The New Disability - Social Incompetence
social competition raises the standard and lots of people get left behind
An Excerpt from Our Worst Strength - Ch. 32 - American Individualism: A Diagnosis, p. 316-8
I grew up in the last generation that thought it was perfectly OK to use disability put-downs—retard, moron, microcephalic, mentally defective, cripple, etc.—when we wanted to make fun of the individual incompetence of our friends, family, or coworkers. For men especially, these physical and mental disability tags helped bolster insecure egos in a hyper-individualistic competition for various kinds of social status.
The more you think you compete against everyone else in love, work, and recreation, the more incentive you have to engage in stigmatizing other individuals as permanently incompetent. Some have forgotten that, not long ago, most Americans rejected people with disabilities as broken individuals and most likely to “fail.” We used to institutionalize them, lock them away, and refuse to discuss their existence. It’s easier to mock people who live in absentia or are otherwise invisible.
In one sense, this old American tendency to mock the biologically weak individual is part of a male-dominated frontier and settler mindset, a competitive ethos of dominance over others. But this also epitomizes the “worst” part of individualism as a cultural way of life: the belittling of others to fuel one’s own competitive striving—a release of nervous energy inside a brutal form of life historically best suited to the male offspring of the affluent.
You may feel that America has become more accepting of the mentally and physically challenged. Overall, I think you’re right. However, the desire to stigmatize the incompetent individual has not disappeared in America. Instead, it has shifted to bullying those with social skills deficits. Ironically, Larry David has made a career of being the socially incompetent butt of this new kind of stigmatic talk. We call it “cringe comedy”; again, it is primarily men who enjoy it. I find this ironic because men are most likely to display the cringeworthy behavior.
I suspect that the rise of high-functioning, level 1 autism diagnosis is partly because people with below-average social skills no longer hide well in adult society. We no longer get a pass, like I did as a young person. The standards have been ratcheted because we are a fully realized individual labor economy with access to a broad array of talent (i.e., a better array than in a purely male-dominated workforce).
We must be networking and stranger-befriending masters like never before in American history. This is most true for educated elites. But your ability to navigate blue-collar networks is also more important in an era that is post-union. In a society built around an unstable, unpredictable labor economy (whose chaos drives most of our waking hours), adults have to rely increasingly on their own training, upskilling, and clever social skills to stay ahead of inflation. And I know I’ve spent a lot of time and money upskilling myself from a low baseline.
We have become stranger dependent as adult workers, relegating our use of friends and family to sporadic entertainment or amateur psychotherapy. Then fun becomes an emotional balm in an urban world resting on weak ties and few close relationships.
It all works in a clumsy way, but not as well for those who are socially unskilled, the shy, the abused, the traumatized, the depressed, and the wildly disconnected (e.g., a divorced man living alone with few friends).
These “exceptions” add up to a fair amount of people at any given time, though it is not easy to measure. And these alienated adults, hanging by a thin social thread, are too widely dispersed to notice easily.
The beauty of highly individualistic societies like ours is that the socially skilled and dominant can easily escape socially conservative lifestyle prisons and seek relatively un-surveilled opportunities anywhere in the country.
We can become settlers on our own personal frontiers. Some of us.
But, when things go badly, America does not have a ritual way to handle the broken individual. We do have professional interventions, but we refuse to push people into them. And we refuse to make the few proven therapies freely available and easily accessible to all comers. We cannot even staff for the therapeutic demand we are experiencing in America.
The more educated and affluent you are, the more opportunities and lifestyle alternatives you will perceive and encounter. This kind of empowerment has real perceptual consequences for young people.
It easily overwhelms them with alternatives—alternative careers, alternative lovers, alternative friends, alternative activities, alternative diets—which leads to the exhausting impulse to curate and re-curate social networks and consumption patterns at the urging of marketing messages that also skew toward the affluent (who spend the most in our economy).
Radical autonomy is terrific if you’re trying to escape something horrid (abusive husbands, cults, abusive parents, toxic workplaces, etc.). But without constraints, the overwhelming lifestyle choice of the modern urban world is anxiety-inducing for many. It requires enormous cognitive discipline to focus on specific choices and not get spun around constantly by alternatives. Individualism is most confusing and overwhelming in youth when so many major decisions remain prolonged and unresolved for years.
America’s individualistic Rumspringa years are still a chaotic sh*t show. But, because a decent majority make it through OK, we declare it a fine way to kick off your adult life. Every misfit and failure seems like an anomaly in any social network. The broken are widely dispersed, not gathered together with a public health spotlight on them. We don’t notice them.
The fact that 70–80 percent are OK is the standard for evaluating the health of American society. The other 20–30 percent are considered expendable. Individualism gets an easy pass.
“You can’t solve everyone’s problems,” some of us say dismissively.
We all move on with our day.
We can do better than this as an affluent nation and as human beings.
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You figured out where these ailing tentacles have reached and exposed our weaknesses.
I had therapy when I was young and it truly put me on the right path! But, we may need a more universal shake up - I think Mother Nature is doing it for us - because we are not.
This reminds me of a book I'm reading now called Modern Friendship. We're a mess, folks!