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MaiqTheTrue

Zensunni Wanderer

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MaiqTheTrue


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Zensunni Wanderer

				
				
				

				

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				Kali Yuga: The Dark Age Prophesied in Many Religions
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My take on this is that human civilization is ultimately cyclical and has declines and dark ages fairly frequently.  These declines often have the same or similar causes no matter where or when they happen and likewise would have similar earmarks no matter which civilization we’re talking about from the Sumerians to the Soviet Union.


What seems to be the overarching pattern is a two-fold degeneration.


The first part is the degradation of ideas of investment in the wider society at the expense of yourself.  This shows up as more selfish thinking, seeking my own wealth and fame and pleasure over the good of society.  It also means a decline in long term thinking, work ethic, education especially apart from the idea of it being merely a job credential.  In ascending societies, you see a lot of things done for the fame or glory of the society, and those who built it are revered and their works are studied.  Public works are built even if the builders themselves don’t expect to benefit directly.  In descending societies, you see people cheating, lying, stealing, and manipulating systems to get ahead.  Corruption is rampant, bribes are common.


The second is the denigration of long term thinking.  Why work hard for years to build something, or study for decades, or think about the world I would leave behind?  Instead, people choose to be hedonistic and consumeristic and choose the pleasure of today and sometimes at the expense of the future.  In ascending societies you can see the opposite, people often choose to deny themselves pleasure for some greater purpose, reject hedonistic impulses and have fairly rigid social codes.  And those who openly flaunt their hedonism are at best shamed and at worst are punished by the legal system.  In a descending society, the rule is pleasure.  If you want wild sex, no problem.  If you would rather not go to school, work, or do anything useful, you don’t have to.  The only thing you really can’t do is shame people.


The writers of ancient literature were not stupid, and they’d have noticed that these sorts of patterns had happened around them in local villages and perhaps in the legends of past civilizations that didn’t make it.  And when writing about the future, they’d project that past onto their mythology and predictions of the future.  We read them hundreds of years later and see ourselves in them because we are somewhere on the civilization sine wave there are parts of the story that fit our observations or our memories of past civilizations.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don’t think rights anywhere in the world, even in America are “inviolable” in any real sense.  The American constitution might give a person de jure rights, but given sufficient desire any one of them can be curbed or end runs can be found.  During the COVID lockdowns, churches were forced to close, which would be a pretty serious curbing of the right to free exercise of religion.  During the last election the major social media companies colluded to keep the hunter biden story from being discussed.


Rights have always been allowed on the basis that the government found it more difficult to do things by force than by consent.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Eventually, I see this going south.  The thing is that our wealth and power of the West and America as the imperial core are shrinking.  And that means it’s coming to a point where you’re faced with the problem that you’re shut out of good paying positions due to the progressive stack working against you.  And at this point, you will create a white bloc much like other minorities have.  At which point, we’ll have a racist and radicalized society where your race is the most important cultural touchstone you have.  It will determine your lifestyle, your political stances, where you live and to some extent what you do.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’m not convinced of that, in fact, history seems to show that the fastest way to get people to think of themselves as a bloc is to convince them that they’re oppressed.  It doesn’t have to be real, but the effect is very real.  That’s how we got Rwanda and Yugoslavia.  Once people started to perceive that the other ethnic group got most of the goodies of society, those on the outside start to see themselves as their ethnic group first and then part of the country.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think a big problem is that people are not only not taught to think, but are actually taught to avoid thinking (while being told that they’re being taught to be “critical thinkers”(tm)).   Even in schools—especially in schools— you are much more likely to be graded worse for original thinking and skeptical thinking about the common narratives than by simply parroting what you’ve been told is true.  And now, watching the way our culture treats those few brave souls who do speak out, they’re well aware that questioning means losing your livelihood for saying the wrong thing.


Given the lack of logic and statistics taught, I dare say that the vast majority of Americans are incapable of noticing the inconsistencies in their ideas.  They haven’t been taught to notice that we were against X until we were for it because they never thought through the logic of X.  They don’t notice that ideas A and B rely on contradicting ideas and that it’s thus impossible to logically hold both to be true at the same time.


