Not exactly: “neurotypical” is a word from the neurodiversity movement for people whose minds work in the ways our culture treats as standard. Therapeutic Shamanism asks whether much of what passes as neurotypical is in fact a product of domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this, “neuromasking on a mass scale”. This is a question about our culture, not a settled fact.
What does neurotypical mean? #
It means having a mind that works in the ways a culture expects, as opposed to being neurodivergent: autistic, for example, or having ADHD. The word comes from the neurodiversity movement, which sees these differences as a natural part of human variety. See What is neurodiversity, and how does Therapeutic Shamanism see it?
Some writers within that movement question whether anyone really fits the category. The social psychologist Devon Price writes: “According to the neurodiversity perspective, no single person is ever truly neurotypical, in fact. We all just vary in our ability to neuroconform.” Price describes neurotypical standards as “a moving target”, which even people without any diagnosis may fail to meet.1
What has been suggested? #
That what we call normal may itself be the result of taming: perhaps what passes for normal is neurodomesticated, or neurotamed, or neuromaladaptive. There is a lot of interesting material on places like TikTok these days about how many neurowild or divergent people are naturally non-hierarchical, and hunter-gatherer cultures were fiercely egalitarian. That would make “neurotypical”, with its “acceptance of (and compliance with) power-over social structures, a product of the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer and not normal in terms of healthy, but neurotamed.”
He has gone a step further: “Maybe ‘neurotypical’ is in fact neuromasking on a mass scale. Suppressing our true needs and nature to fit in with things like overly hierarchical schooling and work environments, having to cope with high population densities and enforced proximity and interactions with strangers, overly-humanised environments cut off from nature, and so on.”
How does this connect with the rest of his teaching? #
Through the idea of the persona, the mask we wear to fit in. “The greater the gap between it and our real-self, the more the real-self becomes suppressed and forgotten about. Many people in the modern world, even most people, lose sight of their real-self altogether.”2
Personas are not only a modern thing. “Now, of course people in hunter-gatherer tribes had middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer personas too. The persona is a necessary part of fitting into a tribe. The crucial thing though is the extent to which the real-self and the persona are different.”3 On this view, everyone has a persona. What differs is how far it has moved away from the real self. See What are the Wild Mind and the Domesticated Mind?
So are neurotypical people domesticated, and neurodivergent people wild? #
Not simply. The terms neurowild and neurodivergent are sometimes used for people on one side, and neurotamed for what passes for normal on the other. The books, though, describe domestication as something our culture does to the people living in it: “To fit in to our current civilisation we suppress our individuality and curtail our freedom to a degree that is unprecedented”.4
This answer does not offer a way of telling any individual what their own mind is, or whether they are wild or tame. See What does domestication do to us?
Is the difficulty in the person, or between people? #
Research on the double empathy problem suggests it is often between them. A team of autism researchers describes the idea like this: “In contrast to a deficit model that attributes poor cross-neurotype interactions exclusively to the autistic person (and the onus on them to change to improve them), a double empathy approach emphasises that social interactions are bi-directional with both parties equally contributing to poor outcomes.”5 In their study, non-autistic observers did not rate conversations between two autistic people any lower than conversations between two non-autistic people, though the authors are careful about how far such a result can be taken.6
This fits a view in which neither way of being is simply the broken one. It does not by itself show that what we call neurotypical is a product of domestication. That remains a question, and an open one.
Can this be proved? #
Not at present. The idea is offered as a question, not a finding. On neurodiversity in hunter-gatherer cultures, the evidence from anthropology is scanty, as it is not something anthropologists tended to be looking for or interested in, though it is certainly possible to speculate and make good guesses. What is offered is a way of looking at our culture’s idea of normal from a much longer view of human history, and of asking what it has cost us to fit it. See What is the Fall?
