Save for later reading. This topic fascinates me. So many people are diagnosed with disorders today, that I wonder if what’s being ignored is that the tendency to think differently is absolutely okay.
“the tendency to think differently is absolutely okay.’
Not always.
What I find especially incredible is how an injured or damaged brain somehow “rewires” itself, and parts known for certain functions and behaviors suddenly perform new functions.
There are several factors driving the false narrative that 1/4 of the population is mentally ill.
Liberals confuse tragedy with evil. They want to blame bad upbringing, lack of “education”, a lack of “love”, and at worst, mental illness for all crime. This worldview lets them think that if we just talk to most bad people long enough, they’ll convert to good happy liberals. If that fails, institutionalization of dissidents creates a faux conformity (look up Russia’s sluggish schizophrenia diagnosis for dissidents) while drugging people into compliance can certainly work.
Another tactic is inflating the numbers of the minority in order to justify altering society to fit the minority’s demands. Make people think 10% of the population is homosexual versus 1%, the demand to redefine marriage seems more reasonable. Inflate the “transgender” category from 1 in 50,000 biological accidents and similar numbers of people with gender dysphoria to include drag queens and butch lesbians, and suddenly it is 1/1000 or 1/100 ... a number that you can leverage to demand all public accommodations change while saying it is not practical to truly deal with it on an individual basis.
Ironically, they deny that gender dysphoria is a mental illness at all because they think it furthers the liberal narrative that sex is a social construct so, viola, there’s no difference between men and women and feminists are totally right ... except when women are better, but we will ignore the issues cased by when men say they’re women because we just want to love everyone as they are.
You see the same “inflation” issue with autism. The number of retarded has significantly declined while the autism rate has increased. Most kids who would have been “retarded” 30 years ago are now classified as autistic.
I recognize that autistic people are mind blind, lacking mirror neurons. In severe cases, this interferes with language learning and bonding with people, and that is the definition of retarded. In moderate cases, you can get nerdy adults who can function but are socially awkward. By expanding the definition of “autism spectrum”, now they argue 5% or more are on this spectrum ... they think having more numbers on their side and in the category box makes their case for them. It is more like calling people with glasses “on the blindness spectrum”.
Another mistake liberals are making is that everyone has a right to be happy with life and content. If you grieve too long, that’s a mental disorder, here are your anti-depressants. If you aren’t an extrovert, something’s wrong with you, here are more pills. A kid is too active? Too much work to increase PE time, just drug into compliance. See, everyone’s fixed! Everyone’s happy! Isn’t life great? Sometimes I think liberals read or watched “Brave New World” and think it is an instruction manual.
Dr. Jordan Peterson did research into the personality subtype of social justice warriors and found that they ARE statistically different. Lower verbal IQs than classic liberals, stricter black/white morality we tend to associate with religious conservatives, and uniquely, more likely to have an anxiety disorder or family member diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.
That’s why they demand safe spaces and emotional support - they truly are disproportionately neurotic.
And they are demanding everyone else stop, ban and censor everything they don’t like. The fact that this removal of the things from society make them less able to cope when it does appear is ignored.
I’m not going to say that all liberals are crazy. The issue there is that they ONLY use perceived fairness and perceived suffering/pain as moral measures. In-group loyalty is a sin when your high personality trait openness makes you hate the familiar and adore the foreign, including people. So loyalty to one’s group is out for liberals, especially nationalism.
A lack of disgust means most purity rules are out, though SJWs are bringing it back big time for food (vegan, clean eating, gluten free). Respect for authority is denied as a virtue by liberals because they only use fairness, and someone having power over you is by their definition UN-fair.
What we are seeing is liberals catering to the far left, the control left, because those are the ones screaming “I’m suffering”, “he’s invalidating my existence (killing me)”, “that’s hate speech” (you’re hurting my feelings).
Because they reflexively default to siding with whoever cries first, screams the loudest or throws the biggest tantrum, they CANNOT refuse to give in to the emotional blackmail of the liberal bullies.
And because the moderate liberals cannot check the violent crazy ones, the whole movement looks insane while making excuses for why insanity isn’t so bad.
They’re trying to protect the feelings of the liberal authoritarians pretending to be hysterically offended, while a few liberal bullies launch the violent nuts at society to force change and scare rivals into silence the same way Muslim moderates will deny Muslim terrorists are Muslim or justify their acts as provoked by the victims. If you just did what we said, they wouldn’t have organized a violent mob against you! If everyone just agreed with us, the violence will stop! Oh, it makes us look bad? Don’t blame us, they’re random crazies / not really Muslim / Antifa not liberal. But if someone comes up with an insane conspiracy theory that lets liberals or Muslims avoid responsibility for something, awesome! If their violent acts or organized oppression achieves the political goal, excellent. If they sound like raving loons, they just think differently and you’re not allowed to criticize them or the ideology, its always perfect.
“the tendency to think differently is absolutely okay.“
While differences are fine—even beneficial—the bell curve still holds true. Those outer quartiles go beyond different.
The gulf between “different” and abnormal or aberrant is vast. Most people are blessedly unaware of mankind’s capacity for depravity. To say evil men think differently is to say cancer cells share many attributes with stem cells.