Gaslighting Democracy and the Double Bind of Truths
A psychological perspective on the theatre of lies
When Donald Trump stood before the United Nations and declared that climate change was “the biggest lie ever invented,” he was not only engaging in political theatre, but was also deploying a psychological strategy that reaches far deeper than policy or science. His lies are effective, even when the majority of people recognise them as false, because liberal democratic cultures are particularly vulnerable to the psychological dynamics that are employed by populist leaders.
It has been well documented that at the heart of Trump’s approach is a narcissistic strategy. Just to recap: In this mode, he positions himself as the final arbiter of reality. Supporters do not have to think (rational), they have to trust him (emotional). In this way, science and expertise are not just dismissed but rendered impotent because the conversation no longer happens at a rational level. He performs a kind of theatre in which humiliation of the “other” inflates his own authority and strengthens his supporters’ loyalty. Critics are not simply wrong but malicious (emotional response). The world is split into those who are with him, and those who are against him.
This strategy works best in conditions where the tension is high, because it offers emotional relief.
We all live in a time that the writer Margaret Atwood calls the ‘everything crisis’. A time where the ideas we have had for our future and our present are giving way to a bleak reality of climate disruption, biodiversity loss, increasing inequality, the breakdown of democracy, and many other inter-connected crises that all amplify each other. Climate change is a multiplier that intensifies every other crisis, across every sector of life. It is the context within which the breakdown of ecological, social, political, and psychological systems unfolds at greater and greater speed.
To acknowledge its reality is to face vulnerability, loss and uncertainty. By naming it a hoax, Trump protects his audience from pain. He offers a simpler, more comforting story: there is no problem, and if there is, it has been fabricated by others with ulterior motives. The burden of responsibility evaporates, and the reckoning with the loss of privileges is avoided.
The technique that underpins this theatre is gaslighting. Gaslighting is a form of manipulation designed to sow confusion and make people doubt their own perceptions and sense of reality. It floods the space with contradiction and untruths until people are overwhelmed.
In political life it operates by denying observable facts, by accusing others of the very falsehoods one is engaged in, by trivialising concerns as overreactions, and by burying old controversies beneath a flood of new ones. Its power lies in repetition. Psychological research shows that repetition breeds a sense of adaptation. So when a leader repeats a lie relentlessly it begins to feel more familiar, even to those who know better. The result is disorientation. People feel exhausted, and institutions that exist to hold memory and truth, such as journalism, science and law, begin to lose legitimacy because they simply can’t hold someone to account when almost everything they say is a falsehood. Repetition is effective because it normalises what once felt unacceptable. Over time, the extraordinary becomes ordinary.
When the public understands that the leader is lying, yet the lies continue unabated without consequence, a dangerous corrosion sets in. People experience a sense of helplessness, as if truth no longer matters and effort is futile. Outrage turns into cynicism and then into disengagement. This phenomenon is well documented in abusive relationships and termed ‘learned helplessness’.
A president lying openly to the world’s most important political forum is no longer shocking but simply part of the background noise of daily life. Some retreat into the belief that all politicians lie, so there is no point in resisting. Others become even more polarised, clinging more tightly to their side of the divide. People feel betrayed by the very system that was supposed to protect them. Trust in all institutions begins to fray and the sense of living in a shared reality dissolves.
All of these factors create a profound double bind. A double bind is a no-win situation, which arises when a person is caught in a situation with two contradictory demands, each of which cancels out the other, and in which escape is impossible. Whichever way you respond, you are wrong.
If liberal societies allow lies to circulate unchecked, truth erodes. Gaslighting requires confrontation and boundary-setting, but the restrictions needed would undermine the very principles and values that democratic societies are built on.
If we allow leaders who lie access to the usual platforms, we allow them to undermine our core values. If we withdraw access, we are left without the shared frameworks that make social life possible and thereby undermine our own values.
Trump’s lies respond to people’s need to feel safe and secure in ways that make us all unsafe. If we successfully expose his lies, everyone is left feeling unsafe and insecure.
These are just some examples of the entanglement in countless double binds. Gaslighters thrive in precisely this trap because they do not share the same commitments. They exploit hesitation and moral scruple, knowing that their opponents will be paralysed by the very values they are trying to defend.
This is exactly the kind of trap that Gregory Bateson and his colleagues described in the 1950s when they were exploring paradoxical communication and described the dynamics of double binds.
