When we look around the world, it’s relatively easy to see the effects of capitalism and colonialism in our physical world - the wars, the broken communities, the climate crisis (and more) are all painfully obvious scars. But what is sometimes less obvious is how our dominant system has changed the way humans relate to one another and changed our definition of “normal.”
In today’s society, being diagnosed as autistic, ADHD, bipolar, dyslexic, or some other mental health condition makes you “neurodivergent” - meaning that your brain is different from what is considered the norm, or “neurotypical.” It has, somehow, deviated from what is standard. But - what does normal even mean? Who told us what the standard was? And what do we lose when we narrow our definition of what a “normal” human looks and thinks like?
All across the world, especially in the West, there are efforts to suppress the experiences of neurodivergent people and conform them into a neat box, whether that’s through treatments, medication, or social pressure. Here in the USA, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, has advocated for creating autism registries to track autistic people, and has framed neurodivergence as a “tragedy.” But what is so tragic about thinking differently from the norm? In fact, we would argue that neurodiversity is an essential feature of humanity, not a bug, and bringing more diversity in how we think, otherwise known as “cognitive diversity,” inside our organizations and institutions is exactly what we need to solve some of the biggest problems we face.
The Roots of Neurodivergent Stigma
When did our modern idea of “normal” get created? As with so many things, a lot of the roots go back to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution of 1600s and 1700s Europe. During that time several frameworks were developed that emphasized individual rights and secular (non-religious) ways of thinking. The Enlightenment was progressive for its time—when society was dominated by religious institutions and royalty—but it also narrowed our identity into discrete categories.
- Religion and spirituality took a backseat to secular rationalism, creating firm definitions of right or wrong based on what could be physically observed.
- Plants, animals, and even humans were sorted into discrete categories by scientists such as Carl Linnaeus and Johann Blumenbach, laying the groundwork for race-based science.
- Gender was reduced to binary categories of male and female.
- Sexuality was increasingly pathologized, associating private acts with overall identity or even illness
- Economic class differences sharpened under the rise of capitalism, later described by Marx and Engels as the central site of struggle for social progress.
The ideas of the Enlightenment are probably the most influential to modern Western society and ultimately created the model for “normal” in the West. That model was exported globally, and violently enforced through colonialism, which spread Western culture to the farthest corners of the globe. As industrial capitalism took hold, the expectations for everyday working people become a lot more rigid. Industrialization and the factory system needed people to operate on factory lines under predictable and repetitive conditions, rigid standards, and consistent timelines. Capitalism wants the person who can fall into line and generate value, not the ones who might rub up against or even reject the status quo.
