Great Expectations II: Indigo Loser

One child prodigy, as seen in bad made-for-TV movies

“Indigo children are light-bearers who are driven by the sole purpose in life: to awaken humanity. They are gifted souls empowered with various spiritual and psychic abilities. 

In the world where most of us are greatly forgetting the ‘feel’, the indigo child will appear as a Paradigm Shifter. They are the old souls who refuse to succumb to societal norms and carve a peaceful way for the coming generations.

While addressing the aura colors of different kids, it was coined that the Indigo children have an aura, indigo or royal blue in color that manifests a change in humanity. They possess supernatural powers and are determined to bring us closer to our true essence.

These spiritually gifted children though extraordinarily empathetic are often misdiagnosed or misjudged by society as mentally ill patients.”

-Mindfool, Traits of an Indigo Child

“I just want to get into the most obnoxious- This, uh, This is the Indigo Children, this is this idea that there’s a new race of beautiful, magical children that have been started started getting born in 1980 and they are just… Perfeeect.”

“You might be an Indigo child, you might be part of the saving grace of humankind, I mean if you’re listening to this podcast you’re already one of the Elite.”

-Last Podcast on the Left Episode 73: Dolphins, Leylines, and the Indigo

You can tell that a movement is developing a problem when it takes responsibility for saving the world. This isn't just an issue of self-importance, but how priorities get distorted by scale: The bigger the picture, the easier it is to write off moral issues as necessary friction. If you are saving the world, all kinds of moral problems can be brushed over out of necessity. Sometimes this is done deliberately by working backwards from a need to excuse doing harm, the current shape of the Longtermist/Effective Altruist weirdo religion being constructed entirely to enshrine colonialist resource extraction and exploiting the Global South as a moral imperative, but in the case of the homeschooling movement I believe it happened by degrees.

Many people can empathize with the basic reasoning: That in a country with a crumbling public education system with overcrowded classrooms, overburdened teachers, and standardized testing held as the be-all and end-all of measuring the value of children to society, it may be better to simply opt out. I know a lot of people who took their children out of school when districts decided that COVID was just over now, and kept them out to break the cycle of toxic culture in small towns. Some people will understand immediately, if your school has a combination football coach/principle who resolves sexual harassment complaints in class by wink-wink-nudge-nudge siccing football children on troublemakers in the parking lot like attack dogs, you might also consider ordering Saxon math books and yanking the spawn out of school.

This is made worse by the continuing assault on the American public school system by power players, siphoning away funding to charter schools that exclude students with disabilities and imposing the responsibility of being a counter-terrorist QRF on teachers who already have to pay for classroom supplies out of pocket. As the system crumbles, carved apart for privatization or decaying, more and more parents will make the rational decision to pull their children out of a damaged and damaging environment.

The people on the ground floor of divesting from public education were much more ideological.

It’s telling that I didn’t learn until after the fact that the homeschooling movement was largely founded in response to desegregation in schools. Less palatable reasoning is hidden behind euphemisms like “Cultural Marxism” to explain why teaching respect for others despite differences is intolerable. The surface level concerns, an epidemic of children too bright for the constraints of standardized curriculum being medicated into zombies to fit into the system, slipping academic performance, excessive homework and a focus of rote memorization, are thinly papered over a real underlying belief in a leftist conspiracy to destroy America by eroding its cultural foundations.

Conservatives are very prone to this.

The upshot is that parents taking their children out of the school system to protect them from various forms of leftist indoctrination, like learning about slavery and the existnance The Gays, often fixate on the surface reasons to justify and evangelize their movement to outsiders. Fear of the New World Order brainwashing your child to be a dull automaton might sound bad, the offspring being a perfect genius who needs to be unconstrained by the system to reach their true potential sounds much better to your un-redpilled family and friends.

The weight of saving the future brushes over any problems that arise: A parent homeschooling in an attempt to simply get a better academic education for their child will re-evaluate if it turns out much more difficult than they anticipated, a parent homeschooling to preserve the next generation from evil government brainwashing and medical poisoning will disregard real problems to keep their children out of the CRT indoctrination camps.

It also puts just a bit of pressure on the kid.

This is where the homeschooling movement begins to merge with varying crystal-based ideologies via crossovers like the Wayseer thing, merging the old unscientific woo left wing with the religious right in the kind of odd fusion that often happened in the time before the right gluttonously devoured all irrationality and hoarded it to itself. The increasing diagnosis of those with ADHD and Neurodivergence as children with actual challenges and not just general-purpose defectives added fuel to the fire. When people like the Wayseer evangelists, with their Indigo-lite personality type testing to show why your kid is on the wavelength of Da Vinci, came through selling a vision of their struggling children as history-changing geniuses shackled by the system and mind-numbing drugs, it proved immensely popular.