It’s really weird to watch people trust the science when the science tells them two or three mutually exclusive things and they believe them all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’ve read Moldbug repeatedly, and I don’t see it as a call to action in any traditional sense.  It’s a social and political theory that purports to explain the way society actually works as separated from the propaganda that society tells itself about how decisions are made.  In that sense he’s closer to something like Plato’s Republic or Moore’s Utopia in which he’s describing a proposed society as a sort of thought experiment as to how a society ought to be run.  He’s not saying “overthrow the government,” he’s saying our current system is more broken than the society of the Middle Ages, so much so that running society in the way that the average medieval fiefdom was run would work better for us than liberal democracy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think his main criticism of modern liberal democratic systems is exactly that no one actually has skin in the game.  His suggestion that Pelosi or anyone else put on workboots to clean up their district is pointing out that in modern liberal democracy, the entire system is geared specifically to prevent the buck from ever stopping and as a side effect to promote short term thinking.


Monarchy did manage to avoid these problems as if you destroyed your fief there’s nothing of value to pass on to your child.  No prince would be happy to find that they were inheriting a fief with its own map of human feces.  In fact this alone would probably make the king fix those problems long before they ever got that bad because he doesn’t want his son to rule over garbage dumps and hobo camps.  Monarchy has other problems— it lacks the ability to effectively gage public sentiment.  But on the whole, the skin in the game generally prevents problems from getting too bad because the ruler’s fate is tied directly to the fate of his state.


This fact alone makes me a bit more sympathetic to monarchy or monarchy with a parliamentary system.  Having a personal stake in the outcome is critical to good decisions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The ticketmaster thing is a problem in the sense that it’s creating artificial scarcity.  Her tickets are not sold out at the price she offered or at least not to humans.  Tickets have been captured by bot-buyers who buy the entire lot for resale.  Humans simply cannot buy the tickets at list price from the venue because they sell out in mere milliseconds after the “public” sale — all to TM and a few other resellers.  And so it’s not that the fans aren’t really fans if they rebuy from TM, it’s that TM has used bots to get themselves a virtual monopoly on ticket sales for concerts and large events.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it’s a problem of weakness of the underlying dogmas under scrutiny.  If you have a dogma that absolutely falls apart on contact with reality, it isn’t good to create a population that is able to think carefully about reality.  In fact, you’d want a population almost exactly like our own, in which people are taught trades and given university degrees, but aren’t actually taught to observe or think and who are basically scientifically illiterate and unable to read and understand complex texts.


It’s not hard to get right, as high levels of scholarship were achieved quite often before the modern era.  Teach kids how to learn, give them tools to observe and interpret their own data, to think carefully about ideas.  It’s borderline criminal that we aren’t doing that:  teaching logic and statistics and philosophy would create a generation of thinkers with the tools to question narratives.


We aren’t doing that, and judging by how things are, it’s being torn down on purpose as anything that actually produces a good outcome seems to end quickly because of accusations of racism.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Depending upon what you need people to accept for the first part, I’m not sure that you can do both.  If I want kids to accept an ideology that says the earth is flat, then competent understanding of physics would work against that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think at this point, I suspect shenanigans on all sides in lots of ways.


But if something like Operation Chaos happens, you’d see the change statistically.  Youd see a reasonably large spike in GOP primary voters and a similar drop in democrat voters.  If the numbers are off then you can at least try to point to them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think people are lying to themselves because they simply cannot imagine a world where humans can exist without working.  And if you believe that (which I do, simply because I see no movement toward my government being willing to allow people to exist without working) then the idea that AI is coming for your job is scary, in fact a threat to your existence.  And add in the class snobbery in which people assume that robots are only going to be used to replace those stupid working class people who work with their hands doing menial labor.  They think their work is too important and sophisticated for a robot or an AI.  It’s a psychological thing where admitting that AI is capable of your job means that that you’ll be just like those old factory workers who they sneered at in the 1990s.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The symbol is more than likely related to Black Israelism that his beliefs seem to mirror.  Basically they believe that Africans are he true Israel, and that the modern Jews aren’t.  They also despite being Christian are bound by the Laws of Moses.  It’s an odd belief system, but it’s not that dangerous.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don’t think it’s no true Scotsman in every instance.  And I think failing can happen if you’re sincere.  Although for sincere beliefs, I tend to observe that failure is something that people with sincere beliefs tend to feel bad about.  And they generally will make some effort to live consistently.  They’re also willing to bear at least some cost for that belief.


