One of the most common grievances with the political left, especially in the United States, is that they glamourize pathology. Even centrists, and some moderate left-wingers, implicitly split with the party line on this topic. While Joe Schmoe Democrat might not agree with discrimination against homosexuals or transgenders, he recognizes that they are “not normal” and that their state of existence is not exactly desirable. If you call him gay, he’ll get offended, but and strongly insist otherwise. But, he’ll follow up with “…not that there’s anything wrong with it”, to save face. He’s not going to judge someone for being transgender, but often accidentally fails to affirm these people’s preferred titles and pronouns, because he does not truly believe that they are what they proclaim themselves to be. I think that it isn’t even accidental sometimes, but is a purposeful attempt at signaling distance from Queer culture without signaling outright revulsion.

Joe Schmoe almost certainly didn’t vote for Trump in 2024, but he might have avoided voting for Kamala as well. He would never say “faggot”, but is proud of using terms like “gay” or “retarded”. Mental retardation, after all, is simply an objectively undesirable state, and it is a state that objectively lowers the credibility of those in it, so it is a completely reasonable insult. But, the American Left is not just interested in rehabilitating sexual deviance and gender dysphoria, they reject the meta-premise that mental disorders should be looked at as a problem. “Neurodivergence” is just a set of alternative thought patterns, and the suffering of those with these thought patterns is at least in large part a consequence of mismatch with the Neurotypical society that fails to accommodate for them. The idea seems to be that, if we were in Autist world, Neurotypicals would be the ones suffering.

Unfortunately, this glamourization of the deviant is not limited to the Left. In fact, it’s been a presence on the Online Right for a long time now. It’s impossible to avoid it online, because chronically online people are much more likely to have some sort of mental illness. In this essay, I’m going to go through the “big three” mental disorders that people on the right have a tendency to erroneously lionize, why they are lionized, and why this shouldn’t be the case.

Autism

I myself was quite the Autism-glazer back in the day, having been sort of irony-poisoned by Varg Vikernes’s hilarous insistence that Autism was a “Nordic neanderthal superpower”. I have posted my thoughts on Autism before, and my opinions on the topic have remained pretty much the same. There are two different kinds of autism that people talk about. There is autism as a personality dimension present to some extent in everyone, and then there is autism as a diagnosable disorder, which can be considered as an extreme value in that dimension. Educational polygenic score correlates positively with polygenic risk for autism1, but diagnosed autists are either of average intelligence or significantly below average intelligence depending on if people with severe autism (so basically, autism as it was defined prior to a few decades ago), so I believe that there is probably some sort of parabolic relationship between intelligence and autism that reaches its zenith far above “average” autism levels but below clinical autism levels.

As I discussed in my article on Autism, the autistic personality dimension is probably related to masculinity. Not only are men simply much more likely to be diagnosed with autism than women, but autism is associated with facial masculinity in childhood and high-testosterone womb environments.

• A vast majority of people diagnosed with Autism are men2

• Autistic children of both genders have more robust/masculine faces3

• Parents of autistic children have higher facial masculinity4

• Autism correlates with womb testosterone exposure5

• Autism associated with earlier puberty in both genders, but a faster process of puberty in boys particularly6

• Autistic children have higher testosterone than non-autistic children7

It makes sense, in this context, why Autism has some prestige on the political right. It corresponds to the male desire to systematize, to associate with the ideal rather than the pneumatic, and to adhere to principles over harm-avoidance. The other reason is, of course, the strong-arming of autism into this position by autists themselves, who have a powerful lobby in the online space. The final reason I can think of is that the right has a fascination with “men above the herd”, and autists are stereotypically unconcerned with the herd due to their introversion and social obliviousness.

But of course, there is such a thing as “too much” for everything. Having high testosterone is good for you, but having 10x the normal testosterone level of a human male due to steroid use is going to send you to an early grave and decay every part of your body aside from your muscles on the way there. Likewise, it’s good to have people who are a little bit autistic in a society, but it’s bad to be a diagnosable autist (ASD).

There are pretty much zero positive life outcome corollaries with ASD. They are extremely prone to suicidal ideation8 and anxiety, and it is probably the single most potent factor in determining if a man is going to be involuntarily celibate9. Autistic men are among the lowest fertility groups, having about the same reproduction rate as schizophrenics.

