Disease is Bad

And other controversial opinions...

I’m struck by how often the sensible and informed must now battle ideas which are, frankly, crazy. Most of the time these ideas do not originate in the wider culture or on FOX News or Substack. They originate in academia, and in strange little closed-off worlds of online activists, and among the wealthy and safe. I should note that those very people are now making a concerted effort to define ‘misinformation’ and take real institutional measures to suppress or even punish it. Naturally, I’m not optimistic about their chances to improve the quality of political dialogue.

Here are some ideas which are not just unpopular in these circles but are often unsayable. They’re so malign that even acknowledging them is a kind of thoughtcrime. The facts that they’re obviously true and that their opponents almost never address them or debate their proponents should be a massive red flag… but are often not:

• Some cultures and civilizations are better at promoting human happiness and freedom than others. Societies which engage in slavery, mass rape, genocide, or brutal political totalitarianism are almost always worse (if that word means anything) than those that do not do these things.

• Science is the best guide to understanding natural reality and has created real benefits, entirely separate from ‘power dynamics’ or hierarchies or meta-narratives.

• Obesity is an illness. Like all illnesses it is of such a nature that its existence is a negative indicator for overall health, almost never a positive one.

• Students should be taught society’s values and objective facts, plus how to gather them and evaluate them. Ideally education should instill a love of learning and teach students how (rather than what) to think.

• Political morality and fairness demand reciprocity and a basic legal and social equality, irrespective of racial/sexual/etc. categories.

• Sex is a binary system (small vs. large gametes-notwithstanding irregularities) and gender has always tracked and mirrored sex in the majority of humans, in all recorded cultures throughout time.

• Humans cannot change their sex.

• Crime is often due to malice and greed and other moral failings and should be penalized.

• Disabilities and disease are bad.

Around the world the vast majority of people in every country believe all of these things (or some workable cultural equivalent) I’m fairly sure. There could be instances where political repression makes people afraid to vocalize some of them and perhaps, in those places, popular opinion has been warped but for most of these propositions in most places we can accurately regard them as ‘common sense’.

Ironically it is the very educated and the very wealthy who now attack them… all of them, at this very moment.

I will focus on the last proposition. It is something that probably 99% of humans who have lived on earth would agree with, and strongly. It’s almost self-evident. Unfortunately we now have a class of people with mild disabilities or disabilities that have become manageable thanks to the recent and spectacular wealth of the capitalist West (a system that the over-educated all benefit from and generally oppose, true to form). They have conflated disability with identity categories and have launched a multi-front attack on autism treatment, on Mr. Beast curing 1000 congenitally blind individuals of their sightlessness, and on the notion that mental illness is actually a bad thing and not a charming quirk.

Read the articles linked to each of these examples if you’re interested. I simply cannot believe that, as a worldly 37-year old, I exist in the most well-informed and technologically impressive civilization in human history… and I must spend my time convincing young people-who have disproportionate wealth, power and influence-that criminals are often bad people and that disabilities are a net negative.

I’m not calling for a uniform approach to these realities. I'm not calling for any approach, or prophylactic, or program. I’m simply pointing out that-while many autistic people don’t dislike their neurodivergence and some mental illness can indeed bestow original ideas or unique insights-the conversation about these things shouldn’t be hijacked by the most verbal and functional quintile of diagnosed people and that these things, for most people in most times in most places, are bad. They’re misfortunes and sources of suffering and conditions which require compassion and wisdom from society. They’re not fucking superpowers… and you’re not Rosa Parks.

“Conveniently for activists, [psychotic people] are too sick to participate in the debate about disability anyway, as are (for example) people whose cerebral palsy have rendered them nonverbal, those whose disabilities also can’t be spun off as a ‘superpower.’ Anyone who is not disabled, even the families of those with severe disabilities, is told they may not participate in the conversation. So a group of educated professionals whose disabilities don’t hinder their participation in elite society, many self-diagnosed, dominate the debate. They insist that disability is only different, not damaging, demand special accommodations despite that contention, and when confronted with contrary information angrily dismiss it.”

-Freddie DeBoer