The challenges of communicating gangstalking
A lot can go wrong when explaining gangstalking to non-TIs
How can I express the essence, the truth, of what I am experiencing? It becomes on the face of it a little harder the more normalised it is, the more inured to it I become.
I fall into that situation of forgetting to start from where my interlocutor is at. I see too many trees and not enough forest.
This is a great danger, I think, and the reason why many TIs fail to gain recognition from their families and friends of what they are suffering. The issue needs to be approached extremely carefully because it contains not just one possible misinterpretation ( that you are delusional), but because it needs multiple interpretive conditions to be in place before it makes sense.
I want to talk about why that is, and what those conditions are.
I think I know a little about communication, especially language. The symbolic, the rational, even the logical, are always interpreted through schemata. This is why two people can interpret the same situation radically differently. As the great Anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote, ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of meaning he himself has spun’. This also accounts for the remarkable effectiveness of language. Interpretive frames are like keys that decode otherwise ambiguous symbols.
The problem is in knowing which code to apply.
Cultures and subcultures are amalgams of different codes that fit together imperfectly but reasonably well enough. Important parts of the code are the ‘signatures’ that signal which key should be used for a particular symbol or text. As Geertz wrote, a wink is such an example. It can be read as a twitch, a seductive invitation or as a marker of jocularity. It can also be read as the citing of a wink, adding another layer of interpretation (you could name another dozen at least).
I happen to live in a wealthy, medium sized OECD nation with a European colonial past. It is a Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic country. Where, in any corner of this society is the kind of interpretive framework that could make sense of the experience of the average TI (remote neural monitoring, electronic harassment, etc)?
By the time they have come to an understanding of what they are experiencing, the average TI has produced an explanation involving secret technology, security agencies and shadowy organisations. This has offered them an alternative interpretative pathway to what they probably feared before - either 1) that their neighbours were surveilling them or 2) that they were suffering mental illness.
Their experiences from then on in become wrapped around this interpretive framework. More importantly, the interpretation works retroactively to make sense of events that were otherwise interpreted as 1) or 2) above, or ambiguously.
They’ve come to this interpretation through internet research, usually. And like any good interpretation, it sheds its own scaffolding, its interpretive framework. So it is very difficult to see their new reality as anything other than reality itself. They forget about the role of the interpretive framework.
Their attempt to communicate their situation to friends or family will founder on this fact. They really need to convey the whole package, experience and interpretative framework, and usually in a very precise structure, if their message is to avoid the fate of either going over their audience’s heads or slotting into a pre-existing interpretive framework.
On its journey from sender to receiver, the message (say, I am being tortured, monitored, through unaccountable electronic remote systems operated by criminals or security services) needs to avoid unfavourable interpretations that will divert it as well as dig its own novel interpretive foundations in the mind of the receiver.
This is a challenging task, to say the least. Here are just a few of the diversions and foundations that are essential to the interpretation of the TI experience:
Necessary foundations
Brain is not secure
Public computing capabilities are dwarfed by secret military and intelligence systems
Military and intelligence agencies are driven by arms-race logic (if we don’t develop it, China or Russia will)
Outsourcing illegal and unethical work to contractors muddies the waters of responsibilty
Highly illegal covert testing is ‘justified’
Diversions to evade
Hearing voices = psychosis
I am centre of strangers’ attention = paranoia and/or narcissism
Brain is too complex to hack
This list is far from complete. I will develop it further in coming posts. The point is that without these foundations and without evading the misinterpretations, the TI will at best find their audience quizzical, nonplussed, and at worst, will find themselves alienated and even forced into psychiatric treatment.
The program knows this, and it knows that a growing support base of TI allies presents a major threat, given that political and public pressure will force inquiries as well as demoralise those on the inside, potentially creating leaks.
We need to band together on the science of communicating the TI experience.