It’s never your fault, you’re always the gaslit victim
You can disagree with people, and you can say that you don’t agree with their description of reality, but neither of those things are gaslighting.
Think for example of someone who is in a cult or deep into a religious belief; or think about those who believe in conspiracy theories of all kinds. They're basically called insane every day even in the media. Would you call that gaslighting?
You may think you are right in this, but it is still gaslighting.
An alternative approach would be to just point out the facts and use arguments, and counter their falsehoods, which implicitly recognizes their ability for sound reasoning. That is not gaslighting, but merely debate.
I doubt there is ever a really good reason to gaslight someone.
Manipulating others is pretty much the activity most highly rewarded by our economy. It's deeply immoral but someone with no morals clearly does have very good reason to engage in gaslighting or other forms of manipulation.
So it's a good thing if there's a growing awareness on the part of victims.
"gaslighting" is defined as a form of manipulation that an abuser uses to sow self-doubt in a victim. But telling someone that they're dead wrong- while it might not the most effective way of convincing- is not necessarily a form of manipulation, nor the person on the receiving end must be considered a victim.
If you're trying to convince someone to leave a cult, or to abandon conspiratorial thinking, or to reject the propaganda that they've heard all their life, or to stop blaming their parents or partners for everything that's wrong in their lives.. you might face a point in which you have to tell that person that they're wrong and their biases are corrupting their vision of reality. The attempt however is not manipulative nor the person on the other end is a victim- quite the contrary.
Well put and this is exactly my point
> ... you might face a point in which you have to tell that person that they're wrong and their biases are corrupting their vision of reality.
I think you make a mistake here by conflating two different things. This is what I reacted to:
> they're basically called insane every day even in the media. Would you call that gaslighting?
There's a big difference between telling someone they are wrong and telling them they are insane. Or making them doubt about their capacity for judgement by convincing them their biases are corrupting their vision of reality, thus losing confidence in not only their views, but their ability for independent thinking, and yielding to your relentless argumentation.
The first one is not gaslighting but the second one does kinda fit your definition. It needs an intent to change something in their behavior (manipulation), which I assume exists here. In reality, gaslighting is often sufficiently subtle to disempower otherwise intelligent people.
The fact that you think you are doing something noble and true by attempting to get someone out of a cult does not alter the equation. It can even end up being abusive. For example, fundamentalist christians trying to 'heal' people from their homosexuality. They think they are dispelling the corruptive influence of sin, and the people who enter therapy are often convinced of this as well. But, in fact, these christians are widely recognized as abusive and the people they target as victims.
There is one case where we agree: telling somebody they are wrong is not gaslighting, ever. For example, Bob claims Lizard people blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Alice says Bob that he is wrong about that. There is a truth-claim from Bob, and Alice refutes that truth claim. This is not manipulation or gaslighting or anything like that. Similarly, if Trump claims that climate change does not exist, that is not gaslighting - he is simply, wrongly but simply, trying to refute something. This is all fine.
However, things start to get messy when Alice says to Bob: you have always been vulnerable to conspiracy thinking. This is where Alice is making a new truth claim herself that is not about Bobs particular views, but about his capacity to hold any view at all. It doesn't refute Bobs truth-claim about the Lizard people, at least not directly. In fact it doesn't even address this at all. Instead, it aims to persuade Bob of 2 things:
1. I am vulnerable to conspiracy thinking.
2. Therefore I should not trust my own judgement in case of the involvement of Lizard people in the Nord Stream pipeline.
Ok. However, it also sows more doubt in Bobs mind:
3. If I can't be trusted to think about Lizard people, how can I be confident in any other matters? Should I even vote? Maybe I am crazy.
Now, maybe Alice says she was just trying to do Bob a favor and rid him of delusional views about Lizard people, but does that matter? The effect is the same: Bob is starting to doubt himself. Has he been gaslit by Alice?
Suppose we later find out that this was her intention after all, and this is just one step in her attempt at gaining control over Bob. Is it now gaslighting? Of course it is, but I would argue it was already so in the first place.
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.
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.
If limited to the perspective of debate, gaslighting is just a variation of an ad hominem attack, which is easily recognized and not subjective at all.
Telling somebody they are wrong is never gaslighting, but suggesting they can't be right due to some personal flaw often is.