The Neurodivergent World: The Institutions Designed to Control You (Part 2 of 3).Why Judges in Horsehair Wigs, First-Past-The-Post, and the NHS Mental Health Crisis Prove the System Is Neurodivergent
How legal systems, voting systems, mental health services, and religion exploit your brain whilst protecting bankers and billionaires - Part 2 of the takedown.
Welcome Back.
In Part 1, https://www.thealmightygob.com/p/the-neurodivergent-world-the-people?r=km5b2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false, we examined the people in power - Trump’s validation addiction, Putin’s control obsession, UK politicians’ anxiety disorders, and the royals’ generational trauma. Bad people in charge are only half the story. The real problem? The systems they’ve built. Let’s talk about the institutions.
The Legal System: Neurodivergency in Wigs.
And whilst we’re cataloguing institutional madness, let’s talk about British judges and the legal system, shall we? Because if you want to see neurodivergency turned into an entire profession, look no further than the people wearing wigs made from horse hair in the year 2025.
First off, what kind of brain do you need to have to think that’s still a good idea? “Yes, let’s continue dressing like it’s 1715 because... tradition.” That’s not respect for history, that’s rigid thinking taken to an absurd extreme. These are people whose brains are so locked into procedural thinking that they can’t see how utterly mental they look to everyone else.
The entire legal system is built for a very specific type of neurodivergent brain - the kind that can read thousands of pages of dry text and not only stay awake but actually enjoy finding the one obscure precedent from 1842 that changes everything. Normal brains don’t do that. Normal brains tap out after page three. But we’ve built an entire system of justice around people whose brains work like legal search engines.
The judges themselves? These are people who’ve spent so long in that world that they’ve lost all connection to how regular humans actually think and behave. They sit up there in their robes and wigs, speaking in a language nobody else understands, making decisions about people’s lives based on interpretations of interpretations of laws written centuries ago.
Their brains are so focused on precedent and procedure that actual justice - you know, the thing the system is supposedly about - becomes secondary to whether the correct forms were filed in triplicate. That’s not how normal brains prioritise. That’s obsessive-compulsive thinking institutionalised into law.
Have you ever watched a judge try to understand modern technology? It’s like watching someone’s brain short-circuit in real time. “What is this ‘Instagram’ you speak of?” Meanwhile, they’re deciding cases about digital privacy and online behaviour. These are brilliant minds, no doubt, but they’re brilliant in one very specific, very narrow way - and that way doesn’t include understanding how the world actually works for anyone under seventy.
The barristers are even worse. What kind of brain wakes up and thinks, “You know what I want to do with my life? Argue. Professionally. About technicalities. For sixty hours a week.” That’s not ambition, that’s a compulsion. These people are addicted to being right, to finding the loophole, to winning the argument. And we’ve given them control over people’s freedom.
The whole legal system is neurodivergent people creating rules for other neurodivergent people to interpret, whilst the rest of us just stand there going, “Can someone please explain this in English?” But we can’t say that, because they’ve made it illegal to criticise them. They call it “contempt of court.” I call it a neurological self-defence mechanism.
And here’s the kicker: this system is supposed to deliver justice. But justice requires empathy, flexibility, understanding of context and nuance. All things that the rigidly procedural, precedent-obsessed, hierarchy-enforcing brains running the legal system struggle with. So we get justice that’s technically correct but fundamentally wrong. Justice that follows the letter of the law, while missing the entire point.
The Voting System: Collective Neurodivergency.
And then there’s the British voting system. First-past-the-post. Let that sink in for a moment. We’ve got a system where you can get 40% of the vote and 60% of the power, and somehow we all just accept this as democracy. That’s not logic; that’s the kind of thinking you get when brains that are terrified of change design a system and then refuse to update it for centuries.
The people defending this voting system? Their brains literally cannot process the idea that there might be a better way. “But it’s simple!” they say. “It’s traditional!” Yeah, so was bloodletting, and we stopped doing that once we realised it was killing people. But suggest proportional representation and watch their minds shut down like you’ve just asked them to divide by zero.
This is neurodivergency on a national scale. An entire country whose collective brain has been trained to accept a system that mathematically guarantees most votes don’t matter. That’s not democracy, that’s mass cognitive dissonance.
