On Gaslighting by Kate Abramson
From Abramson (2024, 56):
The central desire or aim of the gaslighter, to put it sharply, is to destroy even the possibility of disagreement—to have his sense of the world not merely confirmed but placed beyond dispute. And the only sure way to accomplish this is for there to be no source of possible disagreement—no independent, separate, deliberative perspective from which disagreement might arise. So he gaslights: he aims to destroy the possibility of disagreement by so radically undermining another person that she has nowhere left to stand from which to disagree, no standpoint from which her words might constitute genuine disagreement.
This description of gaslighting makes it infinitely more horrifying. I don’t know what bothers me so much about the idea that the possibility of disagreement is annihilated. Maybe it’s the sense that you lose complete epistemic agency via the barrage of epistemic manipulation. You are not even wrong; you are not competent enough to be considered wrong.