In the video that you're about to watch, I'm discussing the concept of epistemic injury.
The harm and damage and pain and hurt caused to victims of narcissistic abuse when their testimonies are disbelieved, when they're ridiculed and mocked, when they are cast as liars, when they are invalidated and disempowered, either by individuals or by society at large.
This is known as epistemic injustice, and I'm introducing the new concept of resulting epistemic injury.
Today I would like to discuss the philosophical dimension of gaslighting and yes, believe it or not, there is one.
To define gaslighting before we proceed, gaslighting is the deliberate premeditated act or series of actions intended to cause another person to doubt their sanity and their ability to gauge reality appropriately.
The perpetrator, the gaslighter, is perfectly aware of the difference between fantasy and reality between the gaslight version and what had really happened.
And there is a power asymmetry. Power asymmetry, which is the derivative of this asymmetry in information.
The gaslighter knows the facts. You don't.
As a victim of a gaslighter, you gradually begin to doubt yourself, to question yourself, to resort to external props in order to somehow sustain and restore your reality testing.
It's a crazy making world of make-belief. It's a paracosm. It's a fantasy. It's a delusion. It's a paranoid space.
Be that as it may. You get lost in it as in a wood.
And then it is a perpetrator who becomes your only anchor, your only island of stability, your only rock, your only reality tester.
This dependency comes later coupled with intermittent reinforcement and trauma, this is the agglomerate known as trauma bonding.
Having defined gaslighting, today I would like to discuss what he does to the victims, something called epistemic injustice.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm also a professor of psychology, and I dabble in philosophy and own a PhD in it.
Okay, we start with Fricker.
No, not what you're thinking.
Fricker, F-R-I-C-K-E-R. It's a she. It's a woman scholar.
And in 2007, she was the first to describe epistemic injustice in its two forms.
We will discuss both forms momentarily.
What is epistemic injustice?
Epistemic injustice is a wrong that is done to someone in their capacity as a knower.
You have information, you have knowledge, you have witnessed something, and no one believes you. People mock you, people doubt you, people chastise and denigrate you. People do not allow you to convey the information, to communicate it, to disseminate it, or even to refer to it and to describe it.
Individuals that are not getting adequate credit for their claims, individuals that are disparaged and criticized for making claims, these are individuals who experience a credibility deficit.
And this credibility deficit harms their capacity as rational agents, as knowers, and as people who have had experience.
It is a form of doubting the very experience.
In other words, epistemic injustice is a variant of what is known as invalidation.
Once your credibility is denied, as someone who has suffered, as someone who has been victimized, as someone who is witnessed injustice, as someone who wishes to communicate an internal state or an external state, once your credibility has been cast aside, you are actually invalidated. You become an invalid, a disabled person.
Now, the challenge to your credibility, the denial of your credibility, could be on any grounds. Your gender, your political identity, your socio-economic class, your race, your ethnicity. All these lead to epistemic injustice.
And there are two forms of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice or interpretative injustice.
Testimonial injustice occurs when there's a prejudice or a bias so that you address yourself to a group of people or to an individual.
And that group of people or individual, they are biased against you. They're prejudiced somehow. And they refuse to hear you out. They refuse to give credence and believe what you are saying. They deflate your level of credibility.
This is testimonial injustice.
And then there is hermeneutical or interpretive injustice where there is a gap in the collective interpretive resources that fairly disadvantages someone in terms of understanding their own specific experiences, social or individual.
So interpretive injustice is a result of social structures, social power, social prejudices, social biases, social discrimination. It's a group thing. It's a collective thing. It is the collective that offers a widely accepted interpretation of your experience. And if this interpretation does not agree with you, there's nothing much you can do.
On the other hand, testimonial injustice has to do with interactions. The interactions could be with other individuals, with groups, or even in the abstract. For example, you write a book about your experiences.
So, testimonial injustice is when you've gone through something. You've had some kind of experience, for example, narcissistic abuse, and no one believes it. People imply that you are insane, that you are delusional, or worse, that you are lying. Rape victims often encourage this kind of experience, encounter, I'm sorry, this kind of experience.
And so I mentioned the role of society in this kind of injustice. And I mentioned also that it involves power asymmetries.
There's a question of social power, also known as identity power. An identity power or social power depends on a shared understanding of social identities which gives rise, this understanding gives rise to the legitimization of social power.
