pack politics

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I know that part of this is aspies supposedly can't read body language/facial expressions well and that can cause problems but another aspect for me is even if I know what is going on I don't want to participate. I was thinking about this while watching Cesar Milan on The Dog Whisperer the other night. You know, the dog pack has the alpha male and female. I have had a lot of trouble with alpha females in my life. I can guarantee if I go into a situation where there is one, I am going to have trouble, most especially if there are minions. The minions cause more trouble than the actual pack leader...they are the ones that do the bullying and behind the scenes stuff. When I was younger I didn't understand why I had trouble, now I understand it completely but I still can't do it. I still have no respect for pecking order and no desire to fall in line. Someone posted something along the same line, about NT being more like dog packs and AS being more like cats, solitary hunters, no pack (except for lions). Does anyone relate to this? It's not just a deficit of knowledge, it's that that behavior feels very untrue to myself and I can't do it. In the middle, before I learned about AS, and after I knew about what I was doing wrong, I tried very hard to fake the behavior but I still couldn't do it right.

If there is a dog pack and there are cats, what is normal?
Do the cats join the dog pack? Not since 1492BC or so!

Don't misunderstand.
Cat might be inappropriate. Do cats ever have packs?
If not, OK, what animal would you say hangs out and plays
chess or video games or reads books? What animals
gather for book club (or whatever its called) at the library?
What animals work together in a lab?

Do dogs go in the library or the lab or "geeky" conventions?

The point is, there are not two or one kind of social society.
There is not a group of cats and dogs anywhere together.
There are other group dynamics also and I haven't named them
but my social net is not "cats and dogs" nor cats nor dogs.

The pecking order is so LORD OF THE FLIES you don't want
to go to that island at all unless you really have do, and then
be sure you really have to, as briefly as possible, as long as
you can be there without getting pecked. I don't even believe
that NTs are all dogs. I am not in a pecking order with them
at all. I don't know of any LOTF islands at all, probably because
I haven't in any way joined or connected to any that may be
around. That would be on the same spectrum as gangs and
stuff. You know what? Lord Of The Flies is one of the names
of the devil! You couldn't pick a worse "social group island"
to go to. Pecking order groups are wholesale rejected by me
as acquaintances. I have "fired my boss" for running a shop
like that once. Seriously, I wasn't just "quitting", I was consciously
rejecting the whole social structure. One other person did the
same before I did, with the same intent. I am under no obligation
in life to be in anything so bad as a certain school was for me that way.
There is nothing I want or need from such groups that I ever have
to submit to pecking. And I never did submit to pecking that I
can remember without somehow disrupting the group itself by
not submitting to pecking but confounding the group (dis)order like
a virus or something. They may have started trouble with me at
first but they then turned on themselves afterward in a few cases I think,
leaving others wondering how that could have happened. Maybe those
dog packs were foaming pit bulls. I said something recently about
psychopaths. Maybe I am talking about something more extreme
than you, but I haven't been in "a cat in a dog pack" since grade school.

One of two things would happen in a workgroup setting like that; I'd either
"fire the boss" (quit) or somehow my nonscalar status would confuse
everyone else's status. (I think nonscalar status is my adaptive response
to situations I didn't understand that way, and may be unique, or may be
typical of everyone who neither understands nor submits to "pecking orders".
I also think that my own nonscalar status adaptation IS interesting and
confusing because people have trouble comparing themselves to me
status-wise).

It reminds be of a certain artificial musical scale that is often compared to
an Escher staircase, where the notes make good melodies but have
ambiguous relative pitch, and if arranged in a circle, and played that way,
sound like they go up and down forever. Shepard's Scale?

i am definitely a cat (and i live with 3 real cats). Like you, i have never felt the need to belong or accepted into a group. i long to be understood and accepted as an individual but that's very hard when i am so different from the rest. social awkwardness leads to exhuastion, so since i do not need to be with people to be happy, i no longer try to be "one of them" - i used to try harder when i was younger but now i am more at ease with myself i guess. i am bossy when in teams and most effective and calm with on my own. this is one of the most noticeable Asperger traits of mine that makes me different from NTs.

I really like the idea of firing people who act like this, i.e taking the active role. I'm so tired of all of this crap. Nothing really is happening in my life. Mainly I am tired of shuck and jive being the main attraction for people to like you or not like you. No one seems to care how dishonest it is at the root. Cats don't shuck and jive. They laugh in your face. I think that is a problem I have had in the past because I think the pecking order stuff is so ridiculous and sheeplike and I didn't hide it. Now I try to hide it but I still don't do it.

