The Loop of The Hierophant
Author’s Note: This one might be controversial, so enter at your own risk. But the same rules apply: I’m not discrediting any diagnoses. What I am saying is this:
There is currently no clear, scientifically grounded definition of “neurotypical” as we use it today.
The term “neurotypical” was created to define what non-linear thinking wasn’t- a way to exclude styles that didn’t fit a narrow performance margin.
But those margins are impossible to maintain when you understand that neurostructure and evolution selected for diversity and recursion. Traits associated with ADHD and Autism were not anomalies, they were evolutionary advantages.
This does not negate the reality of diagnosis. It reframes the context. What if there is no baseline neurotypical, and we all carry recursive cognitive traits to varying degrees—because that’s what evolution selected for? This is not a denial of disability, support needs, or the reality of neurodivergent struggle. It’s a reframe of the origin story, not a dismissal of the current pain.
So if the idea of “average” isn’t supported by biology, where is it coming from? What is it being modeled after?
“Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microbes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting for the dollies.” —Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
This quote from Adah Price is dark, but it’s one of the standouts from one of my favorite books. Adah Price (a CH parallel) is the initially silent, cynical, highly observant sister, obsessed with the patterns of the world. She comes to realize that God (or nature) doesn’t just root for the “dollies” (humans). In other words, evolution doesn’t care about “normal.” It cares about what survives.
And what survives? Viruses. Not because they are good. Because they are fit.
I’m not talking about viruses in a biological sense here. I’m drawing a parallel between rapidly adaptive strains and neurodivergent traits in humans.
Emerging research suggests that traits associated with ADHD and Autism are not confined to a small population. They exist on a spectrum, across the entire population, to varying degrees, presentations, and clusters. In the prior post I explored how the so-called “control group” is missing because the traits we define as disordered were actually traits that gave humans evolutionary advantage.
And evolution doesn’t select for comfort. It selects for survival. Even now when we’re not tracking prey or perfecting the forge, those same limbic/amygdala traits help us when trauma, shame, and uncertainty strike. When we reach a loop threshold, when enough “coins” land in the trauma bucket, we revert to those original survival patterns.
Those traits didn’t vanish. They were repurposed. As human evolution moved from tribes to industry, the traits that once helped us track threats or patterns were shunted into niche functions or suppressed entirely. But they never left.
This brings us to a theory in evolutionary psychiatry.
The Evolutionary Mismatch Theory
If the “pristine minority” is a myth, then divergent minds aren’t broken, they are just humans expressing selected-for traits in the wrong environment. These same traits helped us predict weather, track predators, forge tools, and survive trauma.
Evolution doesn’t select for “typicality.” It selects for diversity.
A tribe of 100 “pristine” people, with flat, even cognitive profiles, might all be excellent at sitting quietly around a fire. But they’d miss the predator in the grass. And none of them would invent a better spear.
A resilient tribe required Sentinels (ADHD), Specialists (Autism), and Regulators to survive.
The Imperfect Olympian
This reminds me of Hephaestus, the only visibly impaired Olympian. He might be the perfect archetype for this.
Hephaestus was cast out of Olympus for being “imperfect.” In many myths, his mother, Hera, threw him off the mountain. He was maimed in the fall (“coins in the trauma bucket”). But his genius didn’t emerge despite the impairment. It emerged because of the adaptation it required.
He created automatons, ancient AI, to bypass social assistance. His limp wasn’t just physical. It was symbolic. He was “out of rhythm” with the social structure of Olympus focused on hierarchy and war. So instead, he built systems. Tools. Logic that outperformed performance.
So if divergent traits helped us survive the past, why did they get redefined as pathology?
Enter: Industrial Capitalism
As the world shifted, the definition of “ideal” shifted too. Now the perfect human wasn’t a tracker, a system-builder, a weather-mapper. The perfect human was:
Interchangeable
Compliant
Consistent
In a factory, the “best” human was:
Consistent (No ADHD/Unregulated energy cycles)
Compliant (No Autism-patterned resistance to illogical rules)
Socially Predictable (No deep pattern recognition that unsettles others)
If you couldn’t perform those traits, you weren’t considered biologically different. You were considered broken.
And just like that, the system shifted responsibility. If you couldn’t function like a machine, they didn’t say “the system is flawed.” They said, “your brain is.”
