epistemology

cognitive centrism: missing the mark

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There’s a mindset I keep seeing—in Buddhist sanghas, autism advocacy, establishment political discourse. I call it ‘cognitive centrism’—inhabiting a kind of middle ground, not because one felt their way there, but because they computed it. Like cognitive empathy: decode, then perform the answer. Here’s what it looks like:

Someone defending an argument gets confronted with some element of it that is clearly biased or harmful in some way: and instead of recognizing the bias, they average it away. “It’s just a tool, depends how it’s used.” “Complicated legacy.” “Incremental change.” Not malice—more like a reflex. It gets you to the neighborhood of fair, but it never actually results in justice.

Why it won’t move under pressure: it’s not holding an opinion, it’s holding a posture: suspension of judgment. “Don’t judge the tool—it’s just doing its job.” It’s a kind of adaptive compartmentalization, aka spiritual bypass. You can hand it more evidence of the tool’s bias forever, but evidence isn’t the input it’s built to take. “You don’t want to know how the sausage gets made” is the operative logic here.

The principle of charity—give the tool the benefit of the doubt in all cases—gets redeployed to make assessment of the tool unreachable. “It’s just a tool” doesn’t just interpret the DSM charitably. It moves the DSM one level up, to a place evidence can’t reach. Likewise, the teacher is not judged for their methods; the party is just gathering consensus. It’s the sincerity that makes its effectiveness as a thought-stopper durable. And dangerous.

Does this mean every accusation destabilizes the institution—that we accommodate every harm as if it delegitimizes the frame? No. It means the accusation gets the same weight the tool got by default. Currently, the tool is presumed innocent past evidence, and the accusation deemed exaggerated before it’s heard. That’s not two neutral positions—it’s asymmetry, running both ways. The fix isn’t reversing it. It’s judging each on its own merits, and refusing to punch down.

The corrective: redirect the benefit of the doubt—not to the tool, but to whoever the tool lands on.

In sangha: stop protecting the teacher’s legacy. Protect the student who was in the room. The lineage doesn’t need your benefit of the doubt—she does.

In diagnosis: stop defending the DSM’s neutrality. Defend the person it mislabeled. The manual isn’t hurt by scrutiny. The misdiagnosed patient is hurt by the denial of scrutiny.

In party politics: stop calling it consensus-building. Ask who consented, and who just got averaged in. The party isn’t harmed by the question. The constituent is telling you where harm landed.

Benefit of the doubt isn’t wrong—it’s just often aimed one level too high. Aim it down, and the people who need it are served.

We just accidentally corrected the mistake of trickle-down economics. Sit with that.

complementary adaptation: toward a kinder view of neurodiversity and disability

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Two people in a boat. One can row, but cannot navigate. The other can navigate, but cannot row. If we view each as a whole, each has both an asset and a liability—each is both abled and disabled. If we view the relationship as a whole, we can describe things differently.

If participation and cooperation are both given, and both needs and abilities are transparent, we can say, for the sake of argument, that we have a balanced system. Ability and disability are actually complementary parts of a balanced system.

For the system to remain balanced, the requirement is that we do not judge one by the standards of the other. Both are necessary for the system to be balanced. It is only in separating the ability and disability within the system—through creation of a standard that applies to each equally—that disability as a permanent status arises (or ability, as a permanent status, for that matter).

Humans are a social animal, and no human can be said to exist in isolation. The work of survival as a cohesive community is complex. If we view human evolution as a community project, rather than a process of creating ideal and identical individuals, perhaps it’s fairer to say that humans are more like the two people in the boat that opened this narrative than like individuals striving toward undifferentiated perfection.

I believe that as our understanding of neurodiversity deepens, we will begin to see the complementary nature of different sensory, cognitive, behavioral, emotional, somatic, and relational expressions within a community of people engaged in the work of surviving within an ecosystem, and start to recognize the unique socio-ecological niche that each is adapted to.

