The aspie worldview...

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I would never think such a thing. It took me years of therapy to get to where I am today. Many people don't have that.

I apologize for misinterpreting you. Its just a sensitive nerve for me. I'm happy that therapy has worked for you.

Don't worry about it. I wasn't being very clear.

I personally see nt's as a pathetic sheepflock, who fears thinking for themselves.

One can be honest and incorrect.

I think most people are good, deep down. I also think some Aspies might have tainted view because of their experiences, like you mentioned. That can be the case for NTs as well.

I think people are good but EASILY INFLUENCED. I don't think too many people are born rotten but they could easily be swayed, under the right circumstances.

I don't think autistic people are immune to groupthink.

At least I am.

i find this a curious discussion because of the disparity between my non-autistic world view and the world view of the only adult autistic i know "irl", my SO. i have always been a happy person and had a very positive view of people and the world, whereas his view is quite dark and negative, especially concerning certain subsets of the population. he often points out, completely seriously, the inherent maliciousness and evil of women

i tend to think for autistics, at least those like my SO who grew up without autism being a known factor, it may be easier/safer to adopt a negative view of the world. in his eyes, the world is a confusing and crazy place that he cant understand, he cant read the motives behind peoples actions and words, so the safest bet is to assume the world and the people in it are bad. by assuming its bad, you take steps to protect yourself from hurt and evils of others. but i think overall the result is always going to be based upon our inherent personality types colored by life experiences/perceptions.

my autistic son, altho only 4, is a happy child thus far. one of my goals for his life is to maintain a positive experience of the world. if i can help the world make sense for him and help him see the good and positive things in it and people, then i hope the negatives he is bound to experience will be balanced out. i would hate for him to feel the world and people in general are bad things as that must be a very dark and depressing world to live in.

It has to do with multiple negative experiences which can cause a temporary bias. People get frustrated and upset because they think everyone else is better off than they are. Again, it's a matter of perception. Are people really better off, or is it just in the mind of the person who believes they are? If you believe someone is better, to you, they will always be better. In a contest, there can only be one grand prize winner, or a fixed number of grand prize winners determined by whomever is organizing the contest. Everyone who enters the contest wants to win, but do they? Everyone who loses is going to be disappointed, if they wanted to win badly.
But it's impossible for everyone who enters to win the grand prize.
If I wanted to win badly enough and lost, it might make me cynical and bitter toward all contests. If I lose often enough, I might even believe the contests are rigged in favor of others and not of me. I might end up with depression if I dwell on it long enough, convincing myself that people who organize contests must be evil and only organize them to upset the people who lose.

I think it's true that Aspies (or perhaps I should just speak for myself here ) -- I think that I tend to have a set of standards that are quite rigid, and when I see people who fail to be ethical, which is common, I cannot just brush it off, or look at other traits they may have, which might mitigate their bad behavior. I tend to see people as very black-and-white. If someone does something malicious or acts out of jealousy or spite, I can't see past that -- and to be honest I don't really think that I should. I get just as outraged at people who look the other way when they see cruelty as I do at the perpetrators themselves, so I don't want to join the ranks of either.

It's this strong sense of injustice and ethics that creates a perception that many people are untrustworthy, and while it may be maladaptive, it's ingrained and also ethical, and it tends not to be subject to change.

There are a few people I am close to and whom I trust and consider fundamentally good, but my experience out in the world, with professionals and casual acquaintances, has been that there is a lot out there to mistrust.

I see the genesis of this worldview in my daughter and it's breaking my heart. She doesn't forgive...ever. She's a kid and the other kids do and say stupid and mean things. What they say sounds identical to what kids said to me decades ago. And I said to them. In a fit of pique some kid will say, "I don't like you anymore". How many times did I say and hear that as a kid? Lots and lots. I said it. It was said to me. So I know from experience that it means, "I don't like you anymore...until later this afternoon or perhaps tomorrow". But once a kid says it to her, that kid is officially a "bad person" for ever and ever and she gets mad at him or her for attempting to play with her an hour later.

People are fallible and will screw up. I'm trying to teach my daughter to forgive and move on, just as others forgive her (although she does not see that others have forgiven her) but it's really an uphill battle. In her eyes, once people fall from grace they are in the gutter forever. I see this starting in her as a kid. I read these posts and feel just sick at heart to see that it's likely to solidify into a bleak and painful and cold, dark view of the world. I don't know how to teach forgiveness.

I would be happy to forgive someone if they were to acknowledge they did something hurtful and attempted to make amends, I would be thrilled. But that almost never happens. Maybe you could help her by teaching her how to ask for an apology. As grating as it is, the best way to ask for an apology is to offer one up first. If that is not something she can stomach, maybe she could say something that isn't an admission of wrongdoing but just an expression of her feelings, something like, "I'm sorry that you don't want to be my friend anymore. I wanted us to be friends and I hope we can patch things up."

Thank you for the idea. I will try that.

Part of the problem is that really scary kinds of people are attracted to being around autistic people and other people they consider gullible. Including sociopaths. So we see a higher than average amount of such people.

Another part of the problem is essentially ableism. People who are higher in any power structure than another sort of person, tend to be corrupted by that position and to form conscious and unconscious viewpoints towards those that seem 'lesser', that can be absolutely appalling. You will find this with men and sexism, white people and racism, etc. Even those who think that they are decent to others, will have these viewpoints embedded somewhere in their head. So lots of people can be wonderful and loving to each other, but to someone 'lesser' they can both consciously and unconsciously do things that are harmful. It is way easier to see such things from the position of lesser privilege than the position of more privilege, whatever it may be. And this is all people who have bits of these things in them, and it can be quite ugly.

None of that means that the world is inherently bleak and dismal. But there are certainly bleak and dismal aspects of it, and that's one of them. There are also really good parts of the world despite all this, and my view of the world is not that it's some horrible bleak dismal place.

Additionally, there are autistic people who feel they are superior to nonautistic people, and talk about nonautistic people in some terrible and inaccurate ways. The only good thing about them is that they'll never have enough power in the world to force such views on everyone the way the opposite view (which describes autistic people in the bleak and horrible ways that some autistic people describe nonautistic people) is now forced on us. Think about how autistic people are normally described, it's the same phenomenon just reversed. I really can't stand what I call autistic supremacy -- the view that autistic people are superior and detached and more intelligent and logical and stuff, and that nonautistic people are inferior and etc. There are things autistic people do better than nonautistic people but that is not one of them. And I am certainly nothing like the stereotypical aspie-supremacist view of what autistic people are any more than I am like the standard nonautistic-supremacist (i.e. normal society) view of what autistic people are.

We're not immune to groupthink. Some people say they are, but various actions say they're not. We're just less likely to be in groups. Once we get into groups, we have groupthink.