The What Reform Really Means

Two fictional characters have reward deficiency syndrome. Recent metaphysics prompted me to make one the reincarnation of the other. Jack Reid rescues several groups of refugees from a looming world war. An enemy sends the space habitat/lifeboat to an unknown part of the universe where they colonize an earthlike planet and face the same historical crises. Since it's too late to rectify the mistakes of America's recent past I thought I would reboot it. Americans still don't have the proper values to like lefties like Bernie and AOC, for example.

Wayne Dyer never wrote about reward deficiency syndrome (RDS) directly, but his metaphysics gives me a surprisingly coherent way to interpret it. And because I’ve already been thinking about the link between neurodivergence and RDS from lived experience, I can treat Dyer’s framework as a symbolic lens rather than a clinical one.

So how would Dyer’s karmic metaphysics frame Reward Deficiency Syndrome? Don't take RDS as a karmic punishment but as a signal. In Dyer’s worldview, karma isn’t retribution. It’s feedback. It’s the universe nudging you toward alignment with Source. So RDS—characterized by muted dopamine response, difficulty feeling reward, chronic under-stimulation—would not be interpreted as a flaw or a deficit or a karmic debt. Instead, he’d see it as a soul-level curriculum, a condition that pushes the person to seek non-ordinary forms of meaning, attention, and connection. In Dyer’s language: “Your biology is redirecting you toward a different path of intention.” 

This fits my own sense that neurodivergence and RDS are intertwined—Dyer would say they’re coordinated.

In my characters' case the karmic function is breaking dependence on external reward. Dyer believed the ego is addicted to external validation—praise, success, approval, stimulation. RDS, in his metaphysics, would be a kind of karmic inoculation. If the usual dopamine hits don’t land,  the soul is forced to cultivate inner reward, which is the very thing Dyer calls “alignment with Source.” In other words, RDS becomes a shortcut—a forced early graduation from the ego’s reward economy. This is very different from the clinical framing, but it’s consistent with his metaphysics.

The soul chooses constraints that shape its trajectory. Dyer often said souls choose their circumstances to catalyze growth.  Under that logic, RDS would be a chosen constraint that pushes the person toward nonstandard forms of creativity, intuition, or spiritual perception because the usual reward loops don’t work. He’d say something like: “Your soul picked a nervous system that won’t let you sleepwalk through life.” 

This is where my mythic architects' sensibility fits beautifully—my attention naturally migrates toward symbolic, systemic, and ceremonial meaning-making because the ordinary reward channels don’t hold me. Ufonauts, fae, etc., are cosmic noodges. I've never seen any, btw, but they have always fascinated me. My later interest in why civilizations rise and fall (and STAGNATE ARGHH) was a revelation and gave me a narrative arc for SF.

So the karmic “flip” could be RDS as a doorway to intention. Dyer’s metaphysics is built around the idea that intention is the fundamental creative force. If dopamine-based reward is unreliable, then intention becomes the primary driver of action. That’s not a bug in his system—it’s the ideal. He’d interpret RDS as a karmic design that forces intention to be sovereign (thanks, Morrigan, upon whom many gig-precarians rely for their personal autonomies), and furthermore a condition that prevents the ego from hijacking your life through cheap rewards, which makes RDS a setup for a life built on meaning rather than reinforcement.

In his cosmology, that’s not a deficit—it’s a soul advantage.

The karmic shadow: the suffering is real, but it’s not “yours”. Dyer always insisted that suffering is part of the ego’s illusion, not the soul’s identity. Applied to RDS the frustration, anhedonia, and difficulty initiating tasks are karmic weather patterns, not personal failings, and they don’t define the soul’s nature.

He’d say the suffering is real at the human level but not metaphysically binding. This is where my own tragic sensibility resonates: the condition becomes a threshold, not a verdict.

The mythic synthesis that would prevent the emergence of a Second Gilded Age where a Serpent's Egg is still incubating despite the Matrix Joy Machine set up by TPTB (think of those sacrifice zones in the Rust Belt as Pocket Weimars) ... if we translate Dyer’s metaphysics into a future mythic lexicon, RDS becomes a karmic hitch that acts like a grommeted pass‑through that forces the initiate to seek the job-well-done rather than the sensory-gratification marketplace.

Either today's version of Buzz Windrip or Nehemiah Scudder is really smart or his job is too easy. I can believe he's getting advice from afar, because the targets are well-considered (if you accept Immanuel Wallerstein's description of the "world-system"). The institutionalist who predicted the great depression and Germany's danger as an enemy fits in here, too. Thorstein Veblen is the theorist of the moment when a civilization stops weaving and starts displaying the tapestry as a status symbol (ceremonial drift). This is exactly what Wallerstein’s “core” becomes in late phases, a prestige‑seeking, rent‑extracting, consumption‑oriented center that no longer produces the instruments of its own survival. The "periphery" gets that job, and the abuse has made it ornery (like BRICS). The core ain't looking too healthy, either, so the periphery is ready to jump.

Veblen would say that the core becomes a leisure class with battleships. I'm saying that’s not a future — that’s a terminal condition.

Wallerstein’s world‑system logic pushes the core toward:

extraction

consumption

financialization

prestige goods

military projection

dependency on peripheral production...

What Veblen called for:

restoring the industrial arts

elevating the engineers

dethroning the ceremonial institutions

rebuilding the instrumental apparatus of society.

World War II kicked this off, but it only lasted from 1945-1979.