So initially you have a common narrative as to who the group, who comprises the group, and then this common narrative allows the group to exercise coercion and power in its interactions with other groups or with individuals within the group.
Inequalities in social power help to create testimonial injustice, where prejudice causes the listeners to give less credibility to the speaker than the speaker deserves.
In other words, if you are within a social group, definitely if you are outside a social group, if you are in the in-group or if you are in the out-group, but you do not conform to the group's overarching narrative, the group's self-perception of identity, the group would penalize you by ignoring you, by doubting you, by humiliating you, by criticizing you, by rendering you ineffective in your attempts to communicate your experiences and gain a modicum of empathy, sympathy, or at the very least some understanding.
The key type of prejudice in such cases is identity prejudice by way of what we call the social imagination.
There are prejudicial stereotypes, and these are distorted images of social types.
For example, when you say most immigrants are lazy or most immigrants are criminal, that is to make use of identity prejudice. You imagine the immigrants, there's a form of social imagination. You imagine the immigrants as lazy or criminal and it becomes a reality for you.
And when you are confronted with a real-life immigrant, and this real-life immigrant tells you that he's not lazy, he's a hard worker, and he's never committed a crime in his life on the very contrary. He has been the victim of crime in his own country. You wouldn't believe it. You would doubt it. You would mock or ridicule this immigrant. You would assume the immigrant is lying.
And this is the power of interpretative epistemic injustice so we have racial prejudices, ethnocentric prejudices which are exactly the opposite. My group is the best. My group is superior. Everyone else is inferior and should be held in contempt and cannot be trusted. Gender biases are among the most pernicious and insidious and all pervasive.
And all these biases distort our perceptions of other people's credibility.
When victims of narcissistic abuse attempt to communicate the harrowing experience of having been maltreated and debased and degraded by a narcissist, the environment finds it very difficult to believe and to accept.
Because there's a series of stereotypes and hidden assumptions about humanity at large, about men, about women, about relationships, and this hamper or impede society's ability, or the ability of individual listeners, to give credence to the stories and the witness testimonies of victims of narcissistic abuse.
The shared reality bias is a tendency of individuals who interact frequently to converge on perspectives and judgments about the world. It has been first described by Anderson.
By converging on a common narrative, they exclude the perspective of others.
So a shared reality bias or a shared fantasy bias or a shared cult thinking group thinking bias. All these biases are exclusionary. They exclude other people.
Very often, the essence and the core of the bias is the act of exclusion.
People develop negative identity. I am never going to be like them, or we are never going to be like them. It is identity by contradistinction, by negation, by comparison.
And this shared reality bias, or in the case of relationships with narcissists, shared fantasy bias, or in the case of membership in cults, the cult mind bias.
These biases not only distort reality testing, distort the reality field, but they also exclude people outside who can provide corrective input, who can somehow help to restore reality testing.
People outside the group or people outside the individual, the biased individual, are perceived to be threatening, precisely because they can undermine the narrative and cast everything in doubt.
When you have agential power, the power of agency, someone controls the actions of another person or group.
Every agency, individual agency, collective agency involves the ability to alter, to modify the behaviors of other people and to induce change in the environment.
And in this sense, agency is intimately coupled with manipulation, not in the bad sense, not manipulation in the bad sense, but the ability to modify behaviors and environmental artifacts and attributes.
And so, agential power is the control or the capacity to control, passive agential power, control the actions of another person or a group with a case of structural power there is no agent.
And this is where the perniciousness comes in when the victim of narcissistic abuse confronts her abuser.
The abuser has agency. The victim has been denied her agency. The abuser has taken away her personal autonomy and independence. The abuser became her reality testing, denuding her and denying her the capacity to interact with reality on her own. The abuser isolated the victim from family and friends and support networks.
So the abuser has rendered the victim non-agentic without agency.
But this is a clear-cut case. It's very easy to comprehend, to discern, to witness, to analyze, and ultimately to reverse, for example, by walking away or by exposing the abuser.
This is not the case with structural power. Agential power is clear, visible, ostentatious, conspicuous. Structural power is hidden. It is surreptitious. It is stealthy. It is subtle. It is non-discernible.
Structural power is like slow acting poison. It permeates everything.
There is no agent there, but the actions of the group are still subject to control by means of the social structure within which they find themselves. By means of the narrative, by means of the storyline, by means of the so-called vision.
There's an overarching symbolic space that activates the agents within the social group.
And it is this symbolic space that endows the group with agency but takes away the agency of its members. It creates a hive mind.
