A Sick Society: Pathologizing Giftedness

Childhood is that shrouded phase of formation when one is discovering who he is, what interests him, and what he would like to do for a lifetime, all while not realizing that he is doing those things. Parents rightly insist that their children, far from being unmolded clay, are unique, with custom proclivities and affinities. Over time, those traits become evident to the people around them.

Enid Blyton was a famous English children’s author who wrote hundreds of books, which to most authors, seems an impossible feat. In modern times, she is rarely referenced, except for complaints about the politically incorrect nature of some of her characters. Reading a biography about her life caused pause at the following account of her late teens:

Enid’s habit of coining nicknames for herself and her close acquaintances and then acting out small fantasies with them was something that exasperated the practical, down-to-earth Ida, now engaged to be married to a young soldier she had known since childhood. But Enid continued to call her friend ‘Cap’n’ and herself ‘cabin-boy’, or ‘Richard’, and on walks together she would often act out the part, whistling noisily, plunging her hands deeply into her pockets and putting on a boyish swagger to keep up the pretence. Ida felt this behaviour extremely childish and not in keeping with a trainee teacher, who would soon be responsible for young children herself. Only Mabel, it seemed, understood her young friend’s need for these occasional escapes from reality and would laugh over her nonsense, continuing to handle Enid, in her late teens and early twenties, like an irrepressible, lovable child.

Modern eyes would read such things and begin to apply various notions of our own time. We sexualize and pathologize. Young Enid’s playfulness would be transformed by so many to be indicative of a disorder—either in sexuality or in mind. Neither was the case. She would live a wildly successful career, enjoy marriage, and have two children.

Her described quirkiness in the 1920s, when she would have been in her late teens, was an expression that would later find its fulfillment in her works. Her characters came most to life on paper, where they thrilled generations of children, including myself. Never would it be asserted by her peers that those characters were representations of repressed homosexuality, or worse, that she really was a male on the inside, yearning for recognition—that she should abandon her (healthy) pursuits and live a life of deviancy and denial of biological reality. Yet, that’s what our society would tell such a young woman today. The LGBT coalition would certainly insist that Enid had unrecognized trans characteristics that the older society had failed to acknowledge, but that assertion would imply that there was something unhealthy about her story, or her way of engaging with fantasy.

Our sick culture takes human quirkiness and originality and reduces those attributes to disease states. It tells healthy but gifted or eccentric people that they ought to refashion themselves into reprobates, as if one could not be an outlier without living in rejection of all that is good.

There is no way to know the number of such people who have been steered off course by a society that is too sick to recognize the innocence of imagination, playfulness, or the liveliness of tomboys. A society should be a kind of steering mechanism for people who are at risk of going astray, directing them back on course towards what is healthy. It should serve as guide by displaying moral order and healthy families. When a culture is sick and perverse enough, that role becomes so disordered that it does the opposite, such that people must resist the tide of degeneracy in order to live moral lives while striving to embrace their gifts.

The modern notion of identification based on brokenness and disorder, elevated to societal privilege by claimed oppression, is catastrophic to individual development. Rather than finding healthy pathways and outlets for one’s distinctive attributes, which can benefit the person and the collective, people are encouraged to sink into a victim state that prevents growth—let alone the reach for greatness. A sick society sickens vulnerable members when it encourages them to turn quirky inventiveness into perversion and mutilation. We all deserve better than that.