Neurodivergence??

 Hello again everyone to a rant which is just going to be me talking to myself which I don't expect anyone else to be reading, so read at your own risk. Before even starting this rant I have the meta ironic image of a troll face emoji saying "I WON'T TAKE MY MEDS" or the meme of "This could have been prevented with regular therapy" being presented in my head as a possible satirization of what I wish to say here so I feel I should address that. Ironically satirizing an image to remove the romanticism associated with the perspective of the person in that situation is not an adequate response to their argument. 

Okay, here we go. The first point I want to make which seems very counterintuitive to me even as I say it and all the rational parts of my brain scream at me to stop is that in purely intellectual terms or from deductive methods of reasoning, you simply cannot understand the intersubjective experience of someone else's consciousness. Actually on second thought this rationally makes sense, because for any epistemic system you have to view the world, you need to have certain axioms. These axioms have to come from perception or memory, or maybe forcefully accepted due to authority. The fact that we can not examine our axioms with the logical system built upon those axioms seems to support what I want to say. 

However, the world to me seems to be built around such a structure so as to emphasize the rationalistic, analytic and deductive parts of intelligence. When you want to pass an exam, you need to remember the specific features of ideas instead of remembering the process of its unfolding in general. The anxiety aspect of examinations is often talked about as a potential reason why we should move towards different systems, but the self hatred is often never considered. Almost as many students as those who have performance anxiety have harsh inner voices which lead to self flagellation each time they make a silly mistake.

The talents of students who remember the ideas in broad strokes and can connect many different ideas together are basically worthless when compared with someone who can efficiently and errorlessly work a desk job or maybe work out the analytic details of some process. This seems reasonable when we do something such as writing code where the structure of the language is of prime importance. But the ability for the meaning of phrases to evolve dynamically, does it not come from making creative errors in the first place. 

I remember an interesting idea I encountered somewhere which mentioned that artists are often relegated to the edges of society and their lives are like experiments. The discoveries they make slowly permeate into the remainder of society by slow adaptation and more and more routine exposition. The people who used to be shamans at one time, exclusively dedicated to expressing creatively, and evolving their consciousness are now basically the ragtags of society ( I don't know if that is a word). 

Connected to the point I mentioned earlier about a harsh inner voice is also the fact that since society is just not structured in a way to be amenable to the working of these people, there is a constant degree of gaslighting involved. What if you actually are just a lazy and unmotivated piece of shit looking for a new excuse to justify how you have been wasted potential all of your life? Every evaluation where you don't do 'quite as good as you could have' is a reminder that you didn't try hard enough, and not that maybe you should have spent that time learning and connecting many more ideas at that same depth. Every time you forget the keys, or an important document or lose your belongings, its a reminder of how you are an irresponsible and untrustworthy person.

Now, I come to therapy. Therapy apart from being stigmatized in many cultures (Why do you need therapy? are you insane?) to the point where it is basically inviable also doesn't exactly address the problem. At best it provides you with a temporary stopgap and a crutch to help you heal and adapt (which should be eventually discarded mind you). At worst it is loading people up with drugs or trying to talk-hypnotize them into accepting a societal structure which does not consider their needs as relevant (This sounds way too radical to me even as I say it, does that not tell us how many layers of propaganda exist?)

so yes, this has been my rant about neurodivergence, and funnily enough I forgot most of the points I made in the last 20 minutes. But perhaps the fun part is that I was able to string together these many ideas in the last 20 minutes. That's all for now (and I will publish this anyway, so I am sorry if you had to sit through a bunch of uncollected ideas but I hope you found it interesting anyway.)