And so when the victim of narcissistic abuse attempts or the victim of rape or the other events, a victim of genocide. When they attempt to communicate their out-of-the-box in ordinary, extraordinary experiences, they are confronted not only with agential power where people, individuals, make fun of them, disbelieve them, reject them, but they're also confronted with structural power, where society at large, or collectives within society deny the veracity of the witness testimonies. Deny the veracity through an alternative reality, through a plot, through a piece of fiction, through a narrative.
So if someone were to complain of genocide for example and describe his or her experiences as potential victim witness testimony of what is happening and has happened, then certain social structures would reframe the genocide, denied the genocide, called it by another name, or frankly, doubt the witness, claim that the witness is lying, prejudiced, biased, motivated by an ulterior agenda, and generally not to be trusted.
The structural uses of power work to create the social order, which is not a bad thing, but they work to exclude the other there's a process of othering in the bad sense the alterity of the other is denied this exclusion of the other and the narratives of the other the stories the other has tell, is the glue that holds the group together.
Freaker wrote in 2007, a practically socially situated capacity to control others' actions, where this capacity may be exercised actively or passively by particular social agents, or alternatively, it may operate purely structurally, as a kind of background or ambient, permeating every cell in the social structure.
And of course we all come across manifestations of this social power.
For example, stereotypes promote a bias or a prejudice that works against the speaker. It can result in a loss of knowledge because a low biased judgment of the speaker's credibility results in failure to learn what the speaker may know and is attempting to communicate.
So stereotypes reduce information flows within social groups. They serve to exclude information. They serve to delete information. They serve to reframe information so that it's no longer authentic or veritable or real.
Stereotypes are the equivalent of psychological defense mechanisms in the individual.
Stereotypes are built on bias. They are built on prejudice.
And because they are such, they tend to prohibit implicitly certain kinds of speech.
So when a victim of narcissistic abuse who happens to be a woman complains about having been abused by a narcissist some people and some social groups would negate her would ignore or devalue her testimony simply because she is a woman and women we all know are not reliable witnesses because they are too emotional or they are they are evil and wicked.
Of course, what I've just said is a series of stereotypes. It's not reality at all.
And so the value, you know, when you have had an experience especially a traumatic experience a difficult experience a harrowing experience when you were the subject of injustice the only way to restore your sense of value is by communicating what has happened to you and being believed. You need to be believed.
The value of your personal identity as a knower needs to be affirmed, not devalued.
When your capacity is someone who knows, someone who has experienced, someone who has witnessed, when this capacity is doubted and undermined, this is exactly the core feature of gaslighting.
So there are two types of prejudice used in testimony.
There are prejudices that lead to credibility excess and there are prejudices that lead to credibility deficit.
Now Freaker wrote in 2007 that the central cases of testimonial injustice involve identity prejudicial credibility deficits. I disagree completely. And so did Davis in 2016 and Medina in 2011.
You see, if your testimony, if your experience, if your truth is denied, of course there is a credibility, like people don't believe you. Your credibility is low. And of course, this causes you emotional and functional harm, psychological damage. No question about it. But we can conceive of situations where believing someone too much is also very detrimental to the individual who is believed and to society at large, to other people. For example, if the testimonies and the truth, so-called, the lies of a narcissistic abuser, are believed, and the testimony of the victim is disbelieved. We have a situation where there is a credibility excess. The abuser is much believed, too much believed. The abuser's credibility is excessive. And of course, this is extremely damaging it's extremely damaging to the victim similarly if you're a narcissist and you keep obtaining narcissistic supply and narcissistic supply means that people believe you that your credibility is high. That is not good because it pushes you to be delusional. Even if you are not a narcissist and someone keeps, people keep telling you that you're a genius, you're amazing, you're unprecedented and so on so forth. Sooner or later, you will come to believe it. If you have excess credibility, you become delusional. If you have access credibility, it impairs your reality testing. If you have access credibility, you would be prone to fantasy. And all these will end badly for you. Access credibility is as much a liability as credibility as credibility deficit.