Liberal democracies are especially vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. Liberal societies hold a deep faith in human rationality and progress. The assumption is that people are purely rational beings and if they are presented with facts, they will make rational choices. Hence, public life is built around a respect for evidence and the assumption that debate is a good-faith exchange of rational arguments in which reason will eventually prevail. Gaslighting does not play by those rules. When reason fails, a culture that does not engage with the emotional and psychological reality of the human Psyche is left with few tools to respond.
Bateson argued that resolution does not come from rationally weighing up one side or the other or from working within the parameters of the double bind but from shifting to a higher order of understanding. A double bind cannot be worked out, it can only be transcended by recognising the paradox itself and stepping into a wider frame. Instead of trying to “win” the bind, we first need to acknowledge it with awareness. The key is recognising that double binds are not problems to be fixed but invitations to a shift in consciousness. They reveal the limits of the logical mind and call for a wider, more systemic awareness. In other words, weird situations need the capacity to come up with weird and unfamiliar responses.
So if liberal societies are to resist manipulation, they must recognise that the response requires more than fact-checking. The rational intellect alone cannot carry us through, because the problems themselves exceed the domain of reason.
In order to understand why outright denial is on the rise again, we may first have to look at the role of psychological defence systems. The definition of trauma is overwhelm that we are not resourced to deal with. The psyche can only process what we are psychologically able to metabolise. What we can’t metabolise we have to reject in order to function psychologically. These defences can be as crude as denial, when there is no support to metabolise the magnitude of a situation or more subtle and hidden, like in the case of disavowal, when there is insufficient support.
Disavowal is a psychological term that describes the emotional disconnect or splitting off from what we intellectually know to be true. This is a defence mechanism, where climate change reality can be accepted intellectually and discussed openly and coherently but this knowledge stays compartmentalised and separated off from a coherent, embodied and emotional response. Disavowal allows a person, a company or a government to split off uncomfortable truths so that they don’t interfere with familiar plans, actions and habits. In this way emotional equilibrium can be maintained.
The more reality is systematically distorted or avoided in this way, the more anxiety builds up unconsciously and the need for further disavowal increases.
When reality catches up with the psychological defences and the splitting is no longer possible, there comes a crunch point:
The defence mechanism can be increased and defended against through outright denial, anger, denigration, righteousness, intimidation and even violence. In the public domain, this eventually risks leading into a collective psychosis: a state that occurs when a large portion of a society loses touch with reality and descends into delusions.
The alternative is a necessary collapse into anxiety. This is a difficult option when a person, an organisation or pockets of society are not equipped to tolerate strong or overwhelming emotions. If there is no psychological containment, this risks to look like psychological breakdown at large scale.
We currently don’t equip people to bear the unbearable truths of a world order in collapse. Being asked to be optimistic, positive and hopeful whilst the evidence stacks up to the contrary is not a sign of leadership. It is a form of gaslighting of a different kind.
Climate change is so much more than an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere. If we don’t equip people to meet challenging times with psychological maturity, we risk facing a mental health crisis at global scale at a time when we need clear thinking more than ever. This will not look pretty.
What we require to transcend double binds is a form of “wise mind,” a capacity that draws on the whole of our sense-making faculties and allows us to deal with difficult situations. This includes the analytic clarity of intellect but also embodied knowledge that arises from lived experience, emotional intelligence, imaginal faculties that open new possibilities. When we access all of these together, a different quality of perception becomes possible and new and unusual responses reveal themselves. These states are best achieved in community with others, where co-regulation can create supportive synergies.
Yet reaching this place of regulation often requires the disruption of familiar patterns. If we want things to come out re-arranged, we must first allow the familiar order to be deranged. The tidy structures of linear thinking, with their craving for certainty, must be unsettled.
Of course our institutions are defended at all levels against this level of change.
Despite frequent talk of “wellbeing,” “resilience,” and “mental health,” our major institutions remain profoundly defended against genuine psychological depth. At almost every level, the structures through which we organise public life are designed to minimise complexity, vulnerability and introspection.
75% of young people worldwide feel anxious about their future (Hickman, 2021) and yet no efforts are made to attend to the psychological toll of living in these times. Education systems, remain largely geared toward measurable outputs and cognitive performance. Schoolchildren learn to solve equations but not to stay with difficult emotions or navigate paradox. The inner dimension of experiencing life is treated as private rather than as a legitimate field of public learning.
