Wazzup Pilipinas!?
Have you ever looked at your grocery bill, your crumbling local infrastructure, or the shrinking numbers in your bank account, only to turn on the news and hear that everything is fine? Have you ever felt a profound sense of cognitive dissonance—a vibration in your skull telling you that what you are seeing with your own eyes is at war with what you are being told by the podiums of power?
You are not crazy. You are the audience in the most sophisticated theater production in human history.
Governments and entrenched power structures have evolved beyond simple censorship. They no longer need to burn books because they have learned a far more effective method of control: they burn the truth by drowning it in a flood of noise, redefinition, and manufactured crises.
Here is how the machinery of state-level gaslighting operates to make you look away from reality.
1. The Dead Cat Strategy (Weaponized Distraction)
The political strategist Lynton Crosby famously described the "Dead Cat" maneuver: If you are losing an argument about facts/policy, you throw a dead cat on the dining room table. Suddenly, no one is talking about the policy anymore; everyone is screaming, "My God, there is a dead cat on the table!"
In the modern era, the government does not just throw the cat; they feast on the chaos it causes.
The Mechanism: When a scandal regarding corruption, economic failure, or incompetence threatens to breach the surface, the narrative shifts instantly to a polarizing cultural issue.
The Result: Instead of demanding accountability for billions in missing funds or failing healthcare, the populace is manipulated into a frenzy over symbols, statues, or inflammatory social media tweets.
The Reality: While you are fighting your neighbor over a manufactured culture war, the vault is being emptied behind your back.
2. Linguistic Theft: The Orwellian Redefinition
If the government cannot change the reality, they simply change the dictionary. This is the core of systemic gaslighting: the denial of shared language.
"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." — George Orwell
When the economy recedes, they do not fix the economy; they redefine the technical definition of "recession." When inflation devours your savings, they rebrand it as "transitory" or, more insultingly, a "high-class problem."
By softening the language, they attempt to soften the blow. They tell you that less is actually more, that censorship is actually safety, and that surveillance is actually freedom. They ask you to deny your immediate sensory experience in favor of their curated data points.
3. Hypernormalisation: Faking a World
Documentarian Adam Curtis coined the term Hypernormalisation to describe a situation where the government, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex "real world" and constructed a simpler "fake world" run by corporations and stable (yet hollow) political narratives.
We all know it’s fake. The politicians know that we know it’s fake. And yet, because the alternative—facing the collapse of the system—is too terrifying, we all play along.
The Simulation: We focus on GDP numbers (which look great for the elite) rather than purchasing power (which is plummeting for the worker).
The Gaslight: When you complain about the quality of life, you are hit with a barrage of macroeconomic statistics designed to invalidate your personal struggle.
4. The algorithmic Divide and Conquer
Historically, a united populace is the greatest threat to a corrupt government. Therefore, the primary goal of modern governance is the atomization of the citizen.
Using the tools of Big Tech, power structures benefit from an algorithm of rage. If the "Right" and the "Left" are locked in a perpetual death match, neither side has the energy to look upward at the puppeteers holding the strings.
They convince you that your enemy is the person struggling alongside you—the immigrant, the rural worker, the urban progressive—rather than the policymakers who designed the cage you both inhabit.
5. Crisis as a Management Tool
There is an old political maxim: "Never let a serious crisis go to waste."
Fear is the ultimate blinding agent. When a population is afraid—of a virus, of a foreign war, of climate doom, of financial collapse—they look to the state for protection. In that moment of collective panic, critical thinking is suspended.
The Shift: During crises, massive transfers of wealth occur. Civil liberties are quietly suspended. Emergency powers are enacted that rarely get repealed.
The Trick: The government presents itself as the savior of a disaster that, in many cases, their own negligence helped precipitate.
Conclusion: Breaking the Spell
The ultimate goal of this manipulation is not to make you believe the lie, but to exhaust you until you stop fighting for the truth. They want you to become cynical, checked out, and passive. They want you to scroll past the corruption because it feels too big to fix.
Do not let them.
The antidote to gaslighting is a firm grip on reality. It is trusting your eyes over their spreadsheets. It is realizing that when they tell you to look "over there" at the shiny new distraction, the real story is almost certainly happening right here, in the shadows they are trying to hide.
Refuse to be an extra in their theater. Walk off the stage.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
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