The Biggest Gaslight of Them All

Because it really isn't that complicated...

First, for those of you who are still a bit uncertain as to what the term “gaslight” means, other than something both sides seem to think is bad, here’s the formal definition:

Gaslighting Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster

psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator. Gaslighting can be a very effective tool for the abuser to control an individual. It's done slowly so the victim writes off the event as a one off or oddity and doesn't realize they are being controlled and manipulated.

The short form version is, “Who are you going to believe? Us, or your lying eyes?”

One of the biggest examples of mass gaslighting occurring today - actually, since the mid-1960s - is the notion that fixing anything worrisome to normal, average folk in the public or private sphere is very, very, very, very complicated, and should be left to “experts” who are educated and trained to deal with such very, very complicated matters.

Girls who decide they are boys - not want to be, but actually are - and boys who genderbend in the opposite direction? Well, that’s too complicated for you to even understand, let alone do anything about, even if it involves your own kids. Best you leave it to experts in child psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, or even school teachers to deal with, since they all know better than you about the wellbeing of your own kids.

Joe Biden’s Monthly Million (Military Age) Men Marches across our borders? Well, son, that is a very complicated question. You should leave the answer to a bunch of politicians who are being paid to have political viewpoints entirely in line with those who are paying them. Clue - that isn’t you, unless you are Facebook, lobbyist organizations for leftwing causes, Walmart, Big Agriculture, or the fast food industry.

“Catastrophic” climate change? (Formerly Global Cooling, Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate Emergency, etc., etc.) Again, a matter for experts only, due to the extreme complexity involved in explaining how a consensus of the knowledgeable managed to switch from Global Cooling to Global Boiling in a bit more than half a century - and still have precisely zero of their predictions either way pan out..

Or how about the economy? You know, the one you’re currently experiencing in which you have to drastically cut back your spending on fripperies like food, clothing, and shelter because Joe Biden has given you “the best economy in decades?” Well, trying to figure out that one is far too complex for you. It will take an army of trained experts to explain why “the richest nation on earth” is piling on a trillion dollars of new debt every four months or so while the Federal Reserve’s Magic Money Machine is desperately trying to damp down that non-existent inflation, and in the process wrecking the hopes of younger generations to ever own a home, given that mortgage costs have more than doubled thanks to their efforts.

And these are only a few aspects of modern American life that are too complex for you mal-educated simpletons to deal with. No, don’t ask - the problems of our educational system are way too complicated for the likes of you to deal with. Just ask any school board about it…right before they have you arrested for trespass and insurrection.

At times it must seem to the average schlub that existence itself is too complicated to deal with, and the only solution is to seek the terminal soma increasingly on offer from our expert classes: Sleep better at night with euthanasia! And why shouldn’t that make sense, given that we have slaughtered most of our potential population growth over the past century by terminating them before they even venture out of the womb?

We can start off by admitting one thing, at least: In many ways, modern life seems much more complex than what we remember from our childhoods, let alone those our our parents, grandparents, or (God forbid) our Boomer forefathers, whose remnants seem to have issues in coping with something as “simple” as an iPhone.

On the other hand, behold the beauty of a couple of current Gen Zoomers faced with the eternal mystery of a rotary dial telephone:

The truth is, a lot of what we are told is insoluble complexity is merely unfamiliarity. Hand those two kids a Samsung S24 5G Ultra and tell them to make a phone call, and other than wondering why you’d want to call instead of texting or posting a TikTok, they’d have zero problems in carrying out the “simple” task.

On the third (gripping) hand), neither generation would have any difficulties with the concept of “make a phone call,” since the technological matrix supporting that concept has existed since not long after Alexander Graham Bell uttered those famous words, "Mr. Watson – Come here – I want to see you" in 1876.

It is right here where the great chasm between the experts who deal with complicated complexity and Know Better than the Rest of Us (for whom Steve Jobs famously said he created and built his tech) yawns most widely, and where their self-serving cultural gaslight burns most brightly: That their concepts of the realities of daily life are the only valid concepts.

Hence, in the above mentioned example, only their concept of “making a phone call” - and all that entailed - would be correct. They would further tell you that the concept of a phone call that required a rotary dial phone was not only incorrect, it should not even be permitted to exist in their Brave New World, since your notions about it are merely false consciousness and can therefore be safely ignored.

But what they studiously ignore is the false consciousness they hold most dear - their contempt for the idea that simple reality is so complicated that humans, born and bred to apprehend and comprehend it on the most basic survival levels, cannot deal with it without their “expert” help.

So. Here. Enjoy a bracing dose of uncomplicated answers to the supposedly complex problems plaguing us today.

Illegal immigration. Enforce the laws currently on the books. Turn back illegals at the border. If they are inside our borders, find them, arrest them, and deport them. Add a few simple new laws as well. Punish those who would or do employ them. Effectively ban them from receiving state welfare payments. More stick (arrest, deportation) and less carrot (jobs, gubmint cash) would solve that “complex” illegal immigration problem simply and quickly.

Economy and inflation: Stop spending more than we earn. The notion of deficit financing - that is, borrowing future money to pay current national bills - did not become common until approximately 100 years ago.

Note that net inflation over about the first 150 years of our existence as a nation averaged minus 0.2%. That is, America actually experienced a very slight deflation during that period. One or two years might be inflationary, but they would shortly be balanced out by an equal period of deflation, for a net change over time of basically zero.