Pretty much every article or study on Autistic employment notes that they are slow to join the workforce and have very high rates of NEETdom throughout their life compared to the masses. They aren’t just a burden on themselves, but also their families and the social safety net. Furthermore, they bring shame to their families through their sexual deviance and tendency towards gender dysphoria, two things which are so incredibly obvious to anyone who doesn’t live under a rock that I don’t even feel the need to provide a source for it, but it’s certainly a google search away for the gender dysphoria thing.

A common retort by right-wing autists, like their left-wing counterparts, is that they’re just experiencing an “evolutionary mismatch”. No, they were supposed to be chipping away at flint chunks for hours, but now they’re obsessed with Sonic because society or something. Well, I have a few reasons not to believe this.

Firstly, Autists are extremely prone to sensory overload, and the “state of nature” was full of this. Do you see much autists getting out in nature today? No, not really. There isn’t a market for specialized products that will adhere to the very specific taste, smell, and texture standards of the autist, and this will be very bothersome for the autist. Secondly, being capable of navigating social situations was arguably more important in the hunter-gatherer world than it is in modernity. There was no standardized environment for learning social cues, and you had less of a sample to chum it up with during childhood. One’s very understanding of reality was bounded by the social fabric, the customs of the people around them. There was no bureaucracy or rank, and people didn’t keep records of merit, so power and prestige came through being a “big man” with lots of connections. These big men could not use much in the way of economic leverage, as people could only possess what they could carry on their back, so their status had to come from persuasion and charisma. Yes, of course they had to be good hunters, but hunting itself was an activity full of unspoken rules and indirect communication between men that would confuse and irritate an autist. I don’t think Autism is very helpful for understanding the thought process of an animal either, as it isn’t even very good for understanding the thought process of other human beings.

On a related note, modern hunter-gatherers are not profoundly autistic, and polygenic risk scores for Autism increased after the Mesolithic.

A final thing Autism advocates will say is that autists are “immune to propaganda”, which is obviously not a very rigorous claim, but is so obviously false to people familiar with autism. Think of every autistic lolcow famous on the internet… What are they famous for? They are profoundly gullible, and don’t know when they’re being manipulated or tricked. Autists also develop very strong connections to things which transcend rationality, such as childhood TV shows or video games, and this makes them especially immune to propaganda which targets their fixations.

Schizophrenia

I’ve seen maybe three different posts by two or three different authors in the past week about the “Schizo-Psycho divide”. It’s from a series of stupid fucking memes about “Schizo-Psycho-Normie rock paper scissors” that used to be popular on /x/.

Sometimes it also includes narcissists:

It’s pretty obvious that the Schizo is meant to be the “hero” of the meme. The psycho is obviously evil, and the normies are his “footsoldiers”. Many people refer to things as “schizo” if they are heavily conspiratorial or esoteric, and like Autism there is a primitivist conception of the “noble schizo” of prehistoric times. People will use terms like “schizoposting” or “schizoborea” in reference to things that they like and agree with, rather than as a way to discredit things they dislike.

It’s all bogus, of course. Schizophrenia is, to nobody’s surprise, actually extremely awful, and is not just “hearing things”. schizophrenic delusions are typically accompanied by depressive symptoms such as anhedonia and apathy, and like autistics there is a high suicide rate among schizophrenics. Schizophrenics also experience cognitive decline throughout the duration of their illness, and this decline begins during childhood and adolescence before they even show symptoms of schizophrenia10. Schizophrenics, aside from drug addicts, are the most overrepresented population among the homeless, with around a tenth of homeless people in developed countries being schizophrenic11.

Schizophrenia as a mental disorder causes people to be violent towards others, even though it doesn’t increase likelihood of violence victimization. 23% of schizophrenics have been convicted of violent crime12.

