How did Aspies in the past survive?

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Studying much on the NT point of view for my entire life, I certainly see that the NT point of view is a very judgemental one. Should one be out of their acceptable range, they will kill/isolate him/her in a figurative sense.

Which made me wonder. Given the obviousness of autistic traits and the sharp eyes of NTs,

How did Aspies from the past ranging from Einstein to Temple Grandin, managed to survive and at least find a living or even be allowed to reach celebrity status?

I would guess the same way they are surviving now. They probably were much more miserable, though.

Imagine being an illiterate peasant with AS, who has never seen a book with one's own eyes, and who will even with the best healthcare available, have a life expectancy of 40. And who will never know anything about anything beyond a 10 mile radius, or more than a generation in the past. Oh, and who lives in a society where the odd are literally killed or ostracized.

This is made more depressing when you realize that for most humans before the last few centuries, this was what life was like regardless of having AS.

Imagine how many geniuses lived and died without ever learning how to read and write. How many in the top 20th percentile died in infancy, or due to diseases which a modicum of hygiene could have prevented.

The question really is, how did anyone manage to survive and accomplish anything of worth?

And I still think the answer is "the same way they survive and accomplish things now."

Except with far more misery.

Last edited by ZeroGravitas on 02 Apr 2011, 5:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

there are much brighter ppl here than me, tho i hope my pennyworth is of some help.

i'm self diag aspi, have known fr fifteen years since reading a newspaper article .. hell, thats me I thought!! now i'm 53.

childhood was v difficult, isolation at school etc, bizzarre parents, then eight years working among others was at times v dire, so i'm self employed for the the last twenty eight, these last twelve years my wage has been tiny, tho the upside is its only thirty hrs a week.

i am no genius, tho several ppl have said i am.... its just cos the competition is so low grade.

i am lucky in that i had ability and enthusiasms. much mellower now, certainly less 'driven'.

i am part of no social circle and give no respect or defference to any. for instance one sh***y company i depended on fr seventy percent of my work (I'm loaded with overheads too) froze me out fr a year .... now that was tough!! a year to the week they called me agn. bunch a s**ts.

its funny. one person on their own and they are usually okay, add another and they become a pair of prattts on many occasions.

i get great joy from nature and my interests and being me. i find others slow me down, are intrusive and generally yuck.i enjoy some ppl i meet yet to most i am a stranger and always will be. i am gracious in real life, polite, well spoken tho have little time for ppl with preconceived ideas and blkinkered vision. lets face it, generally no one but kin would ever help you out, so never ask. i am v lucky with my wife, she popped into my world exactly as i was being chucked out of lodgings, been there a year as my mother sold the house n fckd off after my dad died in 1976.

i have a theory.

its as if us aspis are first time around souls, we have no idea how the world greases along, how ppl get jobs, make a living, yet NT's seem as if they have been on this planet many times before and know how to pull all the strings.

To be honest, unless they were some sort of Einstein they were probably put in mental hospitals and treated with shock therapy.

No i'm not joking.

What the previous person said, miserable but still alive.

Depends how far back you want to go. I think a hunter gatherer society might be a good one for an aspie, much more congenial than a modern one.

well in a family of aspies/auties the family would obviously do everything possible to protect their children if they can. Before my son got his diagnosis I covered up his symptoms and made sure he was not in situations he couldn't handle. I'm considered slightly odd and all problems with him were attributed to my "crummy, overprotective, and strange parenting" ...but my parenting isn't that off and it was later discovered I have AS.

I think most parents would accept being blamed for their children's issues to protect their children. Most marriages were arranged before the 19th century and if you kept the child at home they wouldn't be as noticed. Also you could hire people to work with your child if you were middle-upper class. As for peasants that is probably where people suffered the most although it doesn't take much skill to gather fruits and veggies in a bag so I think somehow these children were simply given tasks they could do and if they were lucky lived with family.

Exactly.

I would like to think that maybe in some corners of the world, being odd gave you special status.