In politics, the aversion to psychological capacity to access our wisest most regulated sense of self is even more striking. Policy-making is dominated by technocratic metrics, cost-benefit analyses, and polling data. While there is growing discourse about “behavioural insights,” it is almost always applied instrumentally, as a way of nudging citizens toward compliance rather than helping them develop inner resilience or collective maturity. Leaders are expected to project certainty, strength and invulnerability. In such a climate, the possibility of ‘wise mind’ is actively undermined.
Corporations and workplaces echo the same pattern. Programmes on “mental health” or “wellbeing” tend to be framed in individualistic terms of stress management or productivity enhancement. They rarely address the deeper organisational cultures that produce burnout, alienation and ethical compromise. The inner life is instrumentalised to maintain performance, not to question the system that demands it.
Even in the psychological professions themselves, depth is often constrained. Therapists are trained in specific models and narrowly defined outcomes. Funding systems in public health favour short-term symptom reduction over long-term transformation. There is little space for imaginal or soul-based approaches without the risk of being seen as unscientific. The profession that should be leading on depth often finds itself squeezed into the same productivity logic as everything else.
At a cultural level, the media environment reinforces primitive defences. Social platforms reward outrage, speed, and fragmentation. News cycles compress complex realities into headlines and soundbites. Cultural narratives valorise heroic individualism instead of complex stories that pay attention to context and patterns of relationship. This constant pressure toward performance leaves little oxygen for the slow work of collective maturation.
No wonder that this cultural defence system created an emotional and psychological dearth that can easily be ignited into a wildfire with the slightest spark.
This is why I believe that the move toward a culture that promotes ‘wise mind’ is not simply a matter of individual practice but of national security.
In order for societies to be resilient against false promises and solutions that call to the most reactive and triggered parts in us, there is no way around, but to pay attention to everything that has been exiled for so long. It would mean redesigning our systems to make space for the very qualities we currently pathologise or privatise. This requires a genuine care for how people feel, an inclusion of a more complex and soulful approach to mental health and the nurturing of moral purpose beyond neo-liberal ideals. What I am talking about is the cultivation of a collective emotional capacity at every aspect of life. I know how unrealistic this sounds, but a society that cannot metabolise grief, fear, or shame in times of upheaval is easy prey for denialists who promise relief through simple lies.
Spaces where people can gather to process their free-floating anxiety, to acknowledge vulnerability, and to share the pain of living in difficult times are not luxuries. They function as inoculations against manipulation. They strengthen the social fabric so that citizens do not collapse into cynicism or helplessness. Yet, ironically, there is almost no funding for this kind of work. I know this first hand.
Last year I founded the Centre for Climate Psychology as a way of nurturing the wisest parts of ourselves. Our mission is to transform the deep cultural, emotional, and relational patterns of the metacrisis by weaving psychological and systemic wisdom into how we think, act, and lead. The work has been endorsed and supported by leading thinkers in their fields, and yet we continue to operate without any financial backing because we do not fit conventional funding categories. The dominant response to crisis consistently prioritises technological fixes or linear narratives of progress. Even the way foundations and funders organise their giving seems to enact the very rationalities that are part of the crisis itself.
At present we are so far from creating the conditions for true transformation that it can feel almost naive to write these words. And yet this is precisely why we remain vulnerable to leaders and systems that exploit our unprocessed anxieties. It is also why it appears that we would rather stumble into mayhem and collapse than risk unsettling the familiar patterns and habits that keep us trapped.
The systemic constellation facilitator Stephan Hausner describes in his book Even If It Costs Me My Life, that the loyalty to dysfunctional yet familiar patterns can be stronger than the will to survive. Families, organisations and even whole cultures often cling to what is known, however destructive, rather than risk the disruption of change. The familiar feels safer than the unknown, even when it kills us.
This bleak insight speaks directly to the political and ecological moment we are living through. Again and again, we see societies clinging to technocratic fixes, authoritarian strongmen, heroic narratives of control. The preference is to stay within destructive double binds than to let go of the logic that binds us to them. To allow those patterns to be unsettled would mean facing the disorientation of moving in the dark. And yet, as Rebecca Solnit reminds us in “Hope in the Dark” (2004): The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave”
Cover photo: By Center of Climate Psychology