Right-wingers identify with schizos because they have been told all their life to equate conspiracy theories with paranoid schizophrenics. So, when they get into conspiracy theories (or anything “not normal”), they start half-ironically identifying with the schizo label. But, the association of schizophrenia with conspiracies is just an attempt to discredit conspiracism, in my opinion. Even the dumbest conspiracy theories require an internal logic and a sort of architecture. After all, it’s a conspiracy… Conspiration requires some sort of “system” through which members of the conspiracy can organize themselves and communicate. Schizophrenic delusions and ramblings are incoherent, self-contradicting, and completely disorganized, on the other hand. Furthermore, conspiracy junkies often gain a sort of gratification from being “in the know”, especially when it comes to those theories that people call “schizo”, meanwhile both schizophrenia and less severe Cluster A disorders are characterized by a feeling of being personally targeted and in danger from the rest of the world. For the paranoid schizophrenic, there isn’t really any camaraderie to be had in their beliefs.

It should be obvious that Schizophrenia is not adaptive in any evolutionary environment. Schizophrenics are a danger to themselves and everyone around them, particularly for the 99% of human history where anti-psychotic medications did not exist. Polygenic risk for Schizophrenia follows a downward trend throughout human history and prehistory, which in my opinion gives credence to the theory that it arose as a byproduct of the evolution of language13.

In this case, it would be incorrect to call Schizophrenia a disorder of “overdriven pattern recognition”, which I don’t think it is. Schizophrenia is mainly associated with people “hearing things”, particularly words, much more-so than seeing things, but visual pattern recognition is far more important in the state of nature. Schizophrenics are also very bad at actual pattern recognition, it isn’t like they notice patterns that are there and then go overboard into noticing nonexistent patterns. It’s possible that the low intelligence and mental instability of schizophrenics simply helps enable the onset of the disease. High-IQ people with high polygenic risk for Schizophrenia are, after all, less likely to become Schizophrenics. But, like autism, the perception of this mentally ill group as “noticers” who stand apart from the sensory-underload lemmings has contributed to a certain cheeky rehabilitation of the Schizophrenic’s image on the online right.

There is another retarded meme I hear among right-wingers, where they positively ascribe the title of “schizo” to historical prophets and religious leaders (ex: shamans). Like the conspiracy element of the schizo appreciation, I suspect it came out of an attempt at rehabilitating an obvious smear campaign against something these people liked. However, if you think that Schizos would make good Shamans, then you either don’t know much about Schizos, or you don’t know much about Shamans. First of all, Schizophrenics commonly suffer from a symptom called Flat Affect, which manifests in a lack of facial expression, a lack of bodily expression, and a monotone voice. Shamans, on the other hand, are expected to be extremely expressive, and this sort of self-expression might actually assist in initiating a trance-like state. Speaking of which… Shamans initiate ecstatic states, unlike Schizophrenics, who have no control over the voices in their head and do not require any sort of initiation to get them going. Shamanism typically requires training in order to correctly observe the various rites that they are held responsible for, and initiation is sometimes hereditary and is otherwise determined by initiation from other shamans, so it isn’t like village people just hear someone spouting gibberish and assume he is a shaman. This would be like hearing a schizo ramble, and assuming he is a priest instead of someone in need of exorcism. Schizophrenics are antisocial and poor leaders or members of the community, which makes it very difficult for them to attain such positions of authority, and furthermore their paranoia and general low intelligence would make it very difficult for them to perform their ecstatic rituals without having a nervous breakdown. This is also why I don’t think it makes any sense to consider figures like Moses to be schizophrenics, such roles require a level of competence and charisma that Schizos rarely ever have.

Sociopaths

The final group to bring up is people with “dark triad” or “cluster B” personalities, especially those who are exhibit antisocial behavior such as psychopaths and sociopaths. This is by far the rarest mental disorder of these three that gets glorified, but there are still people who defend it as a superior life-history strategy than prosocial behavior. There is a romanticization of cold-blooded misanthropes like Patrick Bateman, because it is implied that they simply view themselves as rightfully superior to the idiotic masses. There is, also, a view that antisocial personality is what allows great men of history to “get the job done”, because they have the ability to neglect their own empathy for greater ambitions, and because they are not able to be tempted into a life of inaction through the intoxicating power of love and friendship. Dark triad tendencies thereby get assimilated into the stereotype of the “Sigma Male”, the “bad boy”, or the Nietzschean overman, and this is only bolstered by popular manosphere talking points about sociopaths.

