Rebelling against all of the authorities is pathological. All authorities aren't illegitimate.
"It has been my experience that many anti-authoritarians labeled with psychiatric diagnoses usually don’t reject all authorities, simply those they’ve assessed to be illegitimate ones, which just happens to be a great deal of society’s authorities."
I personally almost got an ODD diagnosis, though the psych didn't think it was severe enough to warrant that. Guess what? I did have a problem with authority at the time, but that's mostly because people in authority in schools are complete nincompoops. I've got absolutely zero issues listening to the authority in my job because my boss is competent and doesn't demand absurdities from me.
Is believing your own thought processes over the thought processes of authorities really something that should be labeled a disorder?
- the default for the vast majority of people is don't worry be happy. This aligns with my life experience
- nonconformists by almost tautological definition then aren't happy. That's going to get you placed immediately in the fringes of psych classification.
- nonconformists also tend to be smarter, which we know also drops you down the happiness scale
- legitimacy of authority is a funny idea, arguably all authority is via direct or abstracted power, despite the ideals of democracy, will be arbitrary and somewhat illegitimate
- and thus we get to the contradiction: most people (the "sane" ones) apply a compartmentalization to deal with an insane world: that is they adopt willful insanity to stay sane in a capricious insane world. Those that accept reality and try to change it are "insane" for rejecting the short and long term cost benefits to accepting the big lie for the pure sane truth.
- if this were a conscious decision it would be more stark, but kind of like accepting the matrix in the movie, the machines had to adopt a facsimile of the sucky real world rather than paradise, since that had all the subconscious psychological engineering worked out to get everyone to mostly confirm.
> ODD is defined as a “a pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior without the more serious violations of the basic rights of others that are seen in conduct disorder”; and ODD symptoms include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.”
This is presented as enough to diagnose the disorder. If you have a look at the full list, you can see why it's a disorder.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/oppositional-...
> I personally almost got an ODD diagnosis,
But you didn't. Probably because you're just anti-authoritarian, but not all the long list of other issues associated with the condition.
Einstein was justifiably anti-authoritarian because he actually was a genius but he also wasn't pathologically so. The author drawing a this comparison belies his own belief that he himself is smarter than all of those authorities which justifies his behavior. Which is actually a symptom.
> Often blames others for their own mistakes or misbehavior.
It's actually not that long of a list[1]. You only need to have 4 symptoms out of 8 to qualify as "clinically" ODD, and the "symptoms" are literally just being unpalatable to those around you. Here are 4 of the symptoms that can get you diagnosed as ODD, straight from the DSM 5:
1) Is often touchy or easily annoyed
2) Is often angry and resentful
3) Often argues with authority figures or, for children and adolescents, with adults
4) Often deliberately annoys others
I don't know about you, but I can blaze through all those in a 10-minute webex call with a "scrum master"... and the DSM just requires (for someone 5 years or older) them to have happened *once a week* for at least 6 months.
Very tellingly, the second major criteria is:
> The disturbance in behavior is associated with distress in the individual or others in his or her immediate social context (e.g., family, peer group, work colleagues) or it impacts negatively on social, educational, occupational, or other important areas of functioning,
So literally whether it bothers you - OR - people around you. There's a reason that the vast majority of ADHD and ODD diagnoses occur as a result of school requests, not from parents.
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t14/
Mine was an English teacher. I realized by the second class that I needed to transfer out of his course. The school administrators were completely unsurprised by my request. It seems that I was just one among many who had done the same thing.
Or just blame, diagnose and medicate them. Only then shall they be better equipped to accept and obey authority figures.
Not all authorities are illegitimate.
(This grammar error can be harmful.)
Who says that's a grammar error?