Diagnostic Self-Privileging is a phenomenon where a person behaves as if an ability to name, explain and assess another person’s attitudes, behaviors and beliefs constitutes genuine understanding.
The Diagnostic Self-Privileger’s (DSP’s) stance is the stance of the expert: “This has been seen before; it called this; it is an understood phenomenon; we know what to do about it.” The DSP comes prepared with the knowledge, the language, the skills, the judgment of an expert — and perhaps with credentials of whatever kind the community seeks and respects as signifiers of legitimate forms of privileged knowledge — and expects to be regarded as an authority on the matter.
Rather than listening, empathizing, attempting to understand, and contending with the substance of a diagnosed subject’s points the Diagnostic Self-Privileger diagnoses the subject as pathological, treats their opinions as symptoms of the pathology, and then proceeds to explain the pathology in terms of theoretical factors and forces (rarely accepted by the diagnosed).
And of course, diagnoses imply cures. For the DSP, whether the cure is vaguely insinuated or explicitly prescribed, the cure is rarely voluntary. Negative moral valuation is useful here, as incorrigible wickedness justifies involuntary cures. The subject deserves it. But also, the opinion of the diagnosed about his diagnosis is where is delusion is most virulent, so the diagnosed is ignorant of his wickedness and its true causes. He is ignorantly evil, and willfully ignorant in an evil way. Everything points to coercive intervention.
But also, by framing the other’s perspective as disease rather than something worth learning about, the DSP can justify excluding the subjects of explanation from participation in developing or testing the explanation. Again, the diagnosed’s objections to the diagnosis are intrinsic to the disease. To listen to these objections, is to risk seeing their validity, and seeing the validity is to contract the disease, or at least weaken one’s resistance to it. Instead, the DSP observes the symptoms, collects more data, finds new connections as well as new examples, and works the theory into something more cohesive, more airtight and bullet-proof, more emotionally satisfying and more effective in justifying a coercive or if necessary, violent solution.
For this reason, Diagnostic Self-Privileging must be treated as a pathology. Diagnostic Self-Privilegers construct elaborate closed arguments to invalidate, dehumanize, silence and dominate their alleged patients. They will claim everyone benefits under their treatment, but the DSP defines what “benefit” means, and they are willfully ignorant of what truly is beneficial or catastophic to those they diagnose. They cannot be reasoned with or appealed to, because the only reasons they admit are their own, and appeals are treated as contagions. But in fact it is their reasons and appeals which are the real contagions. One cannot afford to get entangled in their elaborate arguments and theory-systems — whether the arguments are theological, sociological, economic, or psychological — because this can only confuse what is really going on, which has nothing to do with what they claim, and everything to do with their end-game, which is, as often as not, almost entirely unconscious. They, of course, will object, but despite what they think, their circular reasoning is neither true, nor good — for others, or for themselves — nor even understood by themselves.
Right?
*
To observe a recurring pattern of attitudes, behaviors beliefs, etc. is one thing.
To see the pattern as a syndrome and to name it and define it so others can identify is another thing.
To attempt to explain the causes of the syndrome is yet another thing.
To assign the syndrome a moral value is another thing still.
To prescribe a cure for the syndrome is another thing altogether.
To see these things as inseparable and necessarily implying one another and nothing else, this is the point where incorrect and wrong intersect.