Gaslit Society

Structural Gaslighting and the Collapse of Trust

Aug 05, 2025

This piece is a response to the top request from readers: more writing on U.S. politics. But as always, I bring a philosophical frame to the conversation—because what’s happening now is not just political. It’s epistemic. It’s moral. And it’s personal.

A Familiar Pattern: Truth vs. Power

In early August 2025, President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after an unfavorable jobs report. The official reason was a “loss of confidence,” but in a long line of supposed hoaxes, witch hunts, and conspiracies, we heard a common appeal from Trump: “fake numbers,” a “rigged system.”

The motive seems a lot less about data integrity than it does about upholding an economic image. When data contradict the official talking points, when truth becomes inconvenient, it is the data that must bend to the will of the leader, including terminating the person ultimately accountable to the data. And, of course, replacing them.

A loyalist installed to helm the agency might deliver rosier talking points from the press room, but the uncertainty deepens in the boardroom. As for everyday Americans, we are always downstream from the decisions made behind closed doors.

Blaming unfavorable data on manipulation without evidence is not only dangerous but disingenuous. Two of the three drivers for poor workforce numbers–DOGE, tariffs, and the integration of AI–are squarely within the purview of Trump’s presidency.

I don’t want to step too far outside of a serious tone, these are serious things, but this administration has been shuttering federal agencies and decimating the public sector workforce, introducing economic uncertainty, upsetting the market, clawing back money from research institutions and universities, deporting huge numbers of our workforce, and threatening jobs in law, education, and media–to refuse to take even a soundbyte’s worth of accountability for policies that at least may have contributed to these falling numbers, plainly, lacks leadership.

How can you organize a presidency on reductions in the workforce and, meanwhile, complain that a negative jobs report must be the outcome of an Obama-era deep-state hoax?

This is structural gaslighting.

The unwarranted firing of a career official, with longtime bipartisan support, including a yes vote from JD Vance during their confirmation, is not merely disingenuous; it is dictator stuff.

In a healthy democracy, such a move would trigger alarm. But we are no longer alarmed. I’ve noticed my reactions have dulled to the administration's onslaught of terrible actions. I simply shrug and roll my eyes.

Not that alarm isn’t warranted—it absolutely is—but it’s exhausting to live in a constant state of unease. And perhaps more troubling is the reality that a significant portion of the country seems perfectly content with the way things are. Some have grown numb, others simply don’t care, and for many, I worry it’s a matter of convenience: either unwilling to invest the time to understand the facts, or too comfortable within the confines of their echo chambers to risk challenging the hardened views that serve their interests.

While I share common humanity and empathy for those who operate within their entrenched views, especially those from dogmatic positions that could be an outcome of childhood, education models, or high-control belief systems, sometimes I simply want to scream, “Turn off Fox!”

One responsibility of a member in a free society is to remain open to new or uncomfortable information that we may find challenging.

Whatever the cause, this latest episode with the BLS chief wasn’t just a firing. It was one more tactic in a long-running pattern: a systemic effort to erode public trust in shared reality.

Across government, media, and law enforcement, we are witnessing a shift from transparency to distortion, from accountability to concealment.

Add to this the surge in book bans, curriculum censorship, and open attacks on the free press, and a grim picture emerges: the state is not merely lying—it is systematically disguising its own operations. It wears the mask of law while enforcing impunity. It invokes public trust while actively undermining it.

This isn’t just dishonesty—it’s an epistemic assault on our capacity to trust, understand, and respond to the world. It is structural gaslighting.

Structural Gaslighting: Naming the Problem and Tracing Its Mechanics

Structural gaslighting refers to gaslighting that operates through systems—politics, media, law—not just individuals. Unlike disagreement, which assumes shared frameworks for settling truth, structural gaslighting erodes those frameworks entirely. It’s dangerous because it undermines our ability to engage in democratic discourse, replacing truth-seeking with manipulation and confusion.

Understanding what structural gaslighting is gives us language for a phenomenon many feel but struggle to name. But naming it is only the beginning. To grasp its full impact, we need to look at how it functions—how systems, not just individuals, participate in the erosion of truth.

Structural gaslighting isn’t merely lying at scale—it’s the calculated dismantling of the systems we rely on to distinguish truth from falsehood. It works by undermining institutions we once trusted. Courts are dismissed as corrupt when rulings prove inconvenient. Elections are labeled “rigged” without evidence. Bureaucrats who speak plainly about facts are removed from their posts. Journalism is smeared as “fake news,” and public health data is selectively discredited to serve political ends. Even reporters are criminalized or barred from press events, severing the public’s access to accountability.

The effort of this state-sanctioned messaging—propaganda—is not always to persuade others of the lie, but something more pernicious arises: truth becomes inaccessible. If someone becomes sufficiently convinced that the truth isn’t discoverable, not only will they give up searching, but they may become suspicious of anyone who claims to know it, especially when that truth contradicts their worldview.

The erosion of trust is not a passive loss but an intentional sabotage of people’s right to access—and speak—the truth. On so many counts, Trump is plainly wrong, yet he’s opened a pathway for his supporters that suggests people need not be accountable to the truth, whether by omission, refusal, manipulation, or plain fabrication. The signs of this active assault on the freedom of the press and speech disempower the people, while replacing the labor of epistemic inquiry with the comfort of shared enemies, adversarial narratives, and dehumanizing rhetoric.

