Kinds of Political Systems and ASD/AS

Post Reply New Topic

As someone new here, and someone active in politics, I am reticent to post about political matters too early. However, I wondered if any of you gravitate toward far-left political ideologies because of the order and rigidity that those states provide historically?

I am not condoning mass murder; however, my mother's family comes from the old communist East Germany and Czech Republic and I have often been curious if communism would appeal to someone with a very fixed mindset who tends to be obsessed with following the rules, monotonous work, and rigid routine. Every bad thing and all the good things I hear about the old East Germany make it sound like a paradise for someone like me. This is not the typical reaction that I hear from people when hearing about those things. However, I know many former East Germans who have a nostalgia (Ostalgie) for that country.

Maybe it is the Prussian in me, but I tend to listen to repetitive marches from the Eastern bloc to calm me. This was also true of Helen Keller (who was a big-time fan of the USSR). I also repeat things from TV and movies a lot, including famous speeches about communism (like Kennedy gave at the Berlin Wall) or by communist leaders (when I am in private). But listening to random numbers being recited calms me so this may be a quirk of mine. I care very much for social injustices, maybe too much, and I grew up in a home where far-left political views were very normal.

I don't feel as if this is remotely deviant, as I believe it is quite common many places in the world. One of the greatest Marxist scholars in the world was born in my hometown. My upbringing left me little choice as well.

Not in the least. I'm a conservative in almost every respect, though I don't believe in sacrificing traditional community conservative values for laissez faire nonsense, so I'm not a fan of neo-conservatism.

Soviet style communism would be very bad for people with ASD/AS. The Soviets were strict on conformity and didn't tolerate the kind of independent thought and eccentricity normally associated with aspies.

Of all the places and countries I have visited in the world, the absolute pits was East Germany during the wall years. There is not one good thing I could say about it, not even one. Bullies walking around with machine guns and pointing them at tourists like me, whose unspent currency they confiscated?

Sorry, I think your concept is a romantic idea completely unrelated to the reality of East Germany. It was a terrible place, the Stasi were foul extortionate bullies, and even in the 1970s, buildings reduced to rubble in WW2 still sat in heaps in the cities.

Everything and everyone was unrelieved grey, the colour of death and decay. I wouldn't have sent my worst enemy to live there.

That's interesting B19. I have roots in Eastern Germany going back to the 13th century, and several of my family were prominent East Germans and Soviet citizens. I am aware of what people say regarding life in the DDR, including many that I have known from the Eastern Bloc nations. I only know what I have seen in my travels and what I have been exposed to here in the US. I have lived and travelled everywhere here, and there are parts of this country that seem in my opinion to be very difficult, grey and unhappy. Still, everyone is different. However, I do not think that the states inspired by Stalin-era USSR represent my idea of true socialism. I am not sure where they went wrong, but I certainly know that capitalism and Western-style democracy are not all they are cracked up to be. Our US films certainly do not paint an accurate picture of the US to the rest of the world and foreigners traditionally never came to my town except to settle there (mostly from Eastern and Lower Europe). In my opinion this is a great country on principle, but to me living here is harder than living in any country that has ever existed in recent memory. This is not always for the obvious reasons. One can have a full belly and plenty of glamorous entertainments, and be as grey and full of decay as an East German apartment building (on the inside at least). I feel the point is an internal state of happiness and security rather than fancy dressings.

My area was the subject of some research a few years back and is considered by psychologists to be one of the most unfriendly in the world, while New Zealand and Australia had some of the friendliest, so maybe our views are based largely on our respective world communities. Almost everyone in Ohio is of recent or more distant German origin, and I do not believe that these people are really that different than East Germans during the wall years or at any other time or place. That seems to be my experience of growing up German in America. I am not a fan of wealth, glamour, or the false happiness it brings. But maybe this is personality related. I have for a long time been outside of the mainstream economy and in my career we do not make a lot of money. I do not own anything expensive, including a car or credit card and this is by choice. I especially don't like to see people make merry in public, as when I lived in California. I have a routine and I wear the same thing every day and eat the same thing every day. And I like quiet and was brought up to conform and follow the rules to the letter. However, I will admit that this upbringing didn't really match my differences at times, so RetroGamer87 may have a point there. I do believe that you may be wrong about my views on E. Germany and my compatibility with living in a totalitarian regime, but then again we do not know each other very well and who is to say what goes on in people's minds and hearts. I don't believe I actually need to find out what it would be like though. And even though that would be a mistake to find out, there are quite a few positive DDR stories lurking around out there. My mother seems to think that people recall fondly life in the DDR because it is what they grew up with, but she has now declared an interest in democratic socialism.

It is a big topic. Thanks for sharing. I know this is probably very weird to most people, but what better place to ask?