The parties themselves have figured out how to exploit this beautifully. They’ve gerrymandered constituencies - sorry, “fairly redrawn boundaries” - so that certain areas are guaranteed wins. They’re not even trying to represent people anymore; they’re playing a mathematical game where the goal is to stack votes in the right places. That takes a special kind of brain - one that can look at democracy and see it as a puzzle to solve rather than a principle to uphold.
Then there’s the House of Lords. Oh, the bloody House of Lords. We’ve got hereditary peers - people who get to vote on our laws because their great-great-great-grandfather was mates with a king. What kind of collective brain malfunction do you need as a nation to look at that and go, “Yes, that makes sense, let’s keep that”?
And the life peers? They’re appointed. Not elected. Appointed. By the very politicians they’re supposed to be checking. It’s like asking the fox to design the henhouse security system.
The neurodivergency here isn’t just in the individuals - though there’s plenty of that - it’s in the collective. We’ve all agreed to pretend this makes sense. Millions of brains, all going along with a system that mathematically guarantees most votes don’t matter, where unelected aristocrats get a say in our laws, and where the party with the most seats rarely has the support of most voters.
And when someone points this out? “Well, it’s worked for hundreds of years.” That’s not an argument; that’s just proof we’ve been collectively accepting broken systems for centuries. The system isn’t broken - it’s working exactly as designed by people whose brains couldn’t conceive of actual equal representation.
That’s the real trick, isn’t it? They’ve made us think we’re the weird ones for wanting a voting system that actually represents how people vote.
The Mental Health System: Fixing People, Ignoring the Problem.
So now let’s get to the bare bones of it all - the mental health system. The NHS mental health services, the therapists, the psychiatrists, the whole apparatus that’s supposed to help us cope with being neurodivergent in a world that punishes you for it. And here’s the beautiful irony: they’re trying to manage all of this, trying to “fix” us, whilst operating inside a neurodivergent fiscal system run by bankers and the obscenely wealthy.
Think about it. The mental health system looks at someone like me - writing blogs at 3 AM, can’t hold a conversation face-to-face, brain running on two different tracks simultaneously - and they want to give me a diagnosis. ADHD, autism, anxiety disorder, pick your acronym. They want to put me in a box, give me some pills, maybe some CBT if I’m lucky enough to get past the two-year waiting list. All so I can function “normally” in society.
But what’s the society they’re trying to fit me into? One designed and run by people whose neurodivergency manifests as pathological greed.
Bankers whose brains are so wired for accumulation that they crashed the entire global economy in 2008 and then gave themselves bonuses for it. That’s not rational behaviour - that’s a compulsion, an addiction, a neurological inability to ever have “enough.” But we don’t diagnose them. We don’t put them on medication. We give them knighthoods and let them run the Treasury.
The mental health system is perpetually underfunded, perpetually overwhelmed, perpetually trying to patch up the damage caused by an economic system that makes people mentally ill by design. You’ve got therapists on poverty wages trying to help people cope with poverty. You’ve got psychiatrists who can give you seven minutes before they have to move on to the next patient, prescribing pills that cost pennies to make but are sold for pounds by pharmaceutical companies run by people whose brains can’t distinguish between profit and human suffering.
And the wealthy? The ones actually running this fiscal system? Their neurodivergency is sociopathy dressed up as “business acumen.” Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, the whole lot of them - these are brains that cannot process the concept of “enough money.” Normal brains hit a certain level of wealth and go, “Right, I’m sorted, time to relax.” Their brains don’t have that switch. It’s an endless, compulsive accumulation, a neurological glitch that drives them to hoard billions whilst people queue at food banks.
But because they’re rich, we call them “successful” instead of what they are: people with a mental disorder that’s actively harmful to society. Their neurodivergent traits - the obsessive focus, the lack of empathy, the inability to see humans as anything other than resources - would be diagnosed and treated if they were poor. But they’re billionaires, so we celebrate them.