Consider two tactics now common in immigration enforcement. At protests and raids, agents arrive in full tactical gear, their faces obscured, refusing to identify themselves. This anonymity isn’t about operational safety—it’s about narrative control. Without names, there is no accountability.

Meanwhile, asylum seekers who appear for their scheduled court hearings—doing exactly what the law requires—are detained on the spot. These are people placing trust in a system of justice, obeying summonses, and seeking due process. That trust is weaponized against them.

This is not just dishonesty. It is structural gaslighting—an epistemic assault on our ability to trust, understand, and respond to the world we live in.

The Consequences of Structural Gaslighting

When gaslighting becomes systemic, the consequences reach far beyond misinformation. What’s at stake isn’t just the integrity of individual beliefs, but the very coherence of our shared reality. The damage is cumulative. First, we splinter.

A society subjected to structural gaslighting begins to fracture into parallel realities. One group sees masked officers and hears echoes of authoritarianism; another sees lawful order and patriotic defense. One group sees election results; another sees rigged machines. These aren’t just different opinions—they’re different worlds. And as these informational ecosystems grow more isolated, genuine dialogue becomes impossible—not because people disagree, but because they no longer recognize the same baseline of a shared reality.

From there, the democratic promise begins to unravel. If we can’t agree on basic facts—on who won an election, on what a job report says, on whether a protest happened at all—then the machinery of deliberative democracy stalls. Discourse collapses into accusation. Policy becomes performance. Every institution becomes suspect, and every disagreement is presumed to be in bad faith.

Into this vacuum steps the strongman. Structural gaslighting breeds precisely the kind of confusion, fear, and moral fatigue that makes people susceptible to authoritarian appeal. When truth feels unstable and institutions feel illegitimate, many begin to yearn not for freedom, but for clarity—someone who promises to cut through the noise, name the enemy, and restore order by decree.

And still, there is a quieter consequence: exhaustion. When you’re told, again and again, that your perception is flawed, your sources are biased, your memory is incorrect, and your moral instincts are naïve, you begin to doubt not just what you know, but whether knowing is even worth the effort. The emotional toll of this erosion is profound. People retreat. They grow cynical. They stop trying to intervene—not because they’ve stopped caring, but because they no longer believe intervention is possible.

That’s the final aim of gaslighting at scale: not just to confuse, but to wear down. Not just to distort, but to demoralize. In a gaslit society, the cost of clarity is so high that many stop seeking it altogether.

And that’s when power consolidates, making material the world that was first constructed in distortion.

Philosophical Frame (Tying It Together)

At its core, gaslighting is an epistemic attack. It doesn’t just spread falsehood—it undermines your capacity to discern truth from falsehood. The goal isn’t merely to convince you of a lie; it’s to destabilize your confidence in your own judgment. Over time, you stop asking what’s true and begin asking what’s safe to say, or what’s likely to be believed. You stop trusting the world and start navigating it like a stage: reactive, guarded, performative.

This is what makes gaslighting more dangerous than deception alone. Lies can be confronted, and truth, when discovered, can still function as a course correction. But gaslighting corrodes the deeper structures by which we evaluate truth. It hollows out the frameworks—experience, evidence, dialogue, shared memory—until we’re left grasping for orientation in a world that feels increasingly unreal.

In a gaslit society, truth no longer carries moral or civic authority. What matters is perception, and more precisely, the ability to manipulate perception. It becomes less important whether a claim corresponds to reality and more important whether it lands, goes viral, or wins the argument.

But a democratic society cannot function without shared trust in reality. We don’t all have to agree, but we do have to believe that disagreement can be settled through evidence, argument, and collective deliberation. If that shared substrate collapses—if people no longer believe in the possibility of coming to truth together—then democracy dissolves into performance, spectacle, and coercion.

This is the key philosophical claim at the heart of this essay: Where shared trust in reality collapses, democracy cannot survive.

Gaslighting is not just deception. It is a deep and insidious manipulation—an effort to make someone distrust their own experience of the world. It’s a violation of the tacit trust we extend to one another in conversation and cooperation: the assumption that we are seeing roughly the same reality.

A liar may try to convince you of a falsehood. A gaslighter convinces you that you can no longer trust your access to the truth at all. This is why gaslighting pairs so powerfully with censorship and erasure. If you try to verify your experience, but the public record has been scrubbed—if books, histories, testimonies, and data–people even!— have been disappeared, then the damage goes beyond deception. You are no longer disagreeing about what is true; you may find yourself arguing about simply what is.

The consequence of speaking into this epistemic black hole isn’t simple confusion. It’s shame. It’s existential disorientation. It’s the sense that maybe you’re the problem. You second-guess whether you should speak at all. When your lived experience doesn’t match the sanctioned narrative, and there’s no way to reconcile the two, you begin to doubt yourself—not just your beliefs, but your very being in the world.

This is why gaslighting isn’t merely a personal harm. It is an epistemic attack—and when scaled across systems, it becomes a strategy of political control. Gaslighting doesn’t just deny facts; it erodes the frameworks by which facts can be judged. In a democratic society, where participation depends on trust in shared reality, that erosion is not incidental.

If betrayal of trust in personal encounters can leave us doubting our own judgment, what happens when that same dynamic plays out across entire societies? Gaslighting is no longer confined to personal relationships. It has become a political tactic, a media strategy, and a governance model.

We live in a gaslit society. Unless we reclaim the frameworks that allow us to know, speak, and act on truth together, we risk losing our sense of reality and the democratic promise built upon it.