I would also like some of you to consider that according to history and pure numerical data, capitalism has caused just as many deaths and repressions as communism and maybe more, especially when it was starting out. A big difference between the two systems is that capitalism is very fake and uses a version of the "Matrix" to conceal from its citizens and visitors/immigrants its crimes and true living conditions. This is not intentional and not a computer simulation, rather a social mechanism. Western Marxists and even critics of Marxism have been discussing this in academia well into our own times. I probably do not want to debate whether Marxist-Leninists states are better or worse (or even true socialism) but they did not have that kind of propaganda. They had a very ineffective and oppressive propaganda, but nothing like what capitalism has. That Marxist-Leninist kind of propaganda is very obviously false to most people and outlandish, and what you saw in East Germany is exactly what you saw -- the truth of how hard it is to govern a society, any society with any political economy stripped of its fine clothes and faced with modern problems that all economic systems face, maybe a few more.

If we got rid of a lot of our social control in capitalist societies what would we find? Visit a poor Midwestern state or a poor Southern state and compare it to what remains of Soviet Russia's "ghettos". I have seen both, and let me tell you, the remains of communism and the current reality for a poor community in rural West Virginia or Ohio look eerily similar. If you visit my hometown, grey buildings and people full of decay in East Germany start to look like a Hawaiian vacation. If you don't believe me I invite you to visit a few places in rural America. Foreigners rarely visit rural Ohio or West Virginia and the successful coastal cities like NYC and LA, etc. (that get frequent visitors) are largely that way due to very left-wing policies in local government. There are actually communists on the city councils of some of those major US coast cities.

Just offering another opinion, which I am glad to say is allowed in the US. But we really have never needed to censor too many people's opinions or put people in jail for them, as our social mechanism causes us to be lulled into a false sense of comfort. The worst thing about the Eastern Bloc nations is that they fed this machine by allowing Western leaders to show their citizens how "bad" that socialism is supposed to be, when in reality Western-style democracies seem to be by all accounts whitewashed versions of these states, just more insidious. We put the Stasi to shame B19. These theories are still developing and we are learning more each year. Hopefully we can take these discoveries to the polls, which I plan to do on election day in November.

Thanks for reading.

The thing with communism, is I want MY OWN order, I struggle when being forced to conform to another person's ideas.

Same here Arganger. I think after some reflection that that is also the case for me and maybe the origin of my interest in authoritarian regimes. I often wonder what would happen if you had a well ordered society, if communism started working for everybody, and then what is to stop an evil or sociopathic person from taking advantage of it? I think that is what so many people commenting here are implying about the old communist states. A Joseph Stalin is not someone I want at the head of my government no matter what kind it is. Unfortunately, people have such good intentions and it always turns out bad. For a while I was just like Emile Cioran, a real pessimist about life and governments. Animal Farm is an interesting book in that way or Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed. What a mess we have found ourselves in, really. But I really don't want to give up right away. The life of a monk was also appealing, but the brothers in the monastery did not feel that that life was right for me after a trial period. I am still searching for what makes me feel comfortable and gives me a base for life. I really shy away from religious groups where the pastor/preacher/priest/etc. displays any character traits of a Mao or a Stalin, such as outlandish costumes and having pictures of themselves everywhere. You can find that a lot in the South or Midwest sometimes. Maybe I am backtracking to that kind of thinking? I probably need to be careful with wanting too much order. Thanks for your comments.

That is a valid point RetroGamer87. I also happen to suspect that the Chinese government may visit certain websites hosted in the US that one wouldn't expect. I have a very good friend who has frequent visits to her excellent Catholic-oriented blog from Chinese users, which I guess may be their government (so does her son who is a computer engineer). It is all a lot more complicated than we know. Unfortunately, all of this gets very confusing to me, which is why I wanted to ask a few questions and bring up a few points from what I have read and experienced. I can say that a lot of my medications for seizures make my brain and thoughts take slightly odd turns, and I may find things of interest that I normally would not. I hope that that time is ending as I adjust to my new medication. Thanks for sharing in the discussion.

I'm for maximal liberty, and perhaps largely for autism/ASD reasons - ie. I don't trust other people to measure my life and measure my potential for me, let alone know how to treat me or even worse manage how I treat myself. I need a lot of time alone to explore who I am and figure out how to orient to a world that by and large thinks every differently. Tyranny might work for people who are dead center of the bell-curve and sincerely wouldn't know what conformity was if they saw it, ie. it's a fish trying to grasp the concept of water. Tyranny has a knack for making simple rules where a lot of people benefit in having a simple narrative and those who live along the creases of those narratives get destroyed without any mercy. I have every reason to believe I'd be sacrificed for the sake of simplicity, that's already my experience in a so-called republican democracy, can't imagine something more heavy-handed being better.

I would be more in support of an anarchocommunist state than one with strict authoritarian control. I would consider myself maybe far left, not the point of absolute communism but a far heavier focus on socialism and a wealth of public services often either not provided by the state or propped up as smoke and mirrors.

I'm in favor of anarchist communism. I want to live a more rural and communal life free of unnecessary hierarchy and domination. I also think it will be a necessary transition to protect the worlds ecosystems.