captain Syzygy a culture where these ‘conditions’ are taken as a sign of divinely-inspired genius, and later revealed to be a sort of shackle deliberately engineered into the genome of super-babies
I did not ever read those (or Ender’s Game), but that sounds extremely cool (and the first part might be the truth, who can say)
As someone who has a different kind of divinely inspired genius, I actually sincerely subscribe to a version of this theory.
At the very least, I am invested in the idea that a great deal of what western psychiatry calls disorders and even a good bit of the things they call illnesses, to a lot of different societies and cultures, would have been much more readily seen as having particular aptitudes if not just straight up spiritual abilities.
There is a perspective I’ve encountered in my own community where we’ve more or less attempted to re-establish that way of looking at it, it is helpful to people with schizophrenia who experience hallucinations, for instance, to consider they are hearing or seeing spirits who are communicating to them on a personal level no one else can perceive.
Whether you believe that in a literal sense or a metaphorical sense or not at all, it doesn’t seem to harm and can even help people who are experiencing that to have people they talk about it with to not WELL ACKSHUALLY them and just be chill and, you know, not feed into it but to not try and correct them. ’Cause like, you know, that is how they’re experiencing reality whether we agree or not. Framing it within the spiritual angle is also a helpful way to undo internal stigmatization for sure too. Maybe at some point this is a person who would have been thought of as having an incredible gift.
At the very least it makes me feel a lot better to identify what it is that actually causes me distress or suffering about the Cool ways my brain works because it’s usually not those aspects themselves but the degree to which the world around me doesn’t accommodate or is outright hostile to that difference. When you think about it, having someone who would, say, be extremely good at maintaining the cleanliness of the food storage might have been the reason that winter isn’t killing everybody this year. Or like, for thousands of years we probably needed the guy who likes to stay up until the sun rises and is really good with the dogs for some weird reason. It makes it make sense that these things have a genetic component you know?