Coming back to the second type of epistemic injustice, which is the hermeneutical or interpretive injustice, to remind you, this is when some important part of your experience, especially social experience, is discounted, is doubted, is questioned, is undermined, challenged, because of a gap in society's collective interpretive resources. In other words, society at large in totality is unable or unwilling or both to accept your experience because if they do it would challenge their firmly held long-standing prejudices and biases and narratives and the fiction that holds society together. So this is kind of epistemic injustice, which is really, really bad because it signifies a lacuna, a lack, in the social environment within which we make sense of human experience. So if you're a victim of narcissistic abuse and no one in your society believes you, no one is willing to even listen to what has happened to you, to your witness testimony, to your truth, this would negate you you as an individual to take away your selfhood your personhood your agency a great example is postpartum depression depression you know for many many decades women were reported A great example is postpartum depression. You know, for many, many decades, women were reporting that they have become very depressed after giving birth. Now, society had this social imagination that women automatically love their newborn babies. And that this love is so overpowering that it brings joy and elation and overcomes all obstacles and impediments and difficulties in raising a child. This was the social imagination. This was the narrative. This was the fiction. So women who said, I don't love my newborn baby, I'm very depressed. I hate this. These women were denied. Their experiences were negated. They were told that they are crazy. They felt ashamed and guilty because they were not good mothers.
Today we know that one third, yes, you heard me correctly, 33% and maybe 35% of women who give birth experience post-partum depression. It's a very traumatic, traumatizing and depressive event to give birth. And the exigencies and vagaries of raising a child can overwhelm any woman. This is an example. So in order to effectively engage in communication, we must assess the credibility of what is being said. When you talk to someone, the first thing you ask yourself, can I believe this guy or girl? Are they credible? Or maybe they're lying.
We need to make this assessment. It is the number one assessment in any conversation.
Body language, facial micro-expressions, general ambience give us clues, and we develop instant judgment.
This person I believe, this person I disbelieve. It happens a lot. In the courtroom, some witnesses are believed, others are not believed.
And by the way, there's no correlation between truth-telling and credibility. A witness may be telling the truth, and yet is not perceived as credible and the jury doesn't believe that witness.
And how we make this judgment of whether someone can be trusted or not, this is accomplished through the use of stereotypes concerning the speakers we confront.
So if we're talking to a woman, we're going to use stereotypes of femininity. If we're talking to a man, stereotypes of masculinity. If you're talking to a black person, especially in the United States, we would make use of racial stereotypes, etc.
Stereotypes mediate our assessment of the speaker's credibility. And this helps facilitate the ease with which we are able to communicate with others.
In other words, the use of stereotypes is a shortcut. It allows us to continue the communication without any measurable or discernible disruption.
However, it's very problematic, of course.
The use of stereotypes is indispensable to smooth communication, but it is prejudicial. It corrupts our judgments of the credibility of our interlocutors.
When we speak to a woman and we use stereotypes of femininity and stereotypes of women what it is to be a woman, of course we would be biased and prejudiced and we are very likely to get it wrong.
Indeed, the vast majority of communication between people is totally compromised.
Stereotypes are defined as widely held associations between a given social group and one or more attributes. And this definition is broad and we could break it down to three elements.
The stereotype could be neutral with respect to the reliability of the generalization made using the stereotype.
So we could say, for example, most Scandinavians are tall, they're tall, that is a stereotype but it is a neutral stereotype. So negative, it's not positive.
A stereotype can highlight certain types of cognitive, what we call cognitive commitments.
Stereotypes are not necessarily held only as beliefs, but they include also emotions, feelings, that are less transparent and very often repressed.
The beliefs are on the surface. The beliefs are cognitive processes. The beliefs are communicated and sometimes communicated verbally.
I believe that you align because of your experience as a black man.
That is a verbal communication of a doxastic, a belief-based stereotype.
But stereotypes are like icebergs. The tip of the iceberg is the cognition, the belief. 90% of the iceberg, the emotions, the feelings, the fears, the hopes, all these are submerged under the ocean of prejudice and bias.
Of course, stereotypes can be positive, negative, but they can also be positive.
For example, when people say, Jews are very good with money, that's a stereotype. It is a positive stereotype, nothing negative about being good with money. Or Jews are very clever.
Let's take another one. Less loaded. Jews are very clever. Unusually clever. Jews are super intelligent. That's a positive stereotype.
So stereotypes can be negative or positive, but one thing they all do, negative or positive, they exclude sincere, honest, informed, open-minded communication.
When you hold a stereotype, you're locked in, you're in a vegetative, comma, state. You're not open to information from the environment, period.
It's an echo chamber. It's what we call confirmation bias.
You are likely to accumulate only information and to grant yourself access only to knowledge that supports your biases and prejudices and exclude all other data.
