What is a Disorder?

In the interest of updating this blog a bit more frequently, I am going to start posting some of my “shower thoughts” here. You don’t need to read it, but I want to post something. This is honestly the longest I’ve ever been able to maintain a blog, whatever that implies, and I figure it’s better to try and not lose momentum when possible.

I know basically nothing about psychology. I’ve seen a few YouTube videos about it, and I’ve read a psychology paper or two, and I even pretended to understand them, but this is something most people can say. I certainly don’t have any formal education in psychology outside of a single undergraduate course in which I spent most of my brain power trying to work up the courage to ask the girl sitting next to me out on a date, a task I ultimate…

Anyway, historically I haven’t found psychology terribly interesting, and for the most part I still don’t, but in nine years I’ve been seeing a therapist and psychiatrist in order to help with focus and the guilt spirals I routinely fall into, and as such I’ve been forced to learn a small bit of psychology so as to try and understand my own mental state.

Something that I’ve noticed in psychology is the liberal use of the term “disorder”. Not to be too cliche, but let’s take a look at the definition of disorder:

an abnormal physical or mental condition

This definition is fine, but it doesn’t quite communicate the negative connotation associated with it. Generally if I say someone has Attention Deficit Disorder or Major Depressive Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder or Bipolar Disorder, the world is in agreement that these are “bad” things, and if you have any of these things then there’s something “wrong” with your brain.

Is this actually accurate?

Humanoid creatures have been around for about seven million years, and something akin to a “civilization” for around twelve thousand years.

These numbers are a bit arbitrary, because there’s no firm line on how you define “humanoid” or “civilization”, but I think these work as rough numbers. If we can accept these numbers, then this suggests that for the vast majority of human/humanoid history, we did not live in something we would call “civilization”. The amount of time we’ve had “civilization”, relatively speaking, is nothing from a long-term biological perspective. Throughout most of history, humans have been nomadic, living in small groups, with food being scares, abundance being rare, and the world being frustratingly inconsistent. The situation in which we evolved is a world that was decidedly not civilized.

So if we accept that the circumstances in which our biology evolved are different than what we have today, it may be prudent to evaluate these “disorders”.

Take attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), for example. People with ADHD have trouble focusing on a single task for long durations of time, but almost paradoxically, they also will focus too well on tasks that interest them for short stints of time. In our current economic system, this is a huge disadvantage. Most employers want you to focus on a single task, with little variation, and become proficient at one thing, which can be a metaphorical hell for people afflicted with ADHD.

There I go, using the loaded language I’ve been trained for again: “afflicted”.

Anyway, we define this as a disorder because the current people in charge have decided that it is abnormal. Our lovely oligarchs have decided that you should only ever enjoy a single task, and never venture out of your lane so help you god.

But let’s envision a world where the sociopaths didn’t take over the world and label it “civilization”. When we had small groups, with hunters and gatherers, would having someone a a little knowledge around a lot of different topics actually be a disadvantage?

In our mythical caveman-universe: if we have someone who knows how to do basic hunting, basic fruit gathering, basic childcare, and basic tool-building, would this person be considered “disordered”? This person would be extremely valuable to the group. Resources were so scarce and the world was so harsh that people didn’t have the luxury of being able to not have ADHD.

I don’t need to go through every disorder, though I welcome you to perform your own thought experiments with some others.

I don’t know how I would prove this, but I think that sociopaths taking over the world roughly coincides with “civilization”, or at least large centralized groups (like cities or countries).

Almost by definition, if you try to insert yourself into situations that allow you to control large groups of people, you are likely to be someone who pursues power. Political power often provides opportunities to enrich oneself, and as such there will be a large selection bias towards people who want to enrich themselves, and if you are someone who wants to enrich yourself through political power (especially at the expense of other people), then congratulations, you’re probably a sociopath (or at least display sociopathic tendencies).

Of course, these people, the people who run the world, don’t view sociopathy as a “disorder”. Billionaire and walking billboard of nepotism Elon Musk has stated that empathy is a weakness. He’s just someone stupid enough to say it out loud, but most of these billionaires think the same way.

These people in charge, the people who do not have empathy, have shaped society in a disturbing way so as to actively go against our evolution. In fact, they depend on it. They need people to feel inadequate if they can’t serve their selfish purposes. If you can’t adapt to the world that they fucked up and created, it’s a moral failing on your end, not theirs.

If climate change dries up the ocean, do we act like the dead fish is a moral failure because he refused to evolve lungs?

The world is unfair, and some asshole writing a blog post can’t change it.

It’s just important to remember that you’re not “broken” just because you don’t conform to some sociopathic dipshit’s clusterfuck of the world.

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