The mental health system sees all this. The professionals know. They know that half the depression and anxiety they’re treating is caused by a system designed to extract maximum productivity from humans whilst giving them minimum security. They know that poverty is a mental health crisis. They know that job insecurity, housing insecurity, the constant grinding stress of never having enough - that’s all making people ill. But they can’t fix the system. They can only try to fix the individuals broken by it.
So they give you coping strategies. Mindfulness. Deep breathing. Journaling. “Have you tried going for a walk?” Meanwhile, the bankers are playing roulette with pension funds, and the wealthy are buying their third yacht whilst paying less tax than a nurse.
The mental health system is essentially running a field hospital at the bottom of a cliff, patching people up and sending them back to the top so they can fall off again.
And the funding? Oh, that’s the real joke. Mental health services are funded by a government that gets its economic advice from the same neurodivergent bankers who caused the problems in the first place. “We can’t afford mental health services,” they say, whilst writing blank cheques to bail out banks. “We need austerity,” they say, whilst the wealth gap grows so wide you could fit the entire NHS budget in the space between what the rich earn and what they pay in tax.
The system isn’t trying to make us healthy. It’s trying to make us functional enough to keep participating in an economy that makes us ill. That’s the goal. Not wellness. Not happiness. Just functional enough to work, consume, and not cause too much trouble.
And the saddest part? The people working in mental health - the doctors, nurses, therapists, support workers - most of them are neurodivergent too. They went into that field because their brains are wired for empathy, for helping, for actually giving a damn about other humans. And the system is crushing them as well. Burnout rates are through the roof. Compassion fatigue. Moral injury from having to ration care like they’re in a war zone.
So here we are. The neurodivergent trying to help the neurodivergent cope with a system run by the neurodivergents who lack the basic human decency to see us as anything other than resources to exploit. And we call this civilisation. Seriously?
Religion: Nuclear-Level Neurodivergency.
If you want to see how deep this goes, how thoroughly neurodivergency has shaped human existence, look no further than religion. Because if you want to see neurodivergency weaponised, organised, and turned into a system of control that’s lasted thousands of years, religion is your masterclass. This is neurodivergency on an industrial scale.
Think about what religion actually is at its core. It’s a bunch of people whose brains need absolute answers to unanswerable questions, need structure in a chaotic universe, need meaning in a meaningless existence, and need someone to tell them what to do because the idea of figuring it out themselves is terrifying. That’s not faith - that’s a neurological requirement for certainty in a world that offers none.
Religious institutions have spent millennia exploiting specific neurodivergent traits: the need for ritual, the fear of death, the desire for community, the susceptibility to authority, the craving for meaning and purpose.
And the people who created these religions? Those weren’t prophets - those were neurodivergent individuals having experiences their brains couldn’t process any other way. Hearing voices. Seeing visions. Having revelations. Moses, Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, Joseph Smith - every single one of them had brains that worked so differently from everyone else’s that the only explanation anyone could come up with was “God must be talking to them.”
In 2025, if you told someone God was speaking to you directly, giving you instructions, showing you visions, they’d section you under the Mental Health Act. But do it 2,000 years ago, and suddenly you’ve founded a religion that controls billions of people’s lives.
Now, I can only speak from some prior knowledge of Christianity, which for me nails it - though how close to the cross exactly is still up for further consideration. But Christianity? That’s the perfect example of neurodivergency turned into a doctrine.
You’ve got a man who claimed to be the son of God, performed miracles that would today be called delusions or magic tricks, gathered followers who abandoned their families and jobs to follow him around, and then got himself executed for it. And two thousand years later, billions of people base their entire moral framework on what he supposedly said.
And it works because it preys on specific neurodivergent traits. The need for ritual? That’s OCD given divine purpose. The need for community and belonging? That’s social anxiety, finding a tribe. The need to follow rules without questioning them? That’s a brain that can’t handle moral ambiguity, so it outsources its decision-making to a book written by people who thought the earth was flat.
Then you’ve got the religious leaders - the priests, the imams, the rabbis, the pastors. What kind of brain do you need to believe you have the authority to tell other people how to live, who to love, what to eat, how to dress, and what they’re allowed to think? That’s not humility - that’s a pathological need for control disguised as service to God.