So systematic testimonial injustice, epistemic, testimonial injustice, is defined by, was defined by, by the thinker as a widely held disparaging association between a social group and one or more attributes where this association embodies a generalization that displays some typically epistemically culpable resistance to counter evidence owing to an ethically bad affective investment which is just a fancy way of saying what I've just said.
So now we are faced with a situation where people come to us, people come to you and tell you, listen, I want to share with you what has happened to me in my recent relationship with the narcissist.
What has happened to me is not run of the mill abuse. It's not that, you know, I was shouted or physically bitten or my money was stolen, you know, all these things happened, of course, but it transcended it it was more than that.
I felt as if my soul was snatched. I felt as if my identity was shattered. I felt as if my dreams were absconded with. I felt as if I was de-animated. I was being deanimated. I felt as if I were living with a vampire or whatever.
So there's a desperate attempt to communicate the incommunicable.
And you as a listener, someone who has never experienced narcissistic abuse, you need to make a credibility judgment about the epistemic trustworthiness of the witness. You need to decide whether the witness is competent to make her statements.
For example, is she insane? Is she intellectually challenged?
So you need to make a decision. You need to gauge her competency.
And you also need to evaluate her sincerity. Is she sincere? Or is she lying? Is she Machiavellian and manipulative? For example, is she trying to induce a new pity so that you give her money?
So you need to judge, simultaneously, to adjudicate the competency and the sincerity of your interlocutor, the person you are talking to, the witness, the person who has experienced the Holocaust or the narcissistic abuse or the genocide or the rape or whatever it is.
And to do that, you judge them. There's a process of judgment.
And how do you judge them?
Well, first thing, you look at their skin color. Then you look at their gender. Then you look at the way they're dressed, which indicates the socio-economic level. Then you make a general judgment about the social type, the context, and so on.
In short, when you are judging the competency, sincerity, and credibility of another person, the information you use has very little to do with the other person. Most of it has to do with social cues, with environmental information, with a context, not with a person.
That makes it very difficult for victims to be believed.
Stereotypical association may be based not only on beliefs.
Stereotypes that are based on beliefs, they are known as doxastic stereotypes.
But we can have non-doxastic stereotypes. Stereotypes that are not based on beliefs and yet influence our perceptions of other people.
So stereotyping is not only a cognitive process.
For example, you may hold no prejudices against women. You don't have any prejudice against women.
But then, you come across an obese woman. And something will kick in, you'll be disgusted, you'll be repelled, and this would reduce your ability to believe her.
And the primary harm to people who are trying to communicate their experiences, their truth, trying to bear witness to what has happened, when they're disbelieved, when they're ignored, when they're mocked and ridiculed, when they are disparaged and humiliated and so on, it harms them, it causes damage. It inflicts on them trauma and pain. They are re-traumatized.
And the primary harm is the damage to their capacity as knowers.
Being treated as a purveyor of knowledge, being treated as someone who is capable of knowing, is an essential human value. When it is violated or doubted or undermined or challenged, you suffer a sense of injustice.
It's intrinsic. You can't help it. When you tell someone, listen, I just exited a horrible relationship and I've been abused and so on and so forth, and they doubt you, or worse, they tell you you're a liar, they mock you and so on.
Part of the harm, part of the damage is that you're perceived as someone who is not capable, innately and inherently, not capable of knowing. You don't have the capacity to know. So everything you say is meaningless and junk and should not be attended to or listen to.
It is a negation of who you are.
Because if I take away your cognition, what is left? Disregulated emotions in chaos.
So the act of disbelieving someone is the act of negating them. This is the primary harm.
The secondary damage occurs as a consequence of the primary harm.
And you could have practical consequences.
For example, if you go to court and you sue someone, and the court, the judge disbelieves you. They believe the other party. They disbelieve that is very damaging you may end up paying a lot of money because you were disbelieved and if there is a sense of epistemic injustice because you know what you know and you know it's a truth and yet there is some kind of failure, communication failure.
When the judge rejected your version of what has happened, your truth, your experience, your witnessing, when the judge had rejected all these, the judge had rejected you. You as an epistemic agent, you as a knower.
There's a general loss of what is known as epistemic confidence, epistemic authority.
This is exactly what gaslighters do in gaslighting.
They make you doubt your capacity to know. They demolish your epistemic confidence. They convert you from epistemic authority, someone who is capable innately of knowing, they convert you from this, an agent of knowing, into an agent of confusion.
