Dyslexia and ADHD: Cognitive Advantages, Not Disabilities

The Myth of the 'Disability'

Our pathologically obsessed therapeutic age has become drunk on medicalizing every human difference. In the realm of cognitive conditions, we have reached a level of puritanical madness in labeling valuable traits like dyslexia and ADHD as "disabilities" and "disorders." This is not merely insulting - it is a battering ram against rationality itself.

Let us take stock of what we call disabilities: dyslexia grants an encompassing view of imagery and patterns rather than being slaves to the written code. ADHD blesses abundance of energy, an exploratory spark, and a difficulty being bored by the numbing repetitions of modern industrial life. For the vast majority of our species' existence, these were not afflictions to be medicated and beat out of a child. They were safeguards of our survival.

Our Paleolithic ancestors who could quickly apprehend the landscape, visualize the tracking of prey, and remain intensely focused while hunting were not shunted off to Special Ed. They were the most indispensable members of the tribe. The "disordered" rambunctious ones, elated by novel stimuli, were the first to sniff out new food sources and reconnoiter new lands. These "disabilities" allowed our ancestors to adapt and discover - faculties so valuable that their genetic inheritance survives to this day.

It is only our deranged contemporary existence - isolating young people in enclosed spaces, forcing a unnatural sedentary containment, compelling strict single-minded focus for hour upon hour - that has rendered these ancestral sweetnesses into supposed sins. Like the religious Calvinists who preached that the first laughs of an infant were actually the cries of the damned, we moderns have talked ourselves into believing that such brilliant variety in cognitive processing must be pathologized.

Our prehistoric forebears would have regarded such preposterous homogenizing as a death sentence, a depraved execution of the very traits that allowed us to explore and conquer the world in the first place. Perhaps it is modern society that has become disabled - crippled by its failure to accommodate the full range of blazing human neurodiversity. In our zeal to imprison children in a stifling mania for conformity, we have become the mentally ill ones.

So let us discard these bowdlerizing labels of disability, these unforgivable slanders against our anthropological heritage. Dyslexia and ADHD are not disorders, but cognitive ornaments from our gemlike ancestry, dazzling instruments poorly shapen by our defective modern design. Perhaps it is the world that needs to be treated, its sullen prejudices and cracked frameworks repaired - rather than applying a sociopathic punishment of drugging the diversity to which we owe our very existence as a species.

Here are some expanded talking points and arguments elaborating on why dyslexia and ADHD should be viewed as cognitive conditions rather than disabilities:

Our Ancestral Roots

• For tens of thousands of years, our hunter-gatherer ancestors relied on the very traits we now pathologize as "disorders." The divergent thought patterns of the dyslexic mind allowed for stronger spatial awareness, pattern recognition, and visualization abilities - absolutely crucial for tracking animals and understanding one's environment. ADHD traits like hyperfocus, high energy levels, and seeking novelty were central to humanity's nomadic existence, always being primed to explore new territories and food sources.

• These supposed "disabilities" were not just beneficial, they were essential cognitive adaptations that allowed our species to survive and thrive across endless environmental changes over millennia. To label them as deficits is a gross insult to the brilliant neurodivergence that is woven into the fabric of our evolutionary heritage.

The Tyranny of Modern Conformity

• It is only with the relatively recent mass transition to sedentary lifestyles, industrial scalereplication, and institutionalized education systems that these cognitive differences came to be viewed as hindrances rather than strengths. Our standardized school model that demands students sit still for hours on end, process information in rigid sequences, and live in their heads rather than exploratorily engage with the world around them is an context entirely alien to how the human mind evolved.

• In shackling the dyslexic and ADHD mind into these constricted unnatural formats and schedules, we have criminalized the evolutionary software that allowed our species' cognitive revolution. It is a violent procrustean operation, a forced amputating of the capabilities that permitted our ancestors' existential wanderings and musings upon the world.

The Pathologizing of Cognitive Diversity

• The "disorder" framing reveals the impoverished dogmatism of the modern mental health industrycomplex. With the cajolery of pharmaceutical profiteering, every divergence from a theoretical "normal" baseline is deemed a pathology requiring clinical adjustment. It is a visceral fear of difference, cloaked in the faux-empiricism of disorders and diagnostic criteria.

• Underlying this internal contradiction is the neo-puritanical society's anxious demand that every citizen be a productive machine, capable of performing rationalized tasks with robotic conformity. Those whose brilliance burns too bright, or flares with an alternate spectrum, are swiftly drugged into spiritual submission by the frenzied attentions of the therapeutic state and its desire to mass-produce sanitized, standardized subjects.