The Truth-Teller Paradigm: Institutional Gaslighting, Structural PTSD, and Collective Resistance

Capitalist and bureaucratic orders endure less through force than through institutional gaslighting—denial and pathologization that relocates structural harm onto individuals. It advances Structural PTSD as an analytical (not clinical) construct: chronic dysregulation produced by scarcity scripts, eligibility rituals, and moral coercion. Grounded in Foucault’s (1977) concept of normalization and linked to cultural/collective trauma (Alexander, 2004; Eyerman, 2019), it bridges micro symptoms (numbing, hypervigilance, narrative fracture) with macro power and institutional betrayal (Smith & Freyd, 2014). Building on Sewell’s (1992) “duality of structure,” the Truth-Teller Paradigm is theorized as parrhesiastic boundary-setting that scales from personal refusal to organizational voice and, with solidarity, to institutional reform. Truth-telling is framed as infrastructural labor: naming harm, interrupting trauma-bonded compliance, and reorienting practice toward empathy and care. Reframing post-traumatic growth as resistance, the framework provides a diagnostic lens for making invisible harms legible across policy, education, and healthcare, and specifies pathways for moral speech to rearticulate institutional schemas toward emancipatory change.