Cold-heartedness

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Hmm. The people you mentioned have no emotional signifance oin my life. They are utterly irrelevant to my existence. To be honest I wouldn't mind if Richard Dawkins kicked the bucket. I hate those snotty British types.

So Princess Diana is more important to you than world-renowned intellectuals such as Chomsky and Dawkins who are some of the most influential people alive. Regardless of his religious beliefs, Dawkins is an important evolutionary biologist and has contributed more to human knowledge than someone like Princess Diana ever could.

Isn't wishing harm on others a very unChristian thing to do? I may not share your opinions or like your attitudes but I would never be happy if you died.

Whatever, man. Let's not get nasty.

I'm the opposite.

I'm all sweet and charming and nice and open and loving and caring and compassionate in the eyes of people who don't see my autistic (got told all that so far), but in truth, I haven't yet noticed any intuitive compassion nor anything else.

If someone dies, I react to it. It's a self-righteous reaction, because I'm angry and sad that I cannot make the world any way I want to and a death means I'm not perfect and can't do perfect. So I'm really sorry for the life they cannot life due to their death that I don't want in my world.

I think that if I can live, others should too, because it's the only logical thing ever since I realised other people are real. I go by the rule: I'm a person and I want, others are people so they might want to.

Apparently I do a very good job.

If somebody talks to me and catches me non-'weird' and non-'scary' (= not behaving autistic), they say I'm the sweetest person they know.

Which so blows me away. If I can do that without compassion, why are compassionate-able people generally nasty and mean and hurt others?

The Golden Rule is the one thing no one seems to remember. For those of us who are non-religious, the Golden Rule is perhaps the only teaching of Jesus Christ applicable to everyone regardless of their faith or the lack thereof. Another word for for the Golden Rule is reciprocity. It's great because you can practise it and not have to be a religious person.

To each according to his needs, from each according to his means ?

Something like this happened to me. The girl that I was flerting said " you are the coldest people that I ever met" . And she speaking was much more enfatic than just those words. I gave up from her, but I still don't understand why she said it, she couldn't give me a straight answer. In my mind I was a very gentle guy, not cold at all.

- BTW, didn't care about Diana...

What do you mean by that? I don't get it.

I had a good babyhood, so I had the foundation of love. I felt all the primitive emotions--anger, fear, sadness. I taught myself the rest.

The problem of not caring about people one doesn't know is a real dilemma for the vast majority of people with Asperger's, including myself. But to me, knowing someone through a book counts. That is my window on the world. Sometimes I want to tell people how much I think many aspies would benefit from some sort of "literature therapy," but I don't want to be pounded on by aspies who would rather die than read fiction.

I started with books. Books are safe. Books aren't needy, screechy, or overbearing (unless they're by Ayn Rand ). They teach so much and require little more than patience. Then I moved onto the advanced levels of the Game of Human Emotions; actual people, that is*.

Of course I can't care for everybody on earth, although I wish all nice and smart people well. That's humanly impossible. I care about the following:

1. People I know personally
2. People in fiction and nonfiction
3. People I don't know but identify with somehow (like that disabled girl who just starved to death)

I apply the lessons learned with #2 to the others, see? I don't think I'm cold.

*I, for unknown reasons, never went the through the "animal phase" of learning to interact.

I personally don't think that I'm a cold person. My thinking is all black and white and I always have to have things a certain way. No one has ever told me that I'm a cold person. Dawn

Now that I think of it, I felt nothing when the twin towers went down. I knew it was a terrible thing to do, and I was respectful. That's all I thought anybody else was feeling. Until I started this topic, I've never actually considered that others experienced these strong emotions when tragedies happen. That doesn't mean I'm cold. I think maybe I've just been considered as such because I don't always know how the things I say will make others feel.

I am like this, if a person does not interest me, even if they are "cool" & "nice" & I "like" I feel no point in wasting my time on them. It usually becomes very stressful to me to try to maintain a relationship past the point that I realize this. I have done this to "friends", or rather people who think I am thier friends when I am still deciding whether I am interested in knowing them better. And strangers I tend to cut off automatically if they aren't interesting, I dont even register there faces, I certainly can not remember them.

My mother and I have disagreements along these lines. She says that I can be friends with anyone who is nice and shares some sort of experience with me (like going to the same school). I can only imagine being friends with people who share my interests. My mother also says that the key to a good conversation is letting the other person talk about themselves, but I believe that the only good conversations occur when both parties are and consider themselves equal.

I would not go so far as to call people who do not have information I seek as "useless to me." It's very bleeding-heart-liberal of me to say this, but I have read too many books about the Nazis to allow myself to think anyone is useless or worthless. That sort of thinking keeps people from helping those in need ("it's not my problem!") It can also justify outright cruelty. If somebody's worthless to you, you can treat them however you want*.

Everyone gravitates toward their own type. That is human behavior. But one should not just throw out everybody else. When you see a tragedy on the news, you don't have to try to feel the same emotions the people involved, but it is the honorable thing to acknowledge that those people are feeling strong emotions. I am not the only being in the universe who has emotions, and neither are you. The more you try to make yourself into a windowless monad, the colder you will appear. You may even become truly cold. If you never consider anyone else's feelings, you run about a 90% chance of becoming a bully.

*I AM NOT COMPARING ANYONE TO A NAZI THIS IS JUST MY PERSPECTIVE ON THIS NOBODY INVOKE GODWIN'S LAW!

It's nice to be important, but it's important to be nice.

I don't know if I'm a nice guy naturally, or because of my upbringing.

I was going to say the same about the twin towers but I learned that people goes nasty to me when I use this example... Thanks for mentioning it.

I remember talking about, but mostly becuz I thought I should and also as an excuse to try to talk to someone I wanted to know, other than that I was only very upset & worried becuz I knew most of my friends/my brothers were planning to join the army after highschool at that time & becuz they feel like extensions of me I couldnt imagine myself without them & that scared me, so I cried. Other than that, I dont understand why people are so mad? Americans kill people in other countries all the time. And a lot more than they managed to. Americans martyred themselves. I think it was pretty ugly reaction.