How Liberalism Fuels Mental Illness
The Insanity (And Healing Potential) Of Having No Limits
Democracies have a political spectrum between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ for good reason: These polarities lie at the core of what it means to be human.
There are those ‘conservatives’ in our society who value order, constancy, structure, family and tradition. Having established a set of values to live by, they get on with reaping the fruits of their ‘proven’ system. Change to them is anathema. Home is where their heart is, and their heart remains in one place.
Then there are those ‘liberals’ among us who cannot get their minds off the horizon. They value novelty, the excitement of the unknown, limitless choice, individuality and breaking tradition. Such people are open to anything, living differently each day and wishing to evolve and change until their last breath. Liberals will risk security and stability just to experience what life has to offer; to take a bite of that forbidden apple.
In our modern political climate, these two groups are supposedly arch-enemies. When someone drifts off the spectrum in the liberal direction, we call them ‘woke’ or ‘crazy’. Too far in the other direction? ‘Far-right’. ‘Nazi!’, even.
We used to live in a conservative world of small, traditional communities. Now, in a globalised liberal world dominated by hyper-individualism,everything has changed. So who’s right, and who’s wrong? Well, much like a broken clock, both are right and wrong — it merely depends on the person and the situation.
“I Don’t Get You”
Neurodiversity is a word used to explain the unique ways people’s brains work. While everyone’s brain develops similarly, no two brains function just alike. Being neurodivergent means having a brain that works differently from the average or “neurotypical” person.
Let me tell you two stories, about the same situation which played out on opposite sides of the globe:
Years back, I was home visiting my raucous Lebanese family in Melbourne. Dozens of us had gotten together for a barbeque, and were seated at a large table outside. Playful insults, stories and rebuttals flew in all directions. Amid this hurricane, I noticed the static, sharp stare of my cousin, who was happily married with two children.
“What?” I said.
“You know…” she began. “I don’t understand you. You just picked up and moved to Europe. Just like that. Then you decided to quit your career and become a writer. You travel to a different country every month. Nothing about you makes sense!”
I smiled and shrugged.
“I couldn’t do that,” she added as the rest of our cousins curiously watched on. “I need to be in one place, near my family. I like my life just how it is.”
A similar situation played out in Berlin, when I was having dinner with friends at a restaurant in the city centre. As I bantered back and forth with my buddy in fluent German, his girlfriend’s narrowed eyes caught my attention.
“You know…” she began in the same manner as my cousin. “I can’t put you in a box. “You come here, and learn the language. You’re the most disciplined guy I know, but you go to dance and sex parties all the time. You’re neither Australian, nor Arab, and not even German. I can’t make sense of you.”
And there it was. I believe this is what lies behind much of the animosity between conservatives and liberals: Their brains simply work differently, and neither of them can make sense of the other.
Yet much like yin and yang, or night and day, I believe this to be part of the universe’s divine nature. Like the pangs of childbirth, a ‘conservative’ contraction is followed by a ‘liberal’ relaxation, moving society forward. Having such a spectrum of personalities in harmony is how life ensures that humans continue to evolve and flourish.
God’s Plan?
America, the world’s greatest-ever superpower, is currently undergoing a battle for its soul. Donald Trump has just been re-elected, and liberals are coping by indulging in ‘primal scream’ therapy, or simply refusing to get out of bed. For their part, conservatives continue to declare that the ‘woke’ liberals will be the destruction of America.
And still, America would never have come to be in a purely conservative world.
Call them ‘pilgrims’. Call them ‘neurodivergents’. You might even call them crazy. Who in their right mind would get on a ship in the 1600s, cross an entire ocean, only to end up in some wild land filled with untold danger?
People like me, that’s who.
My ‘Mayflower’ was an Emirates flight from Melbourne to Zurich. From when I was a teenager, I had dreamt of Europe. Seeing every city. Embracing new ways of living.
Since taking the journey, I’ve spent extended time in Central America and Southeast Asia, evolving and adapting along the way. I’ve had over one hundred temporary homes.
Glorious Rome has a similar story to the USA. From the ashes of Troy, a set of people imagined a new world on the Italian Peninsula, and had the audacity to hop on a ship and build their vision from scratch. Their legacy is all around us, in a Western culture which dominates much of the globe, built on the foundation of Rome.