Bewilderment, befuddlement, stupidity.
There's an implied criticism here. You're too stupid to know or you're too crazy to know so it's a judgment on your character on who you are and gradually the more the witness is doubted, the more the victim is denied, the more her experiences are described as or cast as lies, the more she is invalidated, the more she is socially constructed, as we call it the more she becomes exactly that.
If a woman comes to you and says I've been abused in a relationship and you tell her you have not been abused you're lying you're a borderline, you're hyper emotional, you're intuitive and you're unable to see the facts for what they are because you are grounded in fantasy and you're essentially insane.
If you keep telling the victim this, the victim will become it, will really become emotionally dysregulated, and would really be unable to gauge and evaluate reality appropriately, would lose the impaired reality, the reality testing.
So when you negate someone's ability to know and impose on them a stereotype, they conform to the stereotype in due time. It's a process of social engineering. It's a process of restructuring the other person's identity and personality.
And that's why victims of narcissistic abuse keep saying, I don't feel I'm the same person. I don't know what has happened to me. I'm not myself. I act in ways which are alien to me. I feel estranged to myself.
So, yes, because you have been re-engineered. You've been reconstructed. Someone changed the furniture within your mind.
Testimonial injustice excludes people. It's an exclusionary strategy.
It's as if when you exclude someone as a witness, someone who has had an experience, someone is trying to communicate to you some kind of truth. When you exclude them, you're telling them you cannot be trusted. You're untrustworthy. And so you cannot be a party to a trustful conversation.
And in the absence of a trustful conversation with others, there's no way to construe and put together a personal identity.
When you exclude someone consistently based on prejudice, based on bias, based on malevolence, ill intent. For example, in gaslight.
When you exclude someone consistently, it inhibits the development of personal identity and the formation of the self.
What happens to children who later in life become narcissists is that they were perceived by the parent as somehow not trustworthy. The parent did not trust the child, so the parent became overprotective because the child could not be trusted.
Or the parent became tyrannical, bullying and abusive, because the child cannot be trusted.
Or the parent started to spoil the child and pamper the child and isolate the child from reality because the child cannot be trusted.
Or the parent communicated to the child you're bad, you're unworthy, you're inadequate because the child cannot be trusted.
Trust is the key feature in the formation of what is known as secure base. The parental figures, especially the mother, they're secure bases.
And you can't have a secure base if the base does not trust you. You don't feel safe. You don't feel secure.
And you feel that it would be a serious mistake to develop a self.
If you develop a self, if you become you, you're going to lose your parents.
The condition for parental love is that you never become an individual. You never become you.
Again, this betrayal trauma involves silencing. Silencing of your authentic voice and which causes a deep sense of epistemic injustice.
The shared understandings and knowledge in any social group, starting with a family, even a single parent family is a group. Group can be as small as two. Group can be, you know, 340 million.
So the shared understandings and knowledge reflect the perspectives of different social groups.
There's always, in relationships, there's always unequal power. And unequal power has a distorting and disrupting capacity.
When you have an equal power, one group dominates the other. And domination sometimes leads to abuse. You know, the famous saying, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So one of the things that power asymmetry creates is that the interpretation of what's happening is distorted to fit the needs and priorities of the dominant group.
There's a distortion of the shared interpretive resources in ways that enable the powerful to make sense of their social experiences and invalidate the less powerful.
In short, in groups, it could be a gang, two people or 200 million people. In groups, there is a narrative that is permissible, allowed, accepted, legitimate, and that is a narrative of the elites, the narrative of the powerful people.
And there are narratives which are illegitimate, rejected as lies or distortions or exaggerations, invalidated, undermined, challenged. And these are the narratives and the personal experiences of the less powerful, of the disempowered.
In every society, someone else. Blacks in the United States. Of the less powerful, of the disempowered. In every society, someone else. Blacks in the United States, women in Iran, the identity of the less powerful changes, the mechanism does it.
Back to Fricker.
Fricker asks herself, what is the location of these problematic experiences within what she called the credibility economy? How does this distribution of epistemic resources across the domain happen?
In other words, in any group we have powerful people, elites, and less powerful people, the masses, okay? Call them this way.
In a single parent family, the elite is the mother, the less powerful, the minority is the child.
For example, in a cult, it is the cult leader and the cult members.
There's always something or someone more powerful and someone less powerful.
