Has your autism influenced your politics?

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Absolutely it has. Now I am very nonpolitical. I see politics as a joke. Just because we have a US President doesn't amount to a hill of beans to me when I know for a fact that it's the Senate and the House Of Representatives in Congress that are in charge in the first place and make the crazy decisions we see here in the US every day.

The only politics I can even begin to take seriously are politics founded on private property and individual initiative. Politics predicated on the principle that Government is the prime mover and the best guide to social and economic health turn me off in the entirety. The best way to reject collectivism either socialist of fascist is to take them literally and see what nonsense they lead to.

ruveyn

Nope. I'm a very happy Catholic Christian conservative, and that will never change.

I do think that my autistic tendencies (A.S.) have impacted my political thought. My political philosophy can best be described as being libertarian socialist/left-libertarian. This appeals to me because it synthesises the personal autonomy of libertarianism with the social order of socialism. We aspies tend to like to have the freedom to do our own thing, but also seek a well ordered state of affairs. Counter-balancing these sometimes conflicting ideals can be a challenge at times. I think that some of us on one hand might take a laissez faire approach, while controvertedly others might end up drifting towards a totalitarian attitude. I however feel that their should be both ordered liberty, and societal harmony, and justice. Just how exactly to accomplish this goal is the question which must be ultimately determined by the people.

My guess is that one's Myers-Briggs type is a more likely indicator of political leaning. All the INTJs I know are libertarian. I am INTP / INFP am am very left-leaning. Ayn Rand is believed to have been INTJ.

Right leaning libertarian, ISTP/J.

Another big influence on us all is our community. Family and friends play a big part and so does the media, which has become very right-wing in the last 20 years or so. I've been lucky to find two TV channels that tell many big truths I don't see anywhere else. If anyone is interested in this, I think they are only on satellite TV and DISH has both and I think Direct TV only has one. For a huge wake-up call look for Free Speech TV and LINK TV, both of which have websites to learn from for those who don't have satellite.

Wow.

Some would say I'm ultra-conservative. I attribute that to two major developments in my life...both BEFORE I ever knew what AS was.

1. I got into survivalism which taught me that you have you rely on yourself for your well-being, not on government or community. While you always need others, you should NEVER expect others to take care of you, and you plan your life accordingly. Those who do otherwise are in a bad place when the system breaks down. Besides, being able to take care of yourself grants the opportunity to be able to help others.

2. Discovering all the feel good, "life is fair" garbage that my parents and teachers fed me from day one was a crock of steaming donkey manure. The crux of Liberalism seems to hinge on a naive, utopian vision of how the world should be, and not an earnest effort to improve how the world really is.

I have compassion for people who are down and out, but I also know that a lot of people who claim to be in those ranks are phoneys. They can work, they just don't want to since it's easier to let someone else support them....giving a bad name to those who really do need the help of others.

Once learned about AS and saw how my life was adversely impacted by something I couldn't change, I'm a bit more moderate. I think the best way to help someone in need to to help them to get to a place where they don't need to be helped anymore. I'm open to having programs to help people, but I'm cynical about government administration and oversight of those programs.

Finally, I think having AS gives people like us the advantage of seeing things FROM THE OUTSIDE. I asked this of an NT, and he felt I wasn't wrong about my position. People benefited from the system rarely see how it fails to serve others. Since the world is not designed for us, we are on the outside looking in with a more independent perspective of what's going on.

The neurotypical approach to politics is to fit in. It is statistically impossible for anyone to unanimously hold the official ideology of any political parties stand on 100 issues yet a neurotypical will do just that to fit in.

I am not sure if I believe in autism or Asperger's Syndrome, though I do feel emotionally and intellectually different than many people. My view is that left and right are both non-rational social heuristics developed in concert. They are not opposites but related impositions of tribal egalitarian (left) and early civilizational/pre-civilizational patriarchal (right) communities. They reflect adaptive, non-intellectual mores and ways of viewing things that promoted survival (if not optimal functioning) in a distant history.

I think the right is slightly more realistic, as I believe it is a later and more 'civilized' development, yet the individualism and antinomian tendencies of the left also have some validity. The issue, as I have said, is that these are heuristics and emotional tendencies. They are not intellectual systems, though they have influenced many intellectual systems.

Politically I am a nihilist - I don't really believe 'in' anything- though I am oftend tempted to be an evangelical libertarian (in the anarchic capitalist sense) because I admire their rigorous logic in economics and their courage to carry out revisionist history. I do not buy in to any of their moral systems, though Lon L. Fuller and Anthony de Jasay very nearly convince me that justice is an issue of formal procedural reasoning and does not rely on morality or value judgments.

I have a strong antipathy toward economic socialism and liberal humanism, because their values strike me as barely disguised Christian nonsense all mixed up with primitivism. Yet I feel I shouldn't bother myself with it, since my opinion certainly isn't going to change their minds.

Now that you mention it, maybe. I believe politicians are either lying or ducking the questions altogether. Is it the autism in me that wants specifics? It very well might be. Thanks for bringing that up.

My emotions are instructed by logic, and my ADHD makes it difficult for me to dabble for too long on the details(unless it's necessary to grasp larger concepts) so I tend to be a big-picture person. I arrive at compassion through logic, so things have to pass the filter of logic for me, otherwise I'm not so inclined to ascribe to that position or view.

Add to this the fact that faith has never come naturally to me, and it makes it incredibly difficult for me to find a home on the Left, where faith is crucial in the reinterpretation of all of reality, as to allow for a narrative to survive. But I don't quite have a home on the Right, where too my ideas are said to be either too radical or too liberal, so whatever.