I think that we in the west sort of assume that the purpose of beliefs is just about truth seeking.  I think social cohesion is probably why humans ever bothered to have beliefs.  A bunch of people believing the same thing are a tighter group than a group with no beliefs in common.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Whence coddling? Or: why is everything boring now?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it comes from the homogenous nature of how we consume online content.  We have virtual monopolies (or nearly so — there are three main social media sites, and a couple of short video/photo sharing sites) in most media consumed online.  You want articles?  Reddit is the front pages of the internet.  Videos? Almost everything is on YouTube.  Talk with friends?  Facebook, or maybe instagram or Snapchat.  Politics and news are Twitter.  And most of these have very poor filtering between groups.  A post on Reddit is at least potentially available to anyone who happens by.  And this is true of most of these sites — anyone logged on can potentially see anything on the site.


But this presents a problem because there’s the risk of offending people (who then leave) or seen by underage people (potentially opening up legal risks). Or because someone might just tattle to advertising buyers.   The easy solution is to create rules that assume that kids and very easily offended people are watching everything and make rules that fit that.  Essentially, make the site PG rather than R rated.  Remove everything controversial or risky.


In the old days of the internet, it was a lot different precisely because there were thousands of forums each catering to a different audience.  Geeks could create knowing that their tentacle alien woman wasn’t going to be seen by a ten year old or reported to HR.  I mean who’s going to Stardestroter.net that isn’t a hardcore Star Wars fan.  Donna the wine mom wouldn’t like it, but she’s unlikely to see it.  And if the website is age restricted, no ten year old sees it either.  Essentially the early internet was like having a million channels.  Each one could cater to a specific audience and creators could create whatever they wanted for whichever audience they wanted without worrying that people who didn’t understand would see the stuff and get offended.


Modern internet is a lot more like the days of network TV before cable.  Back then you had three or four channels that had to appeal to everyone, because in 1980, kids watched those same four channels just like adults, and mom and dad watched the same shows.  So you ended up with banal boring shit because it was safe viewing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I find all the propaganda around Ukraine to be weird just in how often it’s being sold as various tropes of sci-fi, fantasy and anime tropes to sell various forms of support for the war.  Dehumanizing people in wars is definitely normal, but there’s just something creepy about the way that the war is sold.


Russophobia has been a trope of western propaganda since well before the Cold War.  But they were never “orcs”.  And there were varying ways of saying “just the military,” even if that part never really made it to the homes of the working class.  Not only that, but the rapidity of shutting down Russians in the West (or suspected Russians) and insisted on inane changes (Kyiv may well be the technically correct transliteration of the Ukrainian city, but until 2022, nobody in the West cared about the spelling).  Russians were banned from public life, or permitted only if they took special pains to denounce their home country (including rather absurdly, opera singers and dancers) Russian themed restaurants were shuttered.  Likewise, Ukraine has been lionized as all kinds of things, Zelensky was memed as Captain Ukraine, Miss Universe featured the contestant from Ukraine dressed as an anime angel with fully articulated wings and a sword.


The issue isn’t just dehumanization, which has been happening, but the extremes and contrasts are such that talk of peace and real politik become impossible.  If Ukraine is Marvel superheroes and Russia is orcs, how do you sell negotiations?  How do you prevent escalation?  How do you have sober conversations at all.  And what does it say about the seriousness with which we’re taking a war if we’re discussing it on the level of action movies and genre fantasy?  It seems in the past, even if we were dehumanizing the enemy, we were at least aware that it was a real war, against people, perhaps barbaric people, but people, with real weapons being deployed against real cities with real people in them.


