The aspie worldview...

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I'm just sharing something here that I've been having a hard time with.

It seems like a lot of posts by people on the spectrum have a certain vibe. All these stories of a cold machiavellian world, irrationally cruel and animalistic, filled with pecking orders, herd behavior, and empty duplicitous people... It scares and saddens me and sometimes I don't know what to think. I don't want to believe it's all true but at the same time I know what an honest bunch you folks are. Are you holding up the lantern to a world that is rotten at it's core? Is this view the product of genuine insight into human nature through our unbiased and logical eyes? Are all the NTs who talk about love and compassion afraid to honestly reveal how conditional those items are? Or is this view tainted by a bias of negative experience due to our disability? I'm honestly confused and don't know what to think. I'd like to believe there are good people in the world but sometimes it's hard.

Anyways... I feel like I have more to say but I'm too tired right now. Have to go to bed. Ugh.

Your question is compelling. In certain respects, I think you are correct in your assessment. At times I do regard NTs, as a totality, as brutishly judgmental and punishing. Intellectually, I can reason this is not true but nevertheless provocative.

I think mindblindness, marked by our lack of mirror neurons, does project societal dark urges which is a reflection upon the NT world where we are autonomous. I have to belive, or make myself believe, the world is not wholly this way. This is why I actively look for better and try to ignore the extraneous although that means disregarding certain unscrupulous individuals and superficiality. One cannot ignore all bad intentions though or we would far more vulnerable, as Autists, than we already are.

I sometimes hate that I cannot sense those NT bad intentions and comcommitant negative emotions, such as jealousy, which is an emotion I do not have and cannot really know except vicariously. I cannot see them coming but they can leave a bloody trail.

marshall, you asked the question of a lifetime....at the risk of being too philosophical, this might be why Autism exists. We are like the laboratory control.

I've gone back and forth over this one, and I've ultimately settled into the belief that your world view is always going to be colored by your experiences and what you are determined to get out of life.

Life is what you make of it, the rest is just background noise.

I am saddened by those that hold to the worldview you describe, and yes, I sense it too. The vast majority of non-autistic people I have encountered in my life have been