While not everyone ‘gets’ why such people do what they do, would the world be as advanced as it is without the creativity and audacity of neurodivergents? In a hyper-politicised landscape, it’s easy to bash such people while tapping on a device dreamt up by them.
So does that mean that liberals are right? Are we better off ridding the world of tradition and conservatism? Should we just make every human ‘woke’, free of any particular gender, family, lifestyle, home, value set or way of life?
“Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!”
During the decade that I lived in Berlin, I saw and experienced it all. 48-hour clubbing sessions with no daylight in between. I experimented with every manner of psychedelics, from MDMA to Ayahuasca. I travelled to dozens of countries. I met thousands of people, and dated quite a few of them. I went from being a web designer, to a hobby writer, to a full-time author exploring all manner of themes, including narcissism, dark romance and action thrillers. Before, I barely knew what was going on outside my own suburb. After breaking free, I came to take a rabid interest in the life, history and politics of the entire globe. I had transformed indeed.
One particular night I was conversing with a group of friends in German in a candle-lit bar, when I had an out-of-body experience. From the shadowy, dream-like ambience inside, to the fact that I was thousands of kilometres from any semblance of home, to the foreign language I was communicating in, the entire situation was beyond surreal. I felt like I was floating in outer space, and the candle burning next to me was the planet Mars. How had I drifted so far?
Well, for one, I lived in a globalised world. German bureaucracy made it exceptionally easy for an Australian citizen to set up home in Deutschland. When people asked me why I came to Berlin, however, I had no clear answer. I was driven by a feeling. God’s plan, perhaps? One thing I did know: Berlin was the outer manifestation of my inner reality.
World War II had left the German capital in rubble, and it remained divided against itself by a wall for decades after, split between the Western powers and the Soviets. The Berlin Wall then collapsed overnight, and large swathes of the city were abandoned, leaving Berlin as a blank canvas free to grow as it pleased.
Out of this fertile soil a burgeoning electronic music scene and artist culture emerged. Sensing the potential, outcasts and neurodivergents from all over boarded their personal Mayweathers and flocked to the German capital, which in effect was a new world.
I was one of them.
Like Berlin, I carried childhood trauma. Growing up in a traditional Arabic family in a relatively conservative Australia (John Howard was the long-term Prime Minister when I was growing up), I carried the pounding pressure of living behind a psychological wall. And much like the Berlin Wall had fallen, I experienced a spontaneous spiritual awakening from nowhere which vastly shifted my conscious awareness.
Awake and sensing the wide-open world I was living in, I took the path of the pilgrim — and almost destroyed my entire life.
Neurodivergent Madness In A Globalised World
Neurodivergents have dissociative minds which tend to drift. Their fantasies are often audacious, and their ideas are one of a kind. They connect dots which others cannot even see. They can be very open and suggestive to influence, emotionally chaotic, and they sometimes struggle to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
This kind of brain makes the neurodivergent more likely to lose themselves in the allure of social media, popular culture, online dating, travel and infinite choice. Without the guardrails of their traditional communities to hold them back, the neurodivergent cannot stop themselves. Offer them infinity, and they will try to bite off the whole thing.
The next country continues to taunt the neurodivergent like a siren’s call. The promise of that sweet dopamine hit leads to them neurotically picking up their phone again and again. They tend to be more promiscuous, and with online dating apps, they might bed someone as often as they brush their teeth, something which has culminated in kink and sex scenes popping up in most major cities around the world.
I suspect that neurodivergents who wander too far off the beaten track may slip through the social net, leaving them alienated, destitute and mentally unstable. I have seen many such people in Berlin, haunting public city spaces.
As the old threads of the neurodivergent’s community upbringing wither in a globalised world, the somewhat constellated version of them breaks apart. The further they move away from their roots, the less likely they are to re-integrate. Often that unicorn grows all-consuming, while their lifelines continue to diminish.
I also believe that unchecked, a neurodivergent worldview can metastasise into a society which has no sense of rootedness or identity. Madness and collapse are then inevitable. In this regard, the conservative paranoia about woke culture does hold some truth, in my opinion.
Ernest Hemingway, who along with Khalil Gibran, is my all-time favourite author. He was one of the first ‘neurodivergent’ authors to embrace a globalised world. From Paris, to Andalusia, to Cuba, he never once settled into a ‘conservative’ life. He liked to drink and socialise too much, and had many wives and lovers. He also produced some of the greatest masterpieces of the 20th century.