This is a problem because without taking the war seriously or acknowledging that people are dying and cities are being destroyed, there’s a risk that this conflict escalates to much higher levels, going from being a US-Russian proxy war into being a full on world war, potentially even a nuclear one.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’ve always seen this as HyperCalvinist philosophy in action.  It’s actually somewhat older and goes back really to Romanized Christian dogma especially in the West where notions like original sin, total depravity and noblesse oblige are part of the cultural heritage we inherited from Christianity.  Add in that Christianity isn’t native to Europe (hence up until the second century you don’t see a lot of gentile Christians).  All of this creates a mindset of apology— we are wrong, need to repent, and that pride is the worst thing you can do, while humility is a virtue.


And we’ve been apologizing for 1500 years.  It’s not bad if you’re actually guilty of a specific thing (this is one of the benefits of a confessional— you’re only guilty of things you’ve actually done) but turned to a generalized sense of evil that you and your people are generally guilty of, it turns pathological because there’s no absolutions possible.  And without that, you apologize and move to the next thing, even more obscure than the first, with ever more obvious abasement as if to say “please please tell me I’m forgiven, tell me I’m okay, tell me I’m one of the good ones.”


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think honestly the public needs to be much more skeptical of government propaganda in general.  And I think given the fact that public support can and does help the war effort, the public is responsible.  We shouldn’t just blindly accept the government narrative about war, in fact the default is better off being negative.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it depends on what kinds of things you’re insisting are a culture.  Most people, being essentially raised in those institutions from infancy have more time being taught the values, attitudes, and beliefs of their institutions and their cohort of similarly raised peers than their families of origin (although there are exceptions, most of which come from either purposely dropping out, or very strong and active counter programming).  In that sense, despite democratic dressing, we essentially live in the thought experiments of Plato’s Republic or Brave New World.  The average non-fundamentalist of any religion has essentially the same secular humanist, post enlightenment, consumerist world view.  They all essentially believe in the same things, democracy (particularly liberal democracy), human rights, secularism, sexual liberation, and capitalism.


This is historically pretty weird.  In times past, you could and often would find tribes just a few miles apart believing wildly different things, practicing wildly different religions based on wildly different assumptions.  You’d also find it very difficult to force ideology and conformity on large populations.  A Greek once tried to force the Jews to be polytheists.  It didn’t work.  Modern child warehousing has done wonders to de-Christianize the West, because it takes kids out of the home and spends hours teaching them that their parents are backwards and wrong.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For me, what Kanye is doing isn’t forgiving because you cannot forgive a person without acknowledging the fact that the person did something evil.  The reverse, seeking forgiveness, absolutely requires that I acknowledge that I have done evil.  You can’t really forgive otherwise because there’s not any reason to.  If Hitler did nothing wrong, there’s no reason to forgive.  If Kanye thinks that Jews deserved it, or that it never happened, why would he then forgive?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What Orban says keeps me up at night simply because he’s right.  And what’s really scary is that I don’t think either side can back down.  We’re giving Ukraine everything, and talking about even fighter jets. If we give Ukraine everything and they lose, that’s a serious blow to the credibility of NATO as a protector of the current international order.  I think this is why China is supportive.  If we can’t defend Ukraine, why would we be able to protect our Asian Allies in Korea or Japan?  If we can’t actually protect Ukraine despite billions in sanctions and giving the most powerful weapons we have, what sane country is going to trust us to be their defense or to protect their trade or solve their disputes?  And without that perception, we lose a lot of power.  If you’re not looking to NATO as much for defense and trade protection, why do you care what they say?


And given that neither side can afford to lose, I fear an out of control escalation. NATO leaders know that their power will be diminished by a loss, that’s why Ukraine keeps getting more and more weapons, more advanced weapons, etc. they can’t afford to lose, especially after investing heavily in Ukrainian victory.  Putin likewise can’t lose (though I think there’s a fig leaf in that if he gets Donbas in a peace deal, it’s more than he had to start with, while for NATO anything short of the 1990s border is a loss). It’s just not a situation that either side can back away from.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think, just from observation of other popular theories of education, it comes from a place where education isn’t supposed to feel like work for the students and therefore things like phonics (which would require memorizing phonics rules like what a_e sounds like, or the sounds of the letters) or times tables or vocabulary unpopular.  Even in foreign language learning, there’s a tendency to go for immersion without having to memorize vocabulary or grammatical rules.


