‘Neurodivergence’ Is Both Stupid And Dangerous

We need to stop pathologising our existence and pay more attention to how we use words

Flankers. If I could use one word to describe modern western society, the word would be flankers. In a society reticent to engage in open dispute (because offence has been weaponised) a new system is required by which you, the individual, can win an argument without participating very much. After all there’s no point arguing with person X because they have Y characteristic.

You’re outgunned, you’re outclassed, you’re rhetorically outnumbered. You have to cede the ground. Come back with a sideways argument.

So humans flank.

Penguinism is a flanking manoeuvre designed to take the sting out of identity based arguments. It allows me to sit neatly in a little bubble of fluffy ornithological serenity observing others attacking an identity they’re unsure of with a large bat marked ‘open bias’.

Then I point it out. Part of how language games are played.

Society is moving away from broad flanking strategies where women like Amy Cooper leverage their vagina and fear against the melanin and social status of Christian Cooper.

It creates too much cognitive dissonance to parse out whether a woman’s right to feel safe in public trumps a Black man’s right not to be beaten to death by the military arm of the state.

Opinions on the matter generally varied based on melanin and vagina ownership.

But now, through intense overuse, group based flanking is no longer as a reliable strategy to cultivate ire. Society has now generated individual flanking spaces, we’re down to the ineffable and unquestioned nature of the self.

I knew we’d get here. The here I’m talking about is ‘neurodivergence’. The right to avoid questions and shape the universe around yourself

I’m not a fan of Neurodivergence

Human beings are by their nature divergent and strangely predictable. Human bodies (excluding the brain) are also divergent, though this divergence is limited depending on what we want to explore.

The more we find out about genetics and its sassier younger cousin epigenetics, the better we’re going to get at understanding how bodies diverge.

There seem to be only a limited number of heights, limbs, skin colours, and weights we could be. Anorexics are divergent from the morbidly obese in a fairly obvious way that’s easy to point out. If you force fed one and starved the other, you’d eventually hit a mid point in the bell curve.

Sure, there’d be bitching about human rights and pituitary glands but broadly speaking divergence on the aspect of weight goes either up or down.

You are heavier or lighter and adding calories or removing calories seems to be the main way that works

And before I upset the body positivity club — when they liberated Auschwitz and Belsen, they didn’t find anyone above average weight with a thyroid problem. You can mess about with the complicated middle mechanisms, but brass tacks it’s ‘calories in, calories out’.

However, this is divergence along a single spectrum. Same with height. Same with hair colour. Same with skin tone. These are clear linear paths across which divergence can be measured.

There may be different experiences for people with different skin tones , heights or sizes — but those experiences are not universal.

This is one of my main issues with identity based politics — it rarely gives credence to any experiential divergence once it has decided where on a particular spectrum of divergence you are.

It treats groups of people like a monolith in order to leverage the power of numbers and score political points. It doesn’t grant complexity or individution to the average human. Things that fail to recognise indivudals often turn out to be quietly and insidiously malevolent when you drill down into their core.

I think we should think of the world as a shared consciousness lake-like space in which individuals operate according to intricate psychological patterns — some of which maintain a level of predictability. I also think we should beware the big ideological beasts in the shared lakes of society — they eat little things.

The human mind is the most infinitely complicated thing in the entire universe. It translates experience into consciousness and processes information in real time to help us modify behaviour to our environment.

Even the average football fan makes AI look like an abacus.

To nulify neurodivergence you’d need two clones raised in exactly the same circumstances. Ideally without food, water, or light and even then I’m not convinced these two brains would be identical.

We don’t know enough about the internal workings or mechanisms of consciousness.

Your brain is therefore closer to your fingerprint. Fingerprints are entirely divergent — there is no normal fingerprint on which we can say ‘this is the fingerprint that is normal’.

There’s no baseline. There is no ‘neurotypical’ — there are just emergent patterns of behaviour. To say that you or anyone else is neurodivergent is pointing out the entirely obvious.

I’ll get to why that’s problematic in a second. But let’s talk about me.

The Significant Other Penguin has been sending me memes for a while, all of which are about ADHD. Based on these memes alone and being in an open relationship with my own brain for the last few decades, it seems very likely I meet some of the diagnostic criteria.

Could I be diagnosed? Probably.

Would I want to be? Nah.

Why not? It doesn’t tell me anything I don’t know. It’s interesting that’s all. I already know these things about myself and my life has already adapted around them.

I have provided myself with hundreds of small work-arounds.

Like many in the world — I’m a bit face-blind. I notice when people are built the same, dress the same, have the same sort of gait or wear the same sort of perfume. That is how I recognise people. I’m more likely to recognise you if you walk towards me than if you’re sitting still.