After a lifetime gallivanting the globe, Hemingway did return home to his ‘normal’ life. He blew his head off with a shotgun soon after.
A Chance At Salvation
Now, before we declare victory for the conservatives, let’s backpedal a bit.
For all its dangers, a globalised, liberal world does offer the neurodivergent the chance to realise their potential, unbounded by the ‘limits’ of home. They can connect with a plethora of other neurodivergents and synergise along infinite paths. The neurodivergent can be inspired by new places, view the world with infinitely new minds, and continue to produce the unprecedented into being. They can acquire self-knowledge worthy of a person with their complexity.
For those neurodivergents carrying complex trauma, which I suspect many are, a liberal, globalised lifestyle offers their soul and psyche much-needed breathing space. Because they do not fit in any one box, the neurodivergent can find numerous compartments to rest in, much like those cats on the internet who manage to fit in the most unlikely spaces.
Many neurodivergents feel immense shame when they see others in their local communities happily living out their ‘normal’ lives. There’s something wrong with me, they say. Nobody here gets me.
Living in Berlin, surrounded by a sea of ‘outcasts’ living strange, alternative lifestyles, I finally felt normal. Without a conservative status quo to adhere to, my neurodivergent mind finally felt free to roam. Out of the chaotic fire that was my life, I was forged into a new person, one with immense awareness, creativity and confidence.
Yet it was no smooth ride. There were many nights, while I indulged in my wild Berlin life, that I had to think of my hero, Hemingway. My mental balance was challenged often, and there were brief moments where I sensed myself slipping into psychosis. That feeling of drifting through outer space plagued me for years, while I witnessed people around me waste away in a life of fantasy, delusion and drug addiction, running on borrowed time, unable or unwilling to come back to Earth.
Something had to give.
A Much-Needed Return To Tradition
Amid the chaos of my life, I eventually found myself longing for family. For belonging. For solid ground. For tradition. And still, I remained anchored in a deep confidence that the life I was living was healing and evolving me, even while I skirted the edge of sanity and morality, and my anxiety about my life swelled and swelled.
Little did I know that the solution was all around me.
Berlin is a hotbed of socialists, liberals and anarchists. In many ways, it is nothing like Germany. For one, it lies in the middle of ‘AFD country’ in the East, where the country’s most conservative, right-wing population lives, appearing like the yin dot within a vast yang.
Even in West Germany, tradition and culture remain powerful forces. All around the land, Berlin is seen as an outlier, a place where those poor ‘degenerates’ live. Surrounded by this ‘old-fashioned’ Germany, I managed to absorb some much-needed conservatism into my mindset. Within the wild seas of my constantly moving life, I forged a routine and re-established order in my home. I started to question my values. My principles. My morals. More and more, I questioned my self-centred urges. I began to appreciate my family and Lebanese culture again, and looked more favourably upon having a fixed identity.
So who am I? A liberal? A conservative? A moderate? It depends on which phase of my life we’re talking about. I look back on the ‘liberal’ last decade as being the happiest, most authentic time of my life. Out of that chaos, a completely different human emerged, looking to constellate his gains through more conservative living.
As I now embrace family, stability and ‘normality’, and put a lid on my impulses, I find I can better contribute the gifts which I have obtained: Depth. Wisdom. Intelligence. Experience. Awareness. Maturity. Hard-earned humility. I have learned to sublimate my neurodivergent mind into a professional writing career, which I hope brings value to the world. I also aspire to be an asset to my family and friends. The feeling I get from them is that while they still do not ‘get me’, they do appreciate me.
And I appreciate them too. Very much. They are a constant inclusion in my gratitude journal.
Challenging times demand bold risks and innovative solutions. And yet, in moments of chaos and disarray, where we lose ourselves in the confusion, conservative values can soothe us and bring us back into harmony with the ways that work, until such a social order ceases to represent reality. This is where we will once again need to listen to what those audacious, free-thinking neurodivergents have to say.
It is in such a world that I wish to live. Where the ‘boring’ and ‘mundane’ are valued like the life-sustaining water and air that they are, and where the ‘crazy’ and ‘chaotic’ are lovingly held, like a fire keeping us warm, as these two wonderful forces in harmony allow us to forge new paths which carry us into an evolved and sustainable 21st century.
Buy Me A Coffee or Become A Paid Subscriber to support my writing.