Opus 2024-432: Jumpstart

I just came through a session of gaslighting.  It’s something I am becoming more aware of, and recognizing it is helping me to deal with life.  I am very susceptible to gaslighting.  It comes from a willingness to see myself as the problem and a lifetime of trying to figure out what I did wrong.  Without minimizing my mistakes I am coming to understand that many of my “mistakes” are simply attempts by other people to gaslight me, or control me.

As I was thinking about that, my mind went, as it often does, to how this relates to God, whom He is, what are His attributes and how He deals with us.  I had a hard time accepting the idea that God might gaslight people.  It just doesn’t seem like something He would need to do.  So I moved on

From there I went to thinking about how we come up with these new terms.  You might know the source of the term “gaslight.  But I thought of the other terms that we like to throw around such as ADD which evolved into ADHD.  It wasn’t enough to say hyperactive, or hard time  concentrating.  We needed some lingo, we needed some kind of a scientific sounding designation so the common people feel like they need an expert.  I seems if you can think up a new acronym, then it’s an open door to government money.  I had a school psychologist who was doing a presentation on autism, and during that he admitted that much of the rising autism is caused by expanding the definition, and one of the reasons they would expand the definition is it will put more children under their umbrella.  The more children under your umbrella the more federal money you got.  You see how that works?

These terms don’t really have much use if they are as simple as gaslighting.  That’s another word for passive aggressive.  Which is another extension of manic depression.  All we really need to do is say that person is trying to manipulate you.  But it gives us a springboard to jump off in our understanding.  It gives us a new word so that we don’t have to go back and explain everything up to that point.  Did you notice how I didn’t explain gaslighting to you?

So some of this jargon has value.  It helps us to jumpstart conversations.  It means we don’t have to go back and start at zero.  We don’t need to explain where we are on abortion if we say we are a Democrat.  Being a Calvinist, if you will admit it, lets people know where you stand on a whole host of issues.  We might be able to start at 50%.  Of course there’s always the danger that we have different definitions but life is full of adventure.

homo unius libri