That being said, humans have created systems that separate us from the ecology we evolved over millions of years to function within—capitalism being the most recent and totalizing form this separation has taken. Any framework, whatever its organizing logic, that substitutes an abstracted, portable standard for embedded relationship will distort our ability to view each type of expression fairly, in context. In the deepest sense, it is these imposed frameworks—not one’s specific neuropsychobiology—that create the permanent state of ability or disability.

Is this an argument that disability does not exist, or should not be accommodated? Absolutely not. Does the human organism itself demand that we recognize the various socio-ecological niches for which each individual may be uniquely adapted? Also no—evolution continues, and each part of any ecosystem is changed by interaction with the others—just as we were once single-celled life forms adapted to an underwater ecosystem that no longer exists, we will adapt to whatever conditions our survivors find themselves within (if there are survivors—evolution is a slow process, and the changes we have made to our ecosystem have arguably outpaced it).

What, then, is the good of understanding or accepting a principle like complementary adaptation, if we are eventually going to change anyway? From a human sociological perspective, it allows us to be both kinder and more accommodating of difference. In recognizing the many ways that variations in human adaptive expression contribute to the well-being of a complex social organism within an ecosystem, we can move people toward societal roles for which they may already be well adapted, rather than forcing them to adapt to environments where their permanent disability status is the only option. It changes the framework for our application of care—to use our earlier analogy, to match rowers with navigators, those who thrive as nurturers with those who thrive with care, across a broad spectrum of socio-ecological niches.

What this requires of us, as those who study human variation, is to recognize the many ways that current conditions game the system for the comfort of some, at the expense of basic human dignity for others, and to recognize the gatekeepers who enforce the conditions we find ourselves in, be they actual humans, economic systems, or simply cognitive frameworks. It would be naive to think that we can simply abandon every framework we’ve inherited outright, but making the shift to recognizing human variation as a relationship affords us a direction for a new field of study—and nudges us toward a kinder, more integrated relationship with our world and with one another.

education v. indoctrination

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Education builds bridges to new understanding. (educare: to bring up; to nurture). Indoctrination burns bridges and prevents new ones from being built. (endoctriner: to instruct; to imbue with an idea or opinion). Education makes the world bigger. Indoctrination keeps one sequestered in a silo.

The reason anti-woke folks rail so hard against indoctrination is that they were shaped by indoctrination that was presented as education; and in the absence of actual education, it’s easy to conflate the two, or confuse one for the other. Their impulse to resist indoctrination is sound. The target of their ire is misplaced.

The people who built these systems often believed in them completely—which is exactly what makes indoctrination so effective. You don’t need cynics at the top. You need true believers who’ve never crossed the bridge themselves.

That’s how the confusion between indoctrination and education perpetuates itself—not through deception, but through unexamined inheritance.

‘woke’ just means ‘educated, and ready to cross the bridge when it presents itself.’

‘anti-woke’ just means ‘bridges are dangerous: it’s only safe in the silo.’

Good for you, for recognizing the importance of education, and the power of indoctrination to limit education’s reach. If you’re sitting with the anxiety of a world widened beyond the scale of what you were prescribed, just reach out. Folks are here for you—just over the bridge.

on wokeness, and its opposite

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to be woke is to have a visceral sense of justice, as reliable as the senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and cognition—that allows one to recognize that the current language of justice is inadequate, as justice is not applied equitably across all who would access it; and to participate in creating language that leads to equitable application.

to be a woke ally is to recognize that one lacks the visceral sense of justice; to believe those who experience it; and to use the other senses to fill the gap, trusting that the language will mature if allowed to do so—to be blind, but willing to coexist with the sighted.

to be anti-woke is to deny the existence of the visceral experience of justice; to belittle those who would enrich its language—to be blind, to deny the existence of sight, in the most literal sense, and to refuse to coexist with the sighted.

only a person who has had the sense of justice bred out of them can own humans or force them through contract into unpaid labor; deny them equal access to the right to vote; justify and continue to fund genocide; or accumulate wealth while others starve.

knowing that the path of the ally is available, one follows it to redemption.

never suspecting that justice is lived experience, the whole world becomes one’s adversary.