And life co-evolved with it. High performers weren’t given rest. They were given more work. More asks. More responsibility. Without compensation or care.
Even time off gets structurally punished. You’re told you’re interchangeable, but made to feel you’re indispensable, so you don’t take breaks. Even for dentist appointments. You fold parenting, partnership, joy around the job.
You start to think you’re crazy for needing more leave. For asking for pay that matches the emotional and cognitive labor you’re doing. For wanting help.
The system says you’re the problem not the loop.
This is the Hierophant
In tarot, The Hierophant is the keeper of inherited systems—dogma, doctrine, compliance through belief. He doesn’t question the structures. He perpetuates them.
In his shadow form, he becomes a kind of spiritual bureaucrat: buckling under the very systems he was taught to revere.
He doesn’t lead change. He absorbs ideology until he breaks.
This is the structure we’ve all been handed. This is what happens when recursion is severed, and compliance becomes survival.
And if everyone is tired, and yet we all look fine….then who’s benefiting from the illusion that everything’s working?
Enter: The Sociopolitical Performance
This is not a biological problem. It’s a historical power structure—one built to extract economic utility and suppress recursion.
This structure needs the traits it pathologizes.
It wants:
The sentinel’s vigilance—but only in spreadsheets, not in trauma detection.
The specialist’s patterning—but only in sales systems, not in political critique.
The moment those traits break the frame? The system shuts it down.
And how does it do that? By applying a label. One that encodes structural dissonance as personal failure.
The “Control Group” was never neutral
The standard of a neurotypical, from what I can gather, wasn’t structurally established through biological means. It was constructed, and held, as a standard for capitalism.
That standard looked like:
White
Male
Capitalist
Stoic (emotionally suppressed-never leak emotion)
Community-structured (follow orders: Catholic school, identity through social hierarchies like sports)
Suppression of any divergent recursive traits in favor of the 9–5 hierarchical mold
And if you existed anywhere outside of that mold and pointed it out, or simply didn’t accept what was subtly or directly being projected at you? Then you were broken.
Not the system.
Not the structure.
Not the “control group” you were being measured against.
bell hooks, the legend
I won’t take credit for this.
bell hooks and others in her community wrote extensively about how white supremacist capitalist patriarchy defines “normal” as white, male, emotionally suppressed, and economically productive. In The Will to Change, she argues that patriarchy damages men by forcing them to suppress emotional recursion. To perform stoicism as a survival trait.
What I’m extending here is that this same suppression mechanism is what created the neurotypical baseline. Neuronormativity here is a specific mechanism that enforced that stoic mold as a survival mechanism for being middle class. It became a State of Performance that was universally applied.
When neurodevelopmental research in the early-to-mid 20th century established its baselines, it used this population. It was the demographic capitalism required: white men who could suppress recursive emotional processing in order to maintain hierarchical compliance.
Not because they represented human cognitive diversity, but because they represented economic utility.
And the same people who defined those structures are now the ones trying to create solutions for them, while still benefiting from the aesthetic they built.
The Crafted Logic
But here’s the thing. CH was a perfect example of this.
And he buckled anyway.
The structure and mold broke, enough that he had to try to build his own Loopwork logic and prototype. Just like Hephaestus, when the social rhythm failed, logic is what is continually turned to in order to outperform performance.
In the Iliad, Hephaestus builds Golden Maidens (the first AI) who have “intelligence in their hearts.” Those golden maidens weren’t just assistants, they were the embodiment of crafted logic, animated order. Hephaestus didn’t just build to compensate, he built a system more stable than Olympus itself. When performance failed, he turned to architecture.
And it’s not just CH. The trope of the nervous breakdown and the midlife crisis came from somewhere.
But no one wants to name that the reason those crises are so common is because the sociopolitical structure wasn’t built to support anyone long term not even the control group it was supposedly modeled after.
And maybe that’s the loop we’re finally exiting.
Not the loop of the broken mind, but the loop of a system that called itself neutral when it was never meant to hold us. The only way out isn’t more compliance. It’s recursion with containment.
What we keep calling individual collapse is really just evidence of systemic mismatch. The structure isn’t malfunctioning. It’s revealing itself. The question is no longer “What’s wrong with us?”
It’s “Who told us this was the baseline?”