Photograph Source: Film Gaslight (1944) – Public Domain
“Gaslighting” was Merriam-Webster’s 2022 word of the year, a selection based on the frequency of searches in their online dictionary. The term makes good sense on cultural grounds as well, given the ongoing influence of political and economic chicanery on the U.S. psyche. But “oligarch” was number two, and it may well prove to be the more consequential term – particularly for the working class.
Experts have long debated the reliability of language use as evidence of deep cultural beliefs, but in today’s information and media-saturated world it’s reasonable to assume that words trending in the metaverse have real analogues in — and even impacts on — cultural thinking.
So it seems natural that both gaslighting and oligarch were central to popular social consciousness in 2022, mainly due in the United States to media-enacted antics of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the like. Musk’s particular Twitter tantrums managed to unite gaslighting and oligarchy in ways heretofore seen mainly in the behavior of Gaslighter-in-Chief and oligarchic mini-me Donald J. Trump. As economist Paul Krugman recently declared “we’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch.”
That linkage of childishness and oligarchic behavior can provide some dark humor, with Musk’s blurring of the line between real world and mediated world suggesting that he finds the whole process amusing. In his recent fraud trial, Musk cheekily testified that, “Just because I tweet something does not mean people believe it or will act accordingly.”
But viewing oligarchic gaslighting as mere childishness papers over the real economic devastation wrought by extreme wealth. The fading middle class and subsequently expanding working poor, underemployed, and poverty-stricken remind us that we should take oligarchic power seriously, particularly given its ubiquity and wide-ranging enactors.
As Merriam-Webster itself notes, it is not just Musk and Bezos who are trending. It is also Vladimir Putin, who enables and has been enabled by Russian oligarchs. The war on Ukraine has turned gaslighting into very concrete and real devastation. But the insidious behavior of the oligarchy in the region had already been dramatized by the Ukrainian television series Servant of the People — a satire that offered not merely humor but also biting discussion of current social issues.
It is commonplace to focus on Servant as a near-perfect foretelling of Volodymyr Zelensky’s real-world rise to the Ukrainian presidency, an ironic prediction of his fictional character Goloborodko’s election to the post. Clearly life does imitate art; language and media truly do mirror reality. But the focus on Zelensky overlooks the series’ emphasis on the destructiveness of extreme wealth and power.
Oligarchs appear early and often within Servant. At first we see them in fragments — the backs of heads, partial faces, devouring mouths, and disembodied hands manipulating the action from afar. As the series develops, they are gradually revealed as specific figures. The ensuing — and sarcastic — semi-fictional portrayal of oligarchic power and its societal damage is both prescient and more than somewhat horrifying in light of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by James V. Catano.
James V. Catano | Radio Free (2023-02-15T06:47:21+00:00) How “Gaslighting” and “Oligarchs” Came to Rank as Top Words of the Year. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/15/how-gaslighting-and-oligarchs-came-to-rank-as-top-words-of-the-year/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.