoxical in our time, where inwardness itself is severely tyrannised by the totalising of transparency. Still, the basic sense of it is captured in Iain McGilchrist’s contention that the brain’s left hemisphere, which is largely shut off from the world and preoccupied with its theoretical formulations, dominates modern societies.
Without a doubt, certain features associated with autism are incredibly widespread. All of us are likely to experience some sense of the autist’s lack of context—a lack of a sense of the real ground, felt even while we are positively drowning in figures. Everything is so particular, so extraordinarily unworlded, so devoid of clear reference points. People assume, for instance, that what matters is the Discourse, or the Current Thing—together with the various Talking Points around said Discourse or Current Thing. But the reality is that all of these things obscure the context. They are, to refer to something said by Marshall McLuhan, the juicy piece of meat (the figure) used by the burglar (the ground) to distract the watchdog of the mind.
As in Grandin’s observations, there’s a focus in the popular imagination on specifics over abstractions, which fits a psychological fixation in our time on the overwhelming complexity and fragmentation of modern life. I think of all the bureaucracy, all the bickering about facts and fact-checking, the frequent dismissals of nuances with claims of misinformation or disinformation, and the myriad little stupid minutiae that preoccupy the attention of so many people. I think of the constant cognitive overload. We can see the trees but we can’t see the forest with any real ease. In fact, seeing the forest is often discouraged.
I also think of the widespread sense of relational disconnection in our time. Social cues seem harder to read when everything is so individualised and atomised. The very idea of decorum—the idea of behaviour that keeps with good taste and propriety—is hardly standard now. There’s alienation and loneliness everywhere. Deracination. More pornography and less love. More online meetings and less embodiment. More systematising and less empathy. More hyperconnectivity and less intimacy. Rules have replaced practical wisdom. And yet—and yet—the world remains a world of turbulence and flux and change.
And so, even before we get to the varieties of ways that gaslighting is wielded, our very environments are already, in a certain sense, gaslighting us. I’ll say this again, in different words, since it’s a key idea:
Gaslighting is not something that happens over and above the given order of things but it is built into the very structure of modern life. We know that more is going on than what is readily apparent. We sense that something is out of place before we can figure out what is out of place.
Like that boy in that classroom, we’re all trained by our hypermediated environment into expecting that what we’re being told, what we’re experiencing, and what’s really happening are all different things. We’re trained into a perpetual scepticism towards reality by the mere fact of inhabiting all kinds of artificiality and inhuman architecture.
The usual definition of gaslighting is that it’s about manipulating someone into doubting their perceptions by creating a deliberate disconnection between experience and communication; that is, between what is felt and what is thought. It’s become especially standard in a time in which media no longer functions to inform but functions, first, as the totalising environment within which we must live and, second, as a mode of permanent narrative control. Still, I’d like to modify the usual definition slightly with reference to what I’ve said so far.
Gaslighting is certainly—in this highly propagandistic age of ours—about the exploitation of the gap between perceiving the part and seeing the whole. There’s an obvious power dynamic here between a manipulator (the gaslighter) and the victim of the manipulation (the gaslighted). But, as I’ve already suggested, this power dynamic is built into the very world we inhabit. We feel tyrannised by media—overwhelmed by screens that screen out the real. Any individual gaslighter simply sides with the realm of representations over any possibility of contact with reality.
The part-whole gap exploited by the gaslighter suggests a gap between any perceptible detail and the broader synthesis of the idea. In the story above, we see the autist victimised by his attention to detail, and there are examples of this on the global stage. And the opposite can also happen—where those who see a pattern are told that the pattern doesn’t exist because there is no obvious confirmation of the pattern in any specific part.
Part and whole must be allowed to stand together, in a dialogical relation, if truth is to be perceived. But the societal corpus callosum has been severed and so the two never really meet. This severance is easy to create and maintain in a world of media, where the distance between representation and reality is particularly grotesque. The result of this, as I’ve implied, is a constant oscillation between dodging the whole or dodging the detail. What is sought, by gaslighters, is the perpetual avoidance of an integrated reality.
So much of this has been especially clear in South Africa, and even more so since it’s become obvious that many of us are questioning the dominant narrative. I’ll keep this brief since I know it’s not everyone’s context but it remains an interesting case of what has happened and can still happen elsewhere.
The South African ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), has typically broadcast on two frequencies, as described by Politicsweb on X. On the one channel, the message has been mythical, suggesting a strong commitment to reconciliation, non-racialism, and equality, together with a clear desire to uphold the rights of all citizens. Channel One sounds lovely, harmonious, and absurdly utopian. On the other channel, Channel Two, the message is decidedly different. Chanting songs like ‘Kill the Boer’ is deemed fine, supported by South African law courts, racial slurs by non-white people are overlooked while anything vaguely resembling a racist comment by a white person is punished by prison or an exorbitant fine, and, moreover, the National Democratic Revolution—the strong commitment by the ANC to a communist agenda, including the expropriation of private property without compensation—has been loudly proclaimed to be the true aim of the party.
Channel One says, “You’re welcome to sit anywhere you like in my classroom.” Channel Two says, “You’re sitting in my chair!” This latter channel stresses a strong bias in favour of some racial groups and the vehement opposition of racial minorities. This includes but is not restricted to people of European descent.
