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by hnarn
1304 days ago
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Gaslighting is not an objective term so it makes no sense to try to cast it as such. What constitutes gaslighting depends on terms like "abuser" and "victim" and since these terms are subjective, it follows that the term gaslighting must be as well. Still, I think it's worth involving personal morals when arguing for or against when a term like this can be used, because if we don't we can't really use subjective terms to describe anything. Consider for example that other charged terms involving an "abuser" and a "victim" would be open for the same argument, but arguing that this means that no moral opinion can be made in any of these cases would (in my opinion) not be intellectually honest but simply nihilistic. I don't think that it's very productive to say that any term open for subjectivity in this manner should either be hardened into an objective criteria or discarded, because morality has never and never will be something that can be proven scientifically, it has to come from subjective values. |
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I'm not sure that "abuser" and "victim" are that subjective. I can imagine a lot of situations in which the roles of abuser and victim are pretty objective.
The problem with a term like gaslighting is that allows anyone who is in a strong disagreement with anyone else to 1) claim a victim role and paint their opponents as abusers; 2) by doing so, protect their own belief from being questioned. It becomes a tool of a "closed belief system" where attempts to question the belief are taken as proofs of its correctness, which is in general a hallmark of cults.