Stewart was so enamored with it that he developed an intense long-distance broship with founder Garret John Laporto, the ‘no honey, we have Morpheus at home’ in the linked video above, and attempted to officially partner Oathkeepers with the Wayseer movement before being shut down by the board of directors in one of the frequent internal clashes. The premise deeply appealed to him, when I was small he told my mom that parenting me was “Like raising Jesus” and constantly hounded her on the responsibility she bore in bringing me up as the world-changing figure I would be.

Having an established movement that encapsulated all his beliefs about his own genius and validated the logical conclusion that I, his eldest son and extension of self, must be superhuman resonated deeply. Though the tie-in didn’t work out, one of many manic episode alliances vetoed by the Oathkeepers board, I still ended up with the book in the pile of assigned reading that Stewart kept substituting for a curriculum. I never read it, (just like the other assigned reading, which I would just pick up in a stack and hide out of sight until Stewart forgot about it) but the overall trend behind the book would impact my life severely.

“If Dakota were in public school they’d call him an ADHD kid and have him on medication in an instant. So tragic.”

You weren’t just listening to John Birch acolyte fearmongering about Zionists trying to brainwash away American Exceptionalism, you were safeguarding a generation of free thinkers who might just save the world. Bit by bit, the homeschool movement increasingly took on the self importance of the salvation of mankind, turning the already toxic pressure on ‘Gifted Kids’ and the narcissism of certain parents up to 11.

Depending on the degree, it starts to get real Eugenics-y. Finally coming back around to my own King Fatherlord’s belief in his bloodline’s supremacy and my task to exemplify it, you start getting parents who took Idiocracy very seriously and gave their children standing orders to have five or more grandkids apiece to save humanity. This was Stewart’s stated rationale for there being so many of us, and it was only ever partially a joke.

You may be noticing a bit of a similarity to the Quiverfull ideology and Joshuah Generation that the docuseries Happy Shiny People has belatedly drug into the light, and you’re right on the money. The underlying mindset was baked into what I call the culturally separatist right wing, the people holding themselves apart from a decay in broader America, before Quiverfull took center stage and holds sway even with secular Libertarian types like my own sphere.

When I failed to perform, I was not just failing myself and the Homeschool movement, I was failing the genetic destiny of humankind.

Lots of people who grew up struggling with varying undiagnosed fidgets and ‘tisms heard “You’re not applying yourself/not living up to your full potential” like a background drumbeat for their entire childhood, but the destiny of country and species puts a lot of extra weight on. Being relatively more in the spotlight as the eldest son of the most important man to ever live, I had to live up to a lot of staggeringly unrealistic expectations. When I got into my late teens with no academic accomplishments or prospects for producing the next batch of Superior Rhodes Men, the failure was all the more severe and abject.

Stewart overriding any curriculum and demanding that I just wade into piles of original sources, mostly on the Revolutionary war and ancient Sparta, completely self-directed could not be blamed. Homeschooling could not be blamed. I just sucked.

The ingrained need to prove the Movement right, to justify my upbringing and deflect all criticism, stayed with me long after I fully realized that the version of ‘homeschooling’ I got under Stewart’s direction and interference had totally failed me. I was an adult with a job, responsibilities, and college classes I was struggling to pass before I forced myself to admit that maybe I should reexamine this whole ADHD thing.

If I hadn’t been in therapy already over everything else I probably would not have ever turned over that particular rock. A sibling half-jokingly calling me Autistic was enough to trigger a sudden emotional outburst, and deep down I knew why.

Getting evaluated for any mental health struggle, ADHD, Anxiety, Depression, felt like failing and betraying the entire ideological structure of my childhood. My mom often told stories about other mothers on the playground asking if I might be autistic, chalking it up to an overlap in symptoms due to being very intelligent, and going back to prove them right in the end was a bone-deep discomfort. It felt so much easier to blame myself for failing or just think of myself as stupid, but no matter how easy it also was demonstrably not working.

Deciding on trying medication was the second-to-last step in abandoning the entire construct. A brief struggle with fear of losing my personality and creativity (It turns out something does happen to mercurial creative types who want to write a book when they start taking adderall: They get published) and a briefer bout of paranoia that everything interesting about my personality was just a symptom of ADD, that I was about to become my true bland self to function in society, lead finally confronting myself in the mirror and admitting that I can’t explain away unconsciously doing the weird postured T-Rex arm thing in socially uncomfortable situations.

To top it off, I think this was another place where my years hiding on 4chan did me little good. The anonymous internet informed my view of what Neurodivergence is, a mark of shame bandied as an identifier and launched as an insult alike by internet outcasts who largely gave up on being part of society. It meant accepting that there was something fundamentally different about me that would hinder my ability to connect with people, that no matter what magical future circumstance got me out of the survival basement I would still always be somewhat apart from normal people and never quite belong.

Of course, it was already too late several times over on that front. Catching up to ‘normal’ in any meaningful way was simply never in the cards or me, and accepting that took the weight off a few labels I needed to accept to put my life in perspective.

‘Homeschool Kid’ is just one that’s never going to get any easier.