I think we have this alpha stuff crammed down our throats as 'the normal order of things', when it's convenient to justify the behavior of an a***hole (person, country, etc), but like valmikesmith says that is about the only time people don't acknowledge we are at the top of the food chain, otherwise that is all you hear.

I'm more cat, than I am dog. I just do my own thing. The human dog pack, is a waste of my time.

I've never liked the whole "pack mentality" thing.
I don't take well to following, or pecking orders. I will not be pecked. I will do my own thing. You can join me if you like, but I will not follow you. If you expect me to follow, I will go in a different direction.

I do, however, know the difference between pecking order in business and in social aspects. And I will pretty much abide by the pecking order in my places of work. Unless there is unfair stuff happening. I have 2 part time jobs. In one of them, I have been there 4 years. The person who has the manager position has been there 1.5 years. I don't really know what my position there is, because the manager asks me before doing things. And they take orders from me when I give them. So the pecking order there is a bit confusing. My other job, I've only been there 6 months, but I take orders. I'm lucky at both places I have the most awesome bosses (My boss of 4 years knows I think and behave on a different dimension and tolerates and encourages that) and I have great people to work with (who tolerate my weirdness, which I try to keep in check while I'm at work, thank goodness I only work part time )

I have never fit into any group on a social level. I hated high school. I did hang out with a group of girls but never understood why they said negative things about each other if you were with them one on one. But if they were all together they were nice to each other. I ended up just hanging out with boys, they were much easier to understand on a social level.

wow, is that what it is... a "need"? I have never thought about it before, that way. I'm like, well it would be nice but it almost never happens so...and I don't have any control over it. do NT see it as a need, like air and water, and they HAVE to control it. Like they have control over it because they believe they do...I'm staring to confuse myself, but anyway.

alana, yes NTs do feel the need to belong, that's why so many youngsters join gangs or dress alike.

Yes, it is absolutely a need. I've felt it strongly all my life and I'm on the nerd edge of NT. This need explains many of the inexplicable things that people do in groups. When I look back at my life and all the various things I used to do to fit into this or that group it just looks so foolish in retrospect. However there is photographic evidence of the punk clothes I wore to fit with punks and the goth clothes I wore to fit with goths and today I wear what get called "mom jeans" to fit with other moms. I don't bend over backwards as I used to do in my youth and I've never changed myself absolutely to fit with a group with no shared values. It was always more subtle: a tweak here, a hairstyle there. Even now I can adapt my style of speech to fit the group. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I have adapted my writing style to fit into WrongPlanet and scaled way back on the figures of speech and extended metaphors I use elsewehere. I'll never really fit but I've tweaked the writing style as I've spent my entire life tweaking this or that to fit here or there.

Well, I think the actual "need" to fit in is in teenagers. Adults want to feel accepted and they do want friends and people to care about them. Sure, there are groups of adults that feel the "need" to fit in, but they are usually the phony, money hungry ones. I have 2 kids in elementary school and I don't see much in the way of parents "needing" to fit in at all. The "cliques" tend to happen for children (few in adults-- such as all the stupid Housewives reality shows).

While I'm use to being excluded with the urges of being accepted and included, I can't help but find it hopeless and idiotic to try and win favorites. I use to think that maybe it was because I knew what it was like to be that victim, to be surrounded by a pack of dogs with no real purpose except to obey and stay in a team. Perhaps another reason is I just don't feel as compelled or motivated as some NTs to climb the social latter in order to be accepted. Based on my observations, it seems it does more damage than good. You got to be ruthless but at the same time manipulative enough to play it two-faced. There's nothing that hurts worse than for someone to be nice in front of your face while stabbing you in the back. I've always been perplexed by these sort of social games people play with eachother. I'm not sure what they're getting out of it exactly except "acceptance" in the form of using.

Nowadays this sort of thing is actually inhibiting growth, technologically.
It makes people not go against anything, even if it is wrong.
That makes me very angry.
Especially because I cannot change it, because I truly think that if that need to fit in and socialize was removed, the world would function much better.
This time I will not go as far as banning all emotions, but that pack mentality seems to be a parasite.

Whenever I had to be in a "pack" setting, school for instance, I was the outsider, but being the outsider wasn't something that I chose to be or even enjoyed being. I tried to impersonate the behavior of NTs in order to be like them but never really got the hang of it and really never was accepted. And so for me the analogy would be that the autistic person is more like the lone wolf (or lone dog) that has been rejected by the pack.

Better for me to be a Dandy, than for me to be a clone.