Mental bric-a-brac
autism, word games, blooming late
The Mental Bric-a-Brac column is a semi-regular feature around here, usually reserved for paid subscribers. It’s a round-up of what’s on my mind, a sampler platter. This one is open to everyone. If you like this, please take out a paid subscription, or make a one-time payment to support Disaffected.
I’ve put both those options at the bottom of this article.
Thanks!
-Josh
Nothing means anything means everything
"Autism" is now a meaningless word. It means nothing and everything. When a person uses this word, I have literally no idea what they're talking about.
And you don't either. You can't know. Because it's become a label for:
-Actual autism (but only rarely)
-Being shy
-Being sensitive to intense stimulation
-Borderline Personality Disorder
-Narcissistic Personality Disorder
-complex PTSD
-Being naturally fidgety
-Being intellectually slow
-Being an indulged child who only eats chicken tendies
Blooming late
About four years ago I asked my therapist a question. First, know this about him: he's based. 70, conservative, hard science background before going into mental health, has been through academic cancellation.
He's no mollycoddler and I don't go to him to "feel better."
I was asking what made me and my mother different when it came to making progress mentally. I share some of her traits, and may have become as calcified and un-helpable as she is. My flaws are obvious and some are quite bad, but truly, I never became as deranged as my mother did.
Why? I asked him what is the quality a person has to have in order to be able to make significant progress getting past trauma?
He said, "The ability to tolerate hearing, and the ability to accept, that everything you thought you knew about the world was wrong."
Time has proven him right; this answer rings in my head constantly. During six years with him, the first real therapy I've taken seriously, I changed my mind about things I would never have been willing to change my mind about.
Not because he pushed me, or "radicalized" me. He didn't. He keeps very good therapeutic boundaries.
I changed my mind over time from observing the world around me, from my conversations with him, and by admitting things to myself I had not before. The value of a truly therapeutic alliance like I have with him is priceless. I have told him things I have never and will never discuss with anyone else. Big stuff can come out of that.
When I first started seeing him, I had broken with my Cluster B mother. He told me I'd done a lot of work on my own to correctly understand what happened, and was farther along than most patients. That turned out to be true in some ways, and not in others.
At the beginning, I was still a Democrat. I was still feminist-sympathetic, to give you a sense of what I thought then.
Now, today, here's a list of things that I've changed my mind about. On almost every issue, I believe the opposite of what I used to believe. No, it wasn't a pendulum swing overnight—it took years, and it was gradual, what Stephen Jay Gould would call "punctuated equilibrium." Slow, with some rapid bursts.
If you've been through this, you know how disorienting it is. It's easy to second-guess yourself; the old emotional buttons are still there, even if they're not as powerful.
1. I used to believe in born this way for gays. I now believe the thing I feared the most—that it's often a trauma response from abuse. I needed to be "born this way" all my life. Now I don't need to, and I think it wasn't true for me.
2. I believed we were living in a dangerous, dire patriarchy and that women had always been, and were now to the same degree, at constant imminent risk of enslavement and rape by men.
3. I believed the moral thing to do was feed the world, damn the cost of the welfare state. I believed it was cruelty to make food stamps modest rather than bountiful, etc. Now I understand it's a trap that allows the worst parts of human nature to degrade people into sloth and despair.
4. I believed Christians and Republicans were stupid, hateful people motivated only by stupid hatefulness. I caricatured these people; I had no respect for them and never listened to what they were saying, and couldn't see them as humans.
5. I believed capitalism was basically economic gang rape and socialism was what kind and morally good people aimed for.
6. I believed that there was no difference in mental health, physical health, and the strength of relationships when you compared homosexual couples to heterosexual couples, on average. That's really astonishing, considering that I could have looked to my years of whoring and crushing disappointment, and my lifelong inability to form a successful romantic relationship to know I was bullshitting myself. But lying to yourself is the most powerful kind of lying.
Question to you: have you had an experience like this? Was it this thorough? More? Less?
What did you think and feel when you were going through it, and how do you see it now?
The wicked conscript the normal and the good
Mind control and reprogramming works because most people are decent people morally. That's a problem when the people doing the manipulating are abnormal (personality disordered, narcissistic, Machiavellian).