I saw this documentary and read the book Horse Boy by Rupert Isaacson. In it he tells of his family's trip to Mongolia initially to cure their son Rowan of autism. They visit shamans who help cure him of some of the difficult parts of his autism (toileting issues for example) but in the end -- in my interpretation of the ending anyway-- Rowan is still autistic and better able to interact with the people in his life. The shamans told his parents that he had the potential to become a shaman himself!

I'm sure many were thought of as weird, odd, hard to get along with, unaccepting, difficult to get to know, a slave to routine, and just plain picky about everything.

I type this as I think back to my paternal Grandmother, who I'm pretty sure had Asperger's, which she passed on to her son (my dad), who then passed it along to his son and daughter. I'm also pretty sure that at least one of her brothers also had Asperger's.

My Grandmother was considered a very smart woman - she worked her way from the floor of the factory and into the corporate offices, where she was said to have used her own system to take dictation from her boss. She had a mind like a steel trap and was adamant about being right about the things she knew. She wanted to go to college, but there was no money for it, so she had to content herself with her high school diploma.

I remember stories told to me by her sister, who would explain to me that when they were kids and their mom made all their clothes, that my grandma always had to have items that matched - nothing could appear haphazard or she would go to pieces. Once my great-grandmother made two dresses: one in pink and one in blue, and laid them out for the two girls to choose. My grandma broke down crying at the thought of having to wear the blue dress because, traditionally, blue was for boys. Mind you, no one was saying "you have to wear this" - it was simply the thought of having to wear the blue dress that upset her.

So, yeah, that's at least one small insight into how my Grandmother lived - she did the best she did with what she had and was considered a very difficult woman, but I loved her.

In abject poverty and misery, most likely.

people with feeble minds were seen as simple fools and they were not victimized. they were not thought to pose any danger.

people who had equal intellects to average people, but who did not conform in a behavioral way to the expectations of their society, were considered conspicuous and fodder for suspicion

people who seemed smarter to everyone than their own impression of themselves, and who refrained from "laying it all on the line", could be in jeopardy of the accusation of witchcraft. trial by ordeal. phhhhhhh....

i like this song which strikes a chord in me. i would like old hattie the swamp witch i am sure.
there is much sense in the lyrics of this song and the arrangement and composition as i have determined.
it is way best to not look at the video at all. just look away and hear the song.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA8ULJoEShk[/youtube]

While I think this was decidedly true in many cases, I think also that, because people had less access to larger society than we do, there was less of a need to conform and oddities may have been tolerated more, not less.

Case in point: if you think further back than Einstein and Temple Grandin, you can find quite a lot of people who must have been on the spectrum...or older fictional stories about spectrum-types. For instance, Sherlock Holmes is most certainly an AS type - based on a real person who was also most certainly an AS type - and people tolerated him. Socrates was another one. Not everyone who was considered "odd" was a savant - take a look at this list: http://listverse.com/2009/03/15/10-incr ... ic-people/

There's also a lot of stories about families who "kept" a disabled family member at home - think of Hellen Keller (yes, she wasn't autistic, but she wasn't locked up, either.) We read the horror stories of the insane asylums in the 18th and 19th century, and we read about witchunts and other horrible ways of dealing with the mentally ill - but every once in a while, you do read a story about the "childlike" person living at home with their parents, or a "bookworm" or "weakling" that is treated with compassion and protected rather than jostled out into the world.

I think that during any time in history, there is probably some range of compassion and understanding, or let's face it - none of these genetically-related disorders would be around.

This is an interesting discussion: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/sho ... p?t=329760

In the past we would have been seers, shaman, nuns, bards, saints, and patronized artists and poets... without any expectation to conform to neurotypical standards. We did quite well, I think.

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Agreed.

The traits that are looked for in potential novice shaman are eccentricities such as 'being off in their own world', social isolation, unusual depth of insight, ability to enter a trance like state ... sound like anyone you know?

Cannibals