Like Autism, there is credible evidence that antisocial behavior is associated with masculinity. First of all, and most obviously, it is much more common in men than in women. Symptoms, like criminality, are also obviously mostly seen in men. Secondly, higher blood testosterone is pretty well-established to be associated with antisociality and related traits such as aggression and criminality, albeit not strongly14. Fetal testosterone is much less clearly associated with antisocial personality, though, so it is possible that the autist-psycho distinction is caused by differences in timing of hormonal imbalance. However, I think it’s more likely that there are other factors at play which greatly impact how testosterone impacts someone’s behavior and disposition. For example, antisocials15 and psychopaths16 have a low cortisol-to-testosterone ratio, and cortisol regulates certain behaviors associated with testosterone such as impulsivity, aggression, and dominance even when testosterone levels are high. Cortisol is, however, a big bogeyman in the manosphere and in the alt-health scene, so this might also be a reason for some to glamourize antisocials.

However, aside from possibly having more sexual success (a lot of that is just due to high promiscuity), psychopaths and sociopaths kind of suck. First of all, like the other disorders on this list, they kill themselves a lot17. I guess being “low cortisol” is not so good when you are so apathetic and stressless that you don’t even care about protecting your own life. Secondly, it is associated with low intelligence. ASPD and the antisocial/impulsive factor of psychopathy are both associated with lower intelligence18, albeit only slightly in the case of psychopathy. The relationship between psychopathic behavior and intelligence is clouded by the prognostic features of psychopathy which set it apart from other antisocial disorders that require a degree of wit. Namely, the ability to put on a charming facade.

Many people who are sociopathic or psychopathic aren’t cold and calculating, they’re literally just too stupid to model other people’s emotions in their head. They are also too stupid to model and plan for the future, which is why they do things that bite them in the ass later like rape and kill people, and commit suicide. When you think of a sociopath, you should think of a gangster, a thug, someone with no long-term ambitions who just acts violently towards and ruins their own life and the lives of people around them for no particular reason. Unsurprisingly, it is also more common among the uhh… Criminally inclined peoples of the world, if you know what I mean. Not sure where it is, but I think someone on here wrote an essay on that topic, so if anyone knows what I’m talking about please holler at me.

Your favorite dictator probably wasn’t a psychopath or a sociopath, because to be a dictator with a significant international post-mortem fanbase requires a degree of care for the “human world” beyond the mere domination of others and the degree to which it can satisfy hedonic cravings. I think your average homeless person is more likely to be antisocial than someone like Adolf Hitler.

Also, the whole “rich people are psychos” thing is probably baloney. Consider reading:

Cremieux Recueil

Are the Rich Antisocial and the Poor Emotionally Intelligent?

Working-class people may be, as we're ceaselessly reminded, less meticulous about matters of law and propriety than their "betters", but they're also much less self-obsessed. They care more about their friends, families and communities. In aggregate, at least, they're just fundamentally nicer. …

Read more

2 years ago · 50 likes · 11 comments · Cremieux

Is antisociality something to be completely written off as a mental disorder? Hmm, not as much as the other disorders I talked about. Being highly risk-prone, aggressive, and low-stress is probably quite useful in a solitary, fast life history setting. You know, just the exact opposite of what our own ancestors existed in. It’s just bad when you’re a human being who lives in a society and relies on the people around him to do anything. Is it a manifestation of masculinty? To some extent, probably, but is it the manifestation of masculinty? Probably not. Associations between masculinity and antisociality are limited and dependent on a number of factors, so it’s more likely that masculinity only intensifies antisocial behavior in people who are already predisposed to it for other reasons. Perhaps in people who are unmasculine but also of this profile, they suffer from some other more feminine-coded mental illness… BPD, anyone?

I think, because a lot of people on the far-right have felt isolated from society for so long, they have a desire to internalize their own political dissidence into some sort of “based pathology”. Because right-wing politics affirm the existence of human inequality, being a member of an unpopular and suppressed right-wing ideology often encourages people to adopt some sort of gnostic-type sense of superiority, where people who “know” the “redpills” are somehow of a higher sort than the hylic masses. IQ fetishism and “spiteful mutant” theory are the positive forms of this, where the redpilled individual convinces himself that he is a sane man living in an insane asylum, but this doesn’t work when someone is not fulfilled in life. A negative elitism emerges, where the ones in the know are tortured souls surrounded by blissfully ignorant or disgustingly docile lemmings. TL;DR: