Ben Lieber is an alumnus of the Chicago DIY punk community, frontman for Secret Agent Bill, and a co-founder of Riot Fest. He writes and performs in New Orleans, where he lives with his two sons and his wife, The Duchess of Milan.
THE FAMILY HEIRLOOM
The Duchess and I had to soothe an epic meltdown recently. The fallout is always brutal—my son has real fight in him—but the recovery process is a chance to do the best work: catharsis, reflection, and setting the stage for a positive reset. And it can even be an opportunity for a little gift giving.
You can’t expect a child to learn positive or healthier alternatives if all you’re offering is an index of their screw-ups, or adhere to rules you’re not willing to explain. So we parsed through what went right and wrong, and as an olive branch, I went into the armory and dusted off one of my most priceless family heirlooms, passed down from his Poppy and his GreatPoppy before him: The Lie Detector.
No, buddy—that’s not what Poppy calls it. Good catch.
My boy was flagged for ADD before his diagnosis, just like his old man. A lot of experts argue that this is largely a symptom disguising broader disorders, which has proven accurate. But I wish people would stop talking about it like a defect—very often, it’s a function.
My son sits across from us, processing turning a bad morning into a better day. I watch him doing something that movies attempt: A character stands in the center of a mess of swirling, glowing equations and formulas only they can see, rearranging them until—seconds later—eureka. This visual overlooks that this mental process can apply to things as trivial as buying condensed milk, is agonizingly maddening, and lasts your whole life.
“My son,” I told him, “you have inherited Poppy’s BS Detector, and if you can learn to wield it, the battle is yours.”
The BS Detector
The Bullshit Detector is not unique—it’s just a term my dad used to simplify an underlying process of macroscopic critical thinking so that prepubescent me could understand why my brain was so loud and busy. I’m also not saying that aspects of said Bullshit Detector are unidentifiable.
They include big-picture and futures reasoning, dialectics, ecological reasoning, second-order cybernetics—tools that weigh the source of information, map it against your values and goals, and predict where choices might lead. The Bullshit Detector sorts all this before the eye blinks back open.
It’s a lot, with many variations and informal names. But the Liebers have been handing down their Bullshit Detector since before the Great Wars, likely before the Diasporas, and who knows how far back this gift truly goes.
Grammy and Poppy recognized my warning signs early: the constant tics, the disregard of authority and hierarchy, the susceptibility to hypnosis, a fascination for storytellers and experts of their fields. I was uncomfortably overloaded with context I couldn’t understand yet.
I see this in my boy, and if the Bullshit Detector isn’t honed properly, it can result in constant second-guessing, an increase in unearned trust and gullibility, paranoia, isolation, and the other things that happened to my most brilliant peers—the ones who received all the praise and no support.
The mind can be developed for this, if it’s willing to work for it. But wrestling with a thought process more complex than the brain it occupies? It’s hard to describe the self-diminishing mental torque: thinking 10 steps ahead of yourself, never being able to read the signs right, the full-body headache of trying to comprehend how everyone seems to get it but you.
This is followed by the real symptom—imposter syndrome—and thankfully it has a name now. If other people believe obvious fictions, don’t believe self-evident facts, follow plot lines that are fundamentally wrong or self-destructive, then what is broken about me?
The natural casualty of imposter syndrome is metacognition: the inclusion of your own cognitive methods—your biases, limitations, and blind spots. It’s the nuanced awareness that how you think affects your conclusions. But what good is that awareness when your perception is unreliable? The Lieber gifts are numerous and potent, but self-awareness is not often among them. Duchess will have to intervene.
A Machine Broken By Design
To be a critical thinker in post-Reagan—let’s be honest, post-education—America is a lonely position. More than two of us in a room nowadays draws suspicion. And as a nation, we are now harvesting the fruits of our homeschooled intellectual laziness while wondering, without irony, how we even got here.
Duchess and I, like other parents around the country, have been watching as the protections, resources, and acceptance for special-needs children dwindle with the rise of nationalism. For those who don’t know the history of the term “Asperger’s,” it’s tightly entwined with Holocaust-era eugenics: curing neurodivergence, ending its threat to nationalistic homogeneity, and separating those who were useful from those who were liquidated. None of this is new, it’s just packaged differently.
When critical thinking is outlawed, only outlaws will think critically. That puts a lot of hyperintelligent children on the spectrum in a horrifying position before they’re even voting age. And they’re contending with a whole new era of book bans and historical whitewashing.
The Bullshit Detector is not inherently invincible. It faces some mighty adversaries, like the American education system: a machine broken by design. And it’s doing exactly what it was meant to do—let the kids who need resources slip through the cracks. They’re expensive, and funding cuts protect shareholder margins.
The machine has improved over decades: The cracks are bigger, the voters are simpler, and more money is flowing into the pockets of those it’s meant to serve. It took my late sister-in-law, a charter school teacher, years to finally admit she was part of a scam—selling diplomas to kids completely unprepared for the next steps. It seems bleak… but it’s the misinformed who despair.
Neurodivergence doesn’t exist in spite or because of any recently introduced system or external factors. It exists in the wheel, the atlatl, the abacus, sails, gunpowder. It took Eratosthenes two shadows in ancient Egypt to measure the Earth’s circumference. Aristarchus used the moon to calculate our distance to the sun with near-perfect accuracy.
They’re just two examples of people who pondered the flat, geocentric model of our world and thought, this seems like bullshit. They’re not anomalies—they’re prototypes of who’s falling through the cracks now.
What this education system, designed to enrich a few, has done is make a generational army of disenfranchised. It includes platoons of brilliant, distrustful, anti-authoritarian berserkers—like my son—and they are beneficiaries of a gift with no regard for color, class, or pedigree.
He notices when the storylines change without reason, like I did. He hears when talking points repeat without substance. He sees the angry and nervous tics of the talking heads desperate to placate him. And when something sounds fishy—too simple, too neat, too good to be true—we’re helping him to trust that feeling.
Proud, Gifted Misfits
These are all the things I think as my eye blinks back open. My boy sits on the edge of his bed, his eyes mapping alternate outcomes. “My son,” I tell him, smiling in the wake of generations of proud, gifted misfits, “you have inherited Poppy’s BS Detector—”
I look at my boys and I don’t despair, I have hope and pride. They carry a heavy heritage: as Americans upsetting seats of power, as children of a nation that treats necessities like luxuries, as neurodivergent kids facing a world that still reeks of bullshit. They won’t have it easy, but when they’re in battle mode, they don’t make it easy. Not for anyone. They are dangerous enemies, with a dangerous tool.
“—and if you can learn to wield it, the battle is yours.”
The odds are stacked against them? Good, that’s our heritage. They have the Family Heirloom. They are armed with something far better than guns.
“Is that really what Poppy calls it?”
No, buddy—good catch.
illustrations by Victoria Allen
