Summary, my other summaries are here
Very interesting explanation through neuroatypicality why the norms about the average / proper / career trajectory “floated”, from Daniel Görtz (Danish sociologist, metamodernist philosopher, associated with integralists like Ken Wilber), post Neuroatypicality is the shamanism of late modernity
Atypical nervous systems include both medical – from ADHD to high-functioning autism / asperger like programmers / Sam Altman / Musk (autism is such a scary thing), bipolar, and non-medical variations – dyslexia in creators or Richard Branson, hypersensitivity, cravings towards the spiritual, chronic fatigue, lucid dreaming, non-cisgenderness, currents of psychedelic culture
Non-average abilities/features mean that a) there are things that are easy for everyone but difficult for you, and b) there are things that most people can’t, and you have a talent for them. Then the whole world around – education, the labor market, communication standards, clothing, etc. – not adapted to you/your potential. You need a broader and more sensitive social model to exploit your uniqueness and balance your weaknesses, more sophisticated expectation management, room for ups and downs. Modern life cuts you off, you need a metamodern society:
- Modern is Newton, Descartes, 17th century, reductionism, mechanism, physical reality – the West, the basis of the ideas of capitalism, free will, human rights, socialism
- Postmodern adds subconsciousness, cognitive biases, Turing and non-computable tasks, Gödel with incomplete mathematics, suffering from media more than in reality, etc.
- Metamodern – faith in progress remains, but the existential depth of a person is added, the soaring complexity of society is recognized. This is a social movement at the heart of the “hackers, hipsters, hippies” population.
And so the metamodernists are studying themselves, because they have an unusual mind. And they begin to try to weave a social fabric that can withstand such differences in human expression. What is the structure of the mind and feelings, what can make the best out of them, satisfy their needs?
- It confuses the neurodivergent himself. Sometimes it takes years to discover your path, set expectations for life, as conflicting feedback comes in about your capabilities.
And
- It confuses other people: they have already written off a neuro-atypical person as slow, incompetent, socially awkward, strange, etc., and they are anxious when they find out that he communicates with people much higher in the social hierarchy and enjoys their respect – Diogenes lives on the street, but receives Alexander the Great
Such social miracles, where neurodivergents can be contradictory in different levels of the social hierarchy (the unemployed suddenly became an adviser to the minister), are similar to shamanism. Neurodivergents seem to be close to social hierarchies, looking from the side, and transhierarchy is the position of a shaman in animistic societies – shamans literally dance outside the roles usually assigned in a tribe (spirits and ancestors come and go according to their own logic)
For the first time on the Internet, neo-shamans can work together on a scale (and before they were crushed by their social environment) and connect the social outskirts of the world with its center, its destitute and disenfranchised with the rich and influential, its cultural elite with the Bible Belt. Collectively, they create a culture of looking from the side – metamodernism, and become a global shaman: creating their social magic, they transform the directions in which society can develop, open our doors of perception to the universal
Gortz’s books (I didn’t read) in 2017 Listening society that after capitalism a society is needed that is more sensitive to the internal dimensions of people, and in 2019 Nordic Ideology book about how a metamodern society grows from the Scandinavian model
Technological progress beautifully generates new combinatorial spaces of combinations of everything and everything from Steve Jurvetson: once urbanization gave rise to an explosion of communication transactions, and now the Internet gives a search of all kinds of memes (which are from Dawkins, 1976)
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What should we do?
- Search for your tribe (acceptance by others)
and - Do personal psychotherapy (accept yourself)