Normal, moral people are naive. They don't truly believe that evil people, or people with bad intentions, actually exist. They believe, falsely, that "everyone is good deep down."
This creates a bias toward system-justification. The normies do the work of the narcissist by rationalizing Machiavellian behavior within the "they must be in good faith" framework.
A simple example. Contemplate how it's starting to be "normal" that restaurants ask you not what meat you'd like in your dish, but what "protein" you'd like. (If this hasn’t happened where you live, I’m glad.)
As you contemplate that, recall to your mind that there is, really and truly, a cultural campaign to make meat-eating Morally Bad. Against The Climate. Recall to your mind that the WEF has been very explicit about this. Remember how you've seen their ads that soften you up to eat insects.
Do you have that in your short term recall now? I ask because that's important. You have to have it there if you're going to be able to think through this.
Now. When I post about this "protein" language, I get some responses back from good, normal, morally decent people.
They engage in system-justification on behalf of the bug-pushing narcissists. How, specifically, do they do this?:
"It's really only to be accurate, because restaurants serve proteins other than meat, like tofu."
Or:
"But there are options like tuna, and that's not meat, so they're just trying to be accurate and easily understood."
This would make sense if we weren't living among the bug-pushers. If we weren't subjected to a campaign—remember, you know this is true because we did the recall exercise above—to make meat-eating seem morally bad and "un-woke."
But we do live in that world. And that is what's propelling this "new normal" of asking you for "your protein." If we lived in a normal, sane world, this phenomenon would not even be happening.
The reason I get so didactic by reminding readers of what they remember, and leading by the hand in really small steps, is because the world is set up to fudge your perception. You and I have to be this plodding and really look at each individual piece. I do have to remind you and myself to notice things, and to keep things in mind, because the wider world is working tirelessly to disconnect these things in our minds.
Ladies and gentlemen: Aunt Kamima
From this week’s show: the return of Branch Covidianism
Josh here. Before you leave, would you consider financially supporting Disaffected? We have an option for everyone. You can chip in just a few bucks as a one-off, or you can subscribe for a very reasonable monthly price to support the work Kevin and I are doing.
—A monthly subscription is just $7 per month. You’ll be helping produce our show and the writing here, and you’ll get access to the Disaffected Discord chat server.
—There’s a discount for annual subscriptions; you get two months free with this option!
One-Time Support
—Want to throw $3, $5, $10 to our effort without subscribing? Thank you! Click here give in any amount you like.
It sometimes seems as if almost every kid is autistic, and will die if he sees a peanut butter sandwich. What the hell happened?
Q: Ever change your mind 180 degrees about everything?
1. Born this gay — Used to think it was genetically determined (the classic, steady 10% statistic), but nowadays endocrine-altering chemicals in food/water etc. seem to be creating more androgyny.
However, the response-to-trauma theory probably has some merit, though not all children in dysfunctional families (or groups of people who are exposed to other forms of trauma) turn out gay, so maybe some predisposition exists.
That said, it’s hard to deny that bisexuality is inherent though its expression/repression is culturally contingent: exhibit A is Greco-Roman civ., ca. 1400 BC (Troy/Iliad) - 400 AD.
2. Realized that patriarchy is dead or severely wounded in last 3-4 years (ascendancy of trans movement and feminism).
3. Believed in the welfare state until Covid showed me it’s been co-opted by globalism and maybe was a scam from the beginning (though I still benefit from Disability income, food stamps and public housing so TBH I’m ambivalent).
4. Also since Covid: Republicans/Christians are generally saner than godless socialists (woke Democrats)
5. Covid also showed me that capitalism and socialism are equally dehumanizing, unworkable and cruel. Maybe the answer is small-scale communities as found in the kibbutz or among the Amish.
6. Used to think there was no necessary difference between gay/straight relationships but in recent years I’ve admitted that most gay men are too damaged to establish healthy long term relationships (I’m a textbook case). I could only name a few stable gay male couples I know personally and they’re outnumbered by comparable straight couples.
Thanks for starting this discussion.