I don’t know why this is. I just know it to be true. I cannot draw the faces of other people in my head. I know what they look like when they are there, but I cannot create pictures once they have gone.

I once walked past the SOP three times on a tube-platform because they had changed their hair and bought a new coat since I’d seen them last

We had only been dating three years at this point.

My nightmare scenario is having to walk into a crowded place and find someone I’ve only ever met once. The average meeting with a script developer over coffee for example. Now I’m older and not trying to hide it, I just tell people to wave at me — and they do.

Prosopagnosia is my so-called neurodivergence by the way. That and being a rambunctious little shit.

The problem down the road

We’re currently finding out about half the universe has ADHD, the other half has autism, and the middle third in this mathematical semantic blip has both. It’s a startling revelation, not into the prevalence of these hidden conditions but in the palpable nature of power-based social contagion.

Back to me. I drink too much coffee.

I always hand the car keys to the SOP whenever we leave the house — because I once left them on a plane in Latvia and it was quite the fuckabout getting them back. I always put my neatly ironed clothes on my bed so I can’t go to sleep unless I put them away first.

I also love ironing clothes. I love the dopamine.

I could make memes about what it’s like being me — and some of what happens with me would resonate with the rest of you. That’s because in the Venn diagram smorgasbord of human experience, there’s an absolute fuck-tonne of overlap.

Humans be like that.

A few years ago I wrote ‘if everything is racist then nothing is’. It caused quite a lot of ructions because, everyone pretty much decided, this observation was itself racist. I was a racist bird and I was ‘tone-policing’. I don’t think I was, I think I was issuing a warning.

A warning which went largely unheeded.

And this is a similar warning. We shouldn’t welcome flanking manoeuvres.

We mustn’t let the indulgent identity movement reduce collective compassion by the backdoor, we need to be better at killing social contagions at source and calling them out.

Of course individuals who struggle in society (for whatever reason) deserve our care, compassion and empathy and this should be taken as a given from me. But if we allow others to overuse words like ‘neurodivergence’ to describe what is essentially some variation of behaviour within the bellcurve, we are in danger of removing something important from the collective understanding of human beings.

Compassion.

I work at the sharp end of mental health where the doors are locked and coprophagia is a part of my week and not just a niche tag on Pornhub.

The more we overuse words like ‘trauma’, ‘depression’ and ‘neurodivergence’ the less effective they become and the less meaning they have. Eventually if we overuse these words they will cease to have any real meaning at all.

Language games are not the long-term win society is aiming for

Late stage capitalism has generated the most introspective level of bullshit humanity has ever experienced. Social media has allowed us to share our innermost thoughts — and what tends to be shared is what each of us thinks about ourselves.

When this is writ large across the demos and the naval gazing firmly embeds its spiky tendrils into the young — we’re going to have a problem. People who cannot function because they are unable to differentiate the self as a functioning unit from their public identity.

If you cannot psychologically separate yourself from the collective consciousness, you will fall down with every social contagion available.

So you hate difference do you Penguin?

Not really. We are all different. Difference is great. It makes the universe interesting — but we don’t have to give ground to people leveraging the word neurodivergence as a social tool. I’m also likely in the future to make the same argument about ‘non-binary’ — which will win me even fewer friends.

In a world where everyone is neurodivergent, it is the loudest who will leverage the collective compassion. This does not bode well for society.

If everyone can leverage empathy and special treatment for their existence then we run the risk of leaving behind those who aren’t capable of asking for help. How about we focus less on neurodivergent and more on those people who are ‘housing divergent’ or better still ‘economically divergent’.

Perhaps by taxing some of the very housing divergent and redistributing to the other end of the bell curve.

If everyone is neurodivergent then nobody really is. That’s the point of this article. You aren’t special. None of us are. We’re all unique and we’re all struggling with being human in the best way we can.

We’re having a crisis of compassion in the Western world, not because we aren’t compassionate individuals because we are, but because the consistent need for self-compassion is creating fatigue for social compassion.

If you’re too anxious to come to work because your self-diagnosed autistic trait means you’re ‘overstimulated’ and have to stay in bed for self care — then nobody is available to work in hospitals, prisons, or in the care sector.

All places where there is genuine diagnosed need rather than self-diagnosed appointed need. Are you really neurodivergent? Or are you just an individual just like everyone else?

Neurodivergence as it is currently being cognitively created is the Emperor’s new clothes — a social contagion spreading on an individual level. A self-obsessed Western magnifying lens with which to analyse the minutiae of your individual psychology and leverage others if you fancy opting out of collective social responsibility (or behaving like a twat).

If I behave like a twat then call me a twat. Like the Significant Other Penguin did when I left our car keys on the plane. Neurodiverbully.

This was an article I promised to write all the way back in July… See what I mean about the lack of ADHD focus?!