And the followers? Some of them genuinely find comfort in it, and fair play to them. Their brains need structure and meaning, and religion provides it. But millions more are trapped in it - neurodivergent people whose brains make them susceptible to guilt, shame, fear of authority, need for approval, and religion exploits every single one of those vulnerabilities.
You want to control people? Tell them an invisible being is watching their every move, judging their every thought, and will punish them for eternity if they step out of line. That’s not spirituality - that’s psychological manipulation designed to exploit brains that are already anxious, already afraid, already looking for someone to tell them they’re good enough.
And it’s global. Every culture, every civilisation, every corner of the planet - different gods, different books, different rules, but the same neurodivergent recipe. Brains that need answers. Brains that fear death. Brains that can’t handle randomness. Brains that need to believe there’s a plan, a purpose, a reason for suffering.
Religion isn’t about God. It’s about neurodivergency finding a way to make sense of existence, and then institutionalising that coping mechanism so effectively that questioning it becomes heresy.
That’s nuclear-level neurodivergency. That’s taking the ingredients in our heads and building empires, starting wars, justifying atrocities, and controlling billions of people for millennia. All because some brains can’t handle the idea that maybe, just maybe, we’re all here by accident and none of it means anything.
And we’re still doing it. Still fighting over whose imaginary friend is real. Still killing each other over interpretations of books written by people who didn’t know where the sun went at night. Still using ancient neurodivergent coping mechanisms to justify modern oppression.
If you want proof that neurodivergency runs the world, look at religion. It’s the longest-running, most successful exploitation of different brains in human history.
The System is the Problem.
So that’s the institutions. The legal system is run by people whose brains can’t adapt. The voting system is designed by people who fear change. The mental health system is trying to fix individuals while ignoring the society that breaks them. The religious institutions are exploiting our deepest neurological vulnerabilities for power and control.
Bad people in charge is one problem. But these systems? These are designed to perpetuate themselves. They’re designed by neurodivergent brains to benefit neurodivergent brains that prioritise power, control, and profit over human wellbeing.
And here’s what you need to understand: this has always been the case.
What’s Coming in Part 3: The Uncomfortable Truth.
We’ve covered the people (Part 1) and the systems (Part 2). Now comes the bit that makes it all click into place - and the bit that’s hardest to hear.
Part 3 reveals:
Nothing New: Neurodivergency Throughout Human History - Why this isn’t a modern problem - we’ve been calling it “madness,” “genius,” “sin,” and “prophecy” for millennia, but it’s always been the same brain differences
Same Label, Different Ingredients: Why Your Postcode Determines Your Diagnosis - How the exact same neurodivergent brain becomes “Steve Jobs” with money or “unemployable” without it - success and failure aren’t about your brain, they’re about your bank balance
The Self-Medication Economy: Drugs, Alcohol, and Who Profits - Why ADHD brains self-medicate with cocaine, anxious brains with alcohol, and how cartels and drinks companies are just different sides of the same exploitation
The Mask Wearers: Five Years After COVID - What people still wearing masks (and those who never wore them) reveal about how different brains process invisible threats and why both groups are neurodivergent in opposite directions
The Final Word: Why We’re Not the Ones Who Need Fixing - The uncomfortable truth about why nothing changes and what it would actually take to build a world for neurodivergent brains instead of against them
Because here’s what nobody wants to admit: we’re all neurodivergent, we always have been, and the system is designed to exploit rather than accommodate that reality. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The question isn’t “what’s wrong with us?”
The question is, “What’s wrong with a system that needs us broken to function?”
Read Part 3: “The Neurodivergent World: How We Cope, Who Profits, and Why Nothing Changes”
Subscribe to www.thealmightygob.com to get notified when Part 3 drops.
Related topics: mental health crisis, NHS mental health services, British legal system reform, voting system reform, religious institutions, institutional control, neurodiversity in society, ADHD support, autism awareness, anxiety and depression, cognitive diversity, systemic oppression, democracy reform, mental health awareness, therapy and medication, UK institutional failure, British political hypocrisy, anti-establishment UK, working class perspective
UK mental health crisis #ADHD UK adults #UK political satire #NHS mental health waiting times #British politics mental health #neurodivergent workplace UK #UK political cynicism #Bristol political commentary