Ecological Intelligence for a Mechanistic World

"Neurowild" and Cognitive Permaculture

03/11/2025

Permaculture Makes Use of Diversity, Anomaly, and Wildness

From "Neurodivergent" to "Neurowild"

"Neurodivergence" is becoming a mainstay of the contemporary psychological zeitgeist. While I generally support this trend, I hesitate to use the term because it implies and assumes a "normalcy" from which "other" (non-normal) people "diverge." Sure, this may be accurate in a simple, linear, literal sense. Ironically, though, to accept such simple thinking is to reify the "normal" cognition of what is correlatively called the "neuro-normal." In this sense, characterizing the wide, diverse, multidimensional spectra of human cognition by the simplistic (dualistic; cf. digital) "normal v. divergent" dichotomy ultimately just begs the question. It hides the substance of "normal" within an antagonistic identity of "not-divergent," "not-the other." And this makes sense, because the "normal" in this equation is actually vacuous; it is an empty signifier malleable to the whims of whoever and whatever holds power to dictate the typical. It tends toward the superficial homogenization -- of thought, style, taste, ethics, cultural organization, political imagination, and the like -- characteristic of consumer culture. It caters to the lowest common denominator as a base strategy for expanding markets for mass-produced commodities, perspectives, ideologies, values, and expectations.

Like the inherently meaningless "excellence" of Bill Readings' techno-bureaucratic-consumer-commodity university, "normal" hides its ultimate emptiness by attaching itself to whatever cognitive-moral-ideological trends are peddled by the dominate class and its servant institutions in any given historical moment. Down through history, what is "normal" has shapeshifted to accommodate and promote the actually idiosyncratic values and beliefs of the elites who influence mainstream thought and dialogue through control of religious dogma, media, political dogma, and scientific dogma (oh yes, there is scientific dogma; loads of it).

In this sense, "normal" has never been. Said plainly, what has always been "normal" precisely isn't, because it has always been contingent, parochial, and constructed by a particular sociopolitical group/class to serve an ideology relative to the idiosyncrasies of a contrived arrangement of sociocultural-institutional values and needs. What has been eminently normal in human history is change, diversification, extrapolation, experimentation, innovation, divergence, transformation, and adaptation. Aesthetic alchemy. The very qualities characteristic of what is now mis-named "neuro-divergent."

In no reliable sense can human cognition be categorized into two basic, contrasting boxes. There is not even a single spectrum of cognitive styles, forms, dimensions, perspectives, senses, qualities, tendencies, and flavors; there are rather various spectra of cognition -- all unique, dynamic, and contingent with sociocultural-political-ecological temporalities. There is no standard vantage point from which to "objectively" assess such an array (for we must never forget that the doctrine of epistemological-ontological "objectivity" is itself an historical contingency, unique to a particular time, place, and tiny portion of the human population, an idiosyncratic subculture...it is ultimately impossible to give an objective account of objectivity without begging the question).

Forcing such an unruly and unsettled natural phenomenon as cognition into basic conceptual boxes is to make rigid a fluidity. And, as the psychologist Susan David reminds us, "Rigidity in the face of complexity is toxic." Today, in the midst of the least "normal" times ever to exist on Earth, clinging to and enforcing an adherence to the vacuity of a moral-cognitive "normality" or "typicality" is intellectually and phenomenologically toxic. It is relationally toxic, communicatively toxic, and spiritually toxic. It caustically degrades the wild power of untamed human intellect, favoring a robotic mechanism of mind, movement, feeling, thinking, and socializing.

For these and countless more related reasons, I propose an embrace of each of our "neurowild" tendencies and characteristics, not as "divergences" from a manufactured "normal," but as the heart and soul of natural human cognition. For what is "normal" today is an over-domestication of the wildness that characterized human existence for more than 99% of our existence on Earth. By that measure, wild, untamed mind is the most normal thing in the world. The most literal "divergence" here is the shift away from such a state to the cultural-cognitive conformity characteristic of civilizational society, or "consumer conformist" society, as the eco-depth psychologist Bill Plotkin defines it. (See also Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, and Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress by Christopher Ryan.)