That period ended when the newly created Federal Reserve Bank was transformed into a full time debt creation machine used to finance America’s ascent to global hegemony at the cost of saddling us with an unpayable level of debt that will be erased only though an inflationary, (debt monetization and obscene Weimar/Zimbabwe levels of inflation), or deflationary, (a Greatest Depression that will make our 1930s experience look like a lame warmup for the real thing) event of catastrophic, perhaps even existential, nature.

Note that I do concede that while the solution to our economic woes - live within our means - is simple, it is now impossible to apply to our current situation, which has deteriorated to the level of insolubility. But as a sovereign remedy against future economic calamities, it should work nicely.

Homelessness. One of the great verities of history of all sorts is that you get what you pay for. Specifically, anything you encourage, whether financially, socially, culturally, or by any other mechanism, you will end up getting more of. Conversely, anything you discourage by similar means you will have less of. Since homelessness is generally a personal, and surprisingly rational, choice, (Why would I choose to work when I can get all the drugs, food, clothing, shelter, cash, and other such necessities for survival for free?), in order to reduce it, you must first reduce the subsidies that make the choice a rational one.

A couple of simple caveats here: Since some become homeless because of personal debilities (mostly mental illness), or on a temporary, involuntary basis ( sudden job loss, catastrophic medical expense, etc.) some sort of provision must be made for such situation - take care that such provisions don’t actually encourage or reward the homeless state. There used to be in America (I’m old enough to remember when this was the case), the notion that accepting charity, and especially government charity, was shameful to ordinary folks, which tended to greatly reduce its occurrence.

The second caveat involves dismantling the vast economic, governmental, and self-aggrandizing superstructure created to “solve” (through subsidies of every conceivable kind) a homeless existence. The simple understanding that all of these structures would cease to exist (maybe - some might be repurposed, much as libraries in urban areas have become de facto homeless shelters and benefit distribution gateways once Americans stopped reading books) if they were to achieve their purported goal of ending homelessness, should give you a clue as to why, despite ever-increasing efforts, the numbers of the homeless have only increased. So. Stop paying for homelessness, and you’ll have a lot less of it.

Boys into girls, and vice versa, along with all the other genderfuckery that has been draped over the original notion by the usual armies of sociocultural vampires who see it all as an opportunity to cash in one way or another.

Again, the answer is to stop paying for it. Initially, this primarily took the form of boys into girls, and through transvestism, (we called them drag queens back in the day), rather than transgenderism. One study showed a 7-1 disparity favoring the boys over the girls in terms of identifying with the opposite birth sex from 1978 to 1995.

‘An explosion’: what is behind the rise in girls questioning their gender identity? | Transgender | The Guardian

“I might have seen one child with gender dysphoria once every two years when I started practising. It was very niche and rare.” Now, somewhere between 10% and 20% of her caseload is made up of adolescents registered as female at birth who identify as non-binary or trans, with just an occasional male-registered teenager who identifies as trans.

You deal with that by not encouraging it. If you raise the personal cost of faddish indulgence, you will have less of it. So, simple solutions: Do not permit any “treatments” that involve physical interventions that could even potentially have lasting effects - I’m thinking hormones and surgical procedures here - to be performed on anybody not legally an adult who makes such decisions as an adult. Offer no financial subsidies for such procedures. Make no effort to penalize those who express their opposition to such practices, or even to the notion of “multi genderism” in general, and default to the traditional idea that the sex you are born with is the sex you remain, a matter of chromosomes rather than temporary consensus.

Some uncomplicated approaches to the problems of public education. The simplest and most straightforward strategy would be to ban employee unions in the public education system. Public education is a function of government, undertaken on behalf of the whole people, and financed by tax money extracted from the whole people. And as Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said wrote:

Letter on the Resolution of Federation of Federal Employees Against Strikes in Federal Service | The American Presidency Project

Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.

Much, if not most, of what is wrong with our public education system can be laid at the doorstep of the public teachers’ unions. It’s not just the quadrennial (or so) rape of the taxpayer purse for ever increasing salaries and benefits for a system that produces ever decreasing results in terms of its ostensible product, students well-educated to participate in the workings of the Republic, but also the inherently corrupt circular conveyer belt of taxpayer money from politicians to unions and back to politicians as freshly laundered contributions to their reelection efforts.

It is also the outsized and unwarranted power the unions give to school boards that enables these boards to defy the parents of the students they are responsible for educating in the full knowledge that as long as they toe the union line, the unions will have their backs when election time rolls around again. The public education unions are the Gordian knot strangling our education system. The solution is not complicated. Cut the knot. Ban the unions.

I would certainly agree with anybody who would protest that uncomplicated solutions are easy to propose, but much more difficult to implement. But that is only because the body politic is bombarded daily by vampire chorales with the message that nothing is simple, everything is complex and only growing moreso, and only trained experts have the wherewithal to deal with all the uncertainties and complications of life in the modern world.

Don’t believe them. This Gaslighter’s Brigade has only their own interests at heart, and those interests are not necessarily, or even often, bearing any resemblance to your own.

The middle-aged, upper class white men who wrote the instruction manual for what eventually became one of the most colossal and complicated endeavors in human history - the governing of the United States of America - used simple language to enumerate, in an entirely uncomplicated way, the necessary precepts.

In the real world, black is not white, up is not down, water is not dry, and light is not darkness. If you perceive that some “expert” proponent of complexity is trying to convince you otherwise, I’d advise you to make the almost reflexively simple judgement that you are being lied to, ie. gaslighted about the nature of reality in the matter, and proceed accordingly.

Is that an infallible remedy? Of course not. Nothing is.

But better than the complexity addled Clown Circus in which we struggle today?

Hell, yes.