Good Is Dead
How Gaslighting Shows Up in National Events
Photo from Canva
One of the defining behaviors of narcissistic abuse is gaslighting, not disagreement or ordinary conflict, but the slow and deliberate erasure of reality itself, carried out through denial, deflection, and distortion.
It appears when someone dismisses what they clearly said, reframes harm as misunderstanding, minimizes cruelty as humor, or avoids accountability by scrutinizing your response instead of their action.
Over time, this does more than confuse. It conditions the nervous system to distrust its own signals, eroding confidence in memory, perception, and moral judgment until doubt becomes automatic.
What begins as a private psychological violation does not remain private when it is normalized and left unchallenged.
At a national level, we are now living inside the mature expression of this same dynamic, where denial is no longer interpersonal but institutional, and reality is negotiated rather than named.
We are warned not to trust social media, yet live journalism now occupies a similar position of skepticism, not because truth has disappeared, but because it has been filtered, shaped, and softened by corporate and political interests.
News functions less as witness and more as narrative management, echoing the strategies once used by advertising agencies to mold public opinion, not only about products, but about people, events, policies, and wars.
Gaslighting at scale does not announce itself with force.
It settles in quietly.
As language shifts, ethical reflexes dull. Violence becomes complicated. Racism becomes enforcement. Killing becomes necessity.
And then there are moments when abstraction collapses into flesh and consequence.
Border patrol agents militarize community streets, a 37-year-old mother is killed, and the state names her a terrorist. Her last name was Good.
Good is dead.
Not metaphorically, not rhetorically, but literally and symbolically, carrying with it the unbearable irony of a nation willing to erase both a life and the value her name represents.
The deepest horror is not only the killing, but the dismissal that follows, the refusal to name the act for what it is, and the expectation that the public will accept the renaming of reality, just as individuals in abusive relationships are expected to accept: That did not happen.
You misunderstood.
You are overreacting.
History has encountered this moment before, often after the damage was done. After World War II, many Germans said they did not know, or that they were only following orders, or that resistance was impossible, while observers asked, again and again, how did this happen?
That question no longer serves us.
The question now is simpler, and far more unsettling.
Why aren’t you stopping it?
This is the psychological turning point, because gaslighting only succeeds when silence replaces self-trust, when fear of disruption outweighs allegiance to truth, and when people recognize the pattern yet hesitate to interrupt it.
Carl Jung warned that what we refuse to face in ourselves is projected outward onto an Other, an enemy constructed to carry what we disown. Projection allows violence to feel justified, even necessary, because the danger is imagined as external, contained, and unlike us.
But Jung also understood the inevitable reversal of this mechanism. When projection is sustained long enough, when institutions begin to enact what individuals once did in private, the shadow no longer belongs to the Other.
At that point, the question changes.
When does the Other become us?
When denial becomes policy. When moral injury is renamed as patriotism. When citizens see clearly, yet wait for permission to act.
John F. Kennedy once observed that “the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality,” a warning less about heroism than about the cost of refusing responsibility.
This is not a call to moral purity. It is a call to remain anchored in reality.
We are conditioned to believe that someone else will intervene, a leader, a system, a correction from above, yet the most sobering truth of any abusive dynamic, personal or national, is this.
No one is coming to save us.
The work begins where gaslighting ends, with naming, with refusing euphemism, with trusting what we see, and with saying, without apology: This happened. This is wrong. This matters.
We have to stop gaslighting ourselves.
Because when Good is dead, and we accept the lie that it never lived at all, the shadow does not disappear.
It takes our place.
written by Bren Littleton
Photo from Canva
Tin Flea Press c. 2026