Permaculture, as formally taught in certification courses around the world, revolves around a core set of ethics and principles. The core ethics are Earth care, people care, and fair share. The 12 primary principles are 1) observe and interact; 2) catch and store energy; 3) obtain a yield; 4) apply self-regulation and accept feedback; 5) use and value renewable resources; 6) produce no waste; 7) design from patterns to details; 8) integrate rather than segregate; 9) use small and slow solutions; 10) use and value diversity; 11) use edges and value the marginal; 12) creatively use and response to change.

As this design approach relates to cognitive permaculture, the key aspect is that in permaculture design, systems are arranged to accommodate and constructively utilize the wild, unpredictable elements of nature, rather than being built to resist, block, or subdue those wild elements. Just as in modern industrial design -- which constructs social infrastructure as something essentially separate and different from the natural world [i.e., modern cities feature almost entirely non-living materials with highly contrived, artificial landscaping added as an ornamental afterthought] -- modern psychology and medicine has sought to control and subdue (or repress, eliminate, exterminate) the wild, instinctual elements of human cognition in pursuit of a contrived, abstract, unnatural "normality" of thought, emotion, and behavior. Most anything outside this "normal" (and very narrow, and culturally contingent) spectrum of psychology has been marginalized and pejoratively labeled through the secular demonization of a pathologizing medical ideology.

This "abnormal" range of human experience has been labeled various things across the generations. In the past, such "deviant" cognitive orientations were called "madness," "insanity," or even "demonic possession." Today, they are lumped into vague categories of "mental illness," "disorders," and the currently-trendy "neurodivergent."

In truth, however, the cognitive styles and "norms" characteristic of civilizational cultures and now contemporary, high-tech, industrialized societies are, in the most inclusive analysis of human cultural history, literally the most anomalous, abnormal ways of thinking, communicating, and organizing social systems. For literally less than 1% of human history on Earth (thus, statistically the most anomalous and abnormal) have humans arranged themselves in the social designs, patterns, and legal-ethical-economic-political norms characteristic of modern industrial societies. It is the attempt to force ourselves to live in such extensively unnatural systems that manifests in the wide range of individual and social "pathologies" plaguing contemporary societies.

In other words, the fact that the large majority of citizens of most industrialized nations are chronically depressed, anxious, metabolically ill, and compulsively attached ("addicted") to something does not reflect a defect or fault within those people, it reflects the fact that modern industrial society is a highly unnatural, inhumane, unsustainable, and unhealthy way of living.

Reclaiming Natural Cognitive Diversity: From Neurodivergent to Neurowild

Modern industrial society -- through a comprehensive set of homogenizing, standardizing social institutions such as formal schooling, the medical industrial complex, militaries, oligarchical political systems, hierarchical and paternalistic legal systems, and the like -- conditions people to conform to a contrived, artificial "normalness" that is rewarded by acceptance into a consumer commodity economy concerned almost exclusively with increasing profit at the expense of the health and vitality of living systems, people included. Behaviors, values, perspectives, and social interests that don't fit these "norms" and efficiently serve this economic order are labeled "neurodivergent" -- which, in some ways, has been embraced more positively in recent years. Nonetheless, the term still implies that whatever is "neurodivergent" is defined by what it's not -- it's defined as that which diverges from the assumed goodness and desirability of the "norm."

As mentioned above, the irony here is that what has been paternalistically constructed as "normal" by the authoritarian, hierarchical social institutions characteristic of civilizational societies is, in truth, the most literally anomalous and abnormal manner of living in human history. What is actually normal in human existence is a wide, diverse spectrum of cognitive flavors, styles, perspectives, qualities, and tendencies.

Given this, I offer cognitive permaculture as a means of reclaiming this natural cognitive diversity as a deep basin of immense intellectual resources and capabilities, rather than a pesky complexity muddling the "pure" waters of a mechanistic mind constructed within an industrialized "control society," as James Beniger puts it. Neurowild is my term for this valuing and embracing of natural cognitive diversity, a dynamic psychological manifestation of the wild, incalculably complex diversity of life forms and intelligences characteristic of the biosphere that evolved us.

Further Reading

For further information on permaculture principles and practice, check out these sites:

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