She asked herself, Freaker asked herself, by the way, a brilliant scholar, she asked her so, there is an economy of credibility, economy of believability within the group. Some members are believed, others are not.
How, what determines the distribution of these epistemic resources? How does this believability or credibility divided?
She said that in terms of epistemology and uneven distribution of resources involving concepts credibility and knowledge can lead to hermeneutical marginalization in otherwise what she was trying to say is that a socially disadvantaged group, again, I mentioned women, I mentioned blacks, children are a socially disadvantaged group.
We can think outside the box. There are many such groups, not only transgender and so on.
And moreover, you could be dominant in one social situation and disadvantage in another you can be member of the majority in one place and member of a minority in another for example when you emigrate.
So hermeneutical interpretative marginalization a socially disadvantaged group according to fricker is blocked from access to knowledge or access to communicating knowledge based on a gap in these resources in other, the asymmetry between the powerful and the less powerful is intended, is intentional.
Its aim is to block the less powerful from the capacity to communicate what they know, to silence them.
And when we're discussing all these elaborate philosophical constructs, bear in mind all the time, victims of narcissistic abuse.
As society becomes more and more narcissistic, the victims become the minority group. The narcissists become the powerful group, the leaders. The narcissists and psychopaths own and control the world. Victims of abuse are now the minority.
So narcissists and psychopaths would make every effort to deny the victims of narcissistic abuse a voice, to not allow them to communicate, to interpret or reinterpret their experiences in ways which kind of render the abuse palatable and legitimate and acceptable and understandable perhaps by victimizing or self-victimizing the narcissists and psychopaths.
And this is especially so, this denial of voice, this exclusion of communication capacity. This happens especially when there's a risk of rising self-awareness and self-consciousness.
When there's a minority group, could be, as I said, victims of narcissistic abuse, when there's a minority group, and they become self-aware, and they become conscious of what's happening around them. They understand their existence, the nature of their victimization, their marginalization and so on.
This empowers them. It may even reverse the power matrix, the power structure, and this is a danger that the elites cannot tolerate.
In this case, narcissists and psychopaths.
They're just shared, as I said, social imagination and their interpretive resources, they are part of this social imagination. These are concepts that are widely known and available for use. These concepts allow us to understand ourselves and to communicate these insights to other people.
The elite tries to suppress or deny the minorities, this ability. The elite blocks access to these shared tools of social interpretation and communication.
And I refer you to work by McKinnon in 2016.
And so coming back to the idea that marginalized groups suffer from hermeneutical injustice.
And there is a scholar by the name of Goetze. In 2018, he suggested that marginalized groups who are hermeneutically denied, whose access to shared resources of understanding and knowledge and truth is blocked, who are cast as liars or who suffer from a credibility deficit.
All these groups, he said, can develop an understanding on their own they don't need the elites they don't need these shared resources they can develop resources of their own
And what has happened in the narcissistic abuse movement and community which essentially I started in the late 1980s, is exactly this, self-empowerment.
The language that are developed in the 1980s is now in wide use and people have added to it.
It's a form of self-empowerment, self-discovery, self-exploration, and self-awareness, which is divorced and detached and not dependent on elites, especially narcissistic and psychopathic elites.
Goethe calls it, hermeneutical descent, like a rebellion.
Marginalized groups can develop their own interpretive tools to understand their own experiences they don't need anyone else
Goetzer said that the primary harm of permenutical injustice is when a subject has a distinctive and important social experience or individual experience, but they lack access to the dissemination of this experience, and they lack the intelligibility.
They lack self-awareness. They lack the language.
This intelligibility can be cognitive. They fail to possess the tools or the language used, no need it to sense the experience, to describe it, to convey, to communicate.
Or it can be a problem in the communication itself, when they are unable or prevented from communicating things, such truths and such experiences to other people.
As you see, narcissistic abuse and gaslighting emerge from a very interesting and new developments in philosophy and can be linked to these developments and these developments in philosophy can make much more profound sense of what's happening not only in the individual level not only on the interpersonal relationships level but on the level of society as a whole
Looking around us we are living in the world increasingly more shaped by narcissists and psychopaths we are all bound to end up being victims of narcissistic abuse sooner or later as the residents of the United States are discovering.
So we better get prepared.
And the only way to prepare is to acquire conceptual, philosophical and ideological tools.
And this is the reason for this video.
Tell your truth, bear witness, insist on your experience. Do not let others define you, silence you, prevent access and thwart your communication.
Be you.