Now, very much against the wishes of the ruling party, the messages broadcast on Channel Two have leaked into the controlled messaging offered on Channel One. I can’t think of a more magnificent example of the potential beauty of context collapse. Just a few days ago, a South African diplomat in America said some decidedly undiplomatic things about Trump and was, very deservedly, booted out of the country for that. And yet, the mere fact that we are dealing with two different rhetorical trajectories—different propaganda for different audiences—has meant that anyone who suggests that Channel Two is a clearer reflection of the ANC’s actual goals, which it certainly is, will be accused of misinformation. In other words, anyone who has the gumption to suggest that we’re being lied to will be gaslit. And the gaslighters, currently, have control of almost the entire media and journalistic machine, making gaslighting so much easier for them.
I’ve seen so many variations on the theme, ‘It’s not happening but it’s good that it’s happening’. And so many variations on the theme, ‘We know they’re lying; they know they’re lying; they know we know they’re lying; yet they are still lying.’ Without the media environment we inhabit, none of this would be possible. We can be gaslit so easily simply because reality has become autistic—already structured like gaslighting, with part and whole in a perpetual state of disconnection. We know that what we know is not enough to suffice as knowledge. We know that reality, even when rightly grasped through various fragments of fact and fiction, is somewhat out of reach.
In the realm of propaganda and media, the part-whole relation does seem to be a key aspect of how all the gaslighting works. Various reasons can be offered for why this has happened. Without a doubt, the proliferation of information, cognitive fragmentation, technological mediation, and the cultural fetishisation of efficiency all play some part. But the deeper cause is very worrying indeed. It’s not merely about the degradation of consent but the eradication of trust in the very possibility of understanding, and so also of participating in the truth. Baudrillard suggested that the world has become a simulacrum; it is now such a totalising illusion that there is no way to discover what is real. We know we live in Plato’s cave and we know we need to find a way out of the cave. However, at least as far as the cynical reading of the situation is concerned, that doesn’t mean we know how to get out of the cave.
I do not share Baudrillard’s cynicism, though. I don’t mean we can escape the cave as simply and as easily as we got into it. But, still, we can escape it. The reality is that the cave, the realm of shadows, represents the immediately obvious. It represents the realm of ego and ego-defending. It represents the world of articulated understanding against embodied experience. Most of the time, it represents the part, the detail—the specific instance—without representing the context. It represents a self that is not sufficiently porous to alterity.
The cave—with the realm of digital hypermediation as one aspect of this cave—grants us access to figures, especially as we have come to understand them, but not to the ground, which transcends us in every way. What is not explicitly stated in Plato’s story about the cave but which is implied in the rest of his work is the fact that the philosopher, the one who has gone beyond the realm of shadows, does not arrive quickly and painlessly at a clear sense of what is good and true and beautiful. The philosopher grapples. He wrestles. He refuses to take the obvious as obvious. He welcomes otherness through self-questioning and world-questioning. He is mindful of the mutually supporting role of world-cultivation and self-cultivation. He is willing to accept the truth even if it appears to contradict another truth, knowing—hoping and trusting—that the higher principle according to which each truth accords with the other is discoverable.
In simpler terms, the philosopher does not allow truths to compete with each other, the way a fact-checker seeks to set one figure against another that he finds unappealing. Instead, the philosopher sees truth itself as the aim, which is to say that facts are allowed to be facts, even if they appear to be at odds with the other facts we know. The biblical book of Job can be taken as one of the profoundest literary examples of this. Job goes through hell, suffers terribly, and meets God, the source of all goodness, in one of the most striking poetic theophanies. Others around him with to rationalise his existence and experience. Job accepts all things, believes all things, hopes all things. Job, like the archetypal philosopher, begins and ends with wonder. Job exits Plato’s cave, so to speak, because he welcomes awe. He allows himself to be overwhelmed by what does not conform to his puny paradigm. He does not let his programming undermine the possibility of contact with reality—including, especially, Ultimate Reality, Transcendence, Divinity.
To my mind, the central feature of this Age of Gaslightenment that keeps gaslighting and societal autismification in place is the resistance to wonder and awe in favour of the merely representational. There is a widespread resistance to transcendence, both material and spiritual. Our capacity for awe is the one thing that takes us beyond ourselves and helps us to escape self-curated self-enclosure. You can get tiny scraps of wonder on a social media feed but massive bucketloads are available almost anywhere else where electricity is not the primary mediator of what’s funnelled into the brain. This diagnosis is by no means a shortcut to fixing anything, of course. How does one encourage anyone, even oneself, to be more awe-inspired? Well, maybe the start of it is to note that if your existence has become dull and monotonous, that is by no means what it could be or what it ought to be. Maybe the start of being open to wonder is simple gratitude, or even just a simple attention to that which is not simply an extension of oneself but is radically other.
Still, there is a warning in Plato’s work, at the end of his telling of the story of the cave. As Plato more than implies, the philosopher who has transcended the realm of shadows risks his neck when he goes back to tell the cave dwellers of the true nature of their realm of shadows. This happens to be the philosopher’s task. He can’t stay disconnected from others but must return to share the good news with the imprisoned. But people often prefer fiction to the truth. They don’t want you to destroy the idols that have given them a measly sense of purpose. People may even kill for the sake of a lie they’re not yet willing to relinquish.
But, as difficult as the job of the philosopher and awe-finder is, it is the only task worth undertaking. For where there is no truth, there can only be a contest of wills. Where there is no honesty and no light, we will fact-check ourselves into being even more deeply entrenched in the realm of shadows. Where there is no understanding, there can only be a power struggle. Lies are always, in every case, about power and manipulation. And reality is only reachable through a basic trust in our capacity to transcend what we already understand. Reality is only reachable, in other words, when we relinquish the desire to control everything.