This kind of approach is attractive because it’s not boring for the kids (who wants to spend time memorizing rules or math tables?), it’s easier for teachers (you can just speak Italian to the kids, they’ll figure it out), and you make initial progress fairly quickly (if I memorize a dozen words, I can “read” a Dr. Seuss book.  Cat in the Hat isn’t that hard) but you’ll eventually hit the limits of the method.  A word like coagulation or bipedal or function isn’t easy to guess from context.  You certainly wouldn’t get a picture in a text complex enough to use words like that.  But those problems don’t crop up for years.  Long after you’ve been able to issue glowing reports about how well the dumb kids are reading.  And the kids feel good about it too.


These methods are the perfect solution to the education problem they’re actually trying to solve.  The problem isn’t “how do I teach skills in such a way that the kids truly learn the skill in question,” but “how do I get these kids to do well on a standardized test and keep them from being disruptive.”  Whole language, neo-math, and immersion work for that.  Duolingo works on the same issues— how do I make people feel like they understand something without making it feel like work?  What actually works is much closer to the old school classical model — memorize the basic information, and use that as a base to build on.  The problem is that it’s too boring and too slow.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I totally agree with this and it’s an under appreciated issue.  It basically traps you to wherever the bus/train/subway goes with very few other options.  And I think that the ability to pack yourself shit in a pickup truck and leave is something that gives people more power than they appreciate.  I’m not stuck beholden to whatever stores are close by, or whatever jobs are on the bus route, or the schools close to my house.  If the only grocery store I have reliable access to is the Piggly Wiggly in my “zone” they know they have a mostly captive audience, thus have little reason to keep quality high or prices low.  If I can only get jobs along the bus routes or near my home, the employers get a bit of leverage because they might well be the only people employing my skills within that zone.  If I’m a specialist, and want to quit but don’t have a car, it’s a bit of friction, and thus the employees aren’t able to get good wages.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It depends on why the discrepancy exists.  If it’s genetic, then you can only contain the damage by limiting opportunities to rape (I don’t buy this as the best theory).  If it’s poverty, fix the poverty.  If it’s culture, change the culture.


My suspicion is that we’re looking at a cultural difference in which white men are taught to seek long term mutual supportive relationships with women.  The goal is at least a companion if not a marriage.  The goal for black men seems to be bedding a woman, or preferably multiple with no intention of forming a long term relationship at all.  If this is the cause, the solution it to change the culture to being more like the white men in seeking out long term mutual relationships, rather than simply notching the bed-posts.  You can do this (at least in a thought experiment) by forbidding arts and media from celebrating easy sex, among other cultural bad habits.  You can also purposefully inject more useful memes into the culture to promote marriage, sobriety, and industriousness.  I think the Christian sect that Kanye is in is a sort of answer.  Promote the idea of keeping the law as a practice, which naturally includes not raping people, working hard, being a family man, being sober, and so on.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think — love to the good ones like Scott — almost all of psychiatry is basically a pseudoscience dressed up as medical science.  There’s just not the same level of skepticism and rigor behind the diagnosis and it’s not even something that most of them seem worried about.


The DSM defines various illnesses abut there are problems here.  First, everything is based on self reported symptoms.  This is not how a science-based medical diagnosis should work, especially now that anyone can simply Google and find out what to report.  How does a doctor know you have the symptoms?  You tell him, and he believes you.  If you report losing your keys “often” and that you can’t pay attention in lectures, you have ADHD— with no checks to see if you actually have more trouble than anyone else of the same age.   Second, most of the disorders are simply defined as symptom clusters, none of which are something objectively testable even if you wanted to.  It’s a mess.


Add in that doctors caring for mental health quite often aren’t skeptical about anything their patients tell them, and it’s simply a patient wring their own diagnosis through the auspices of a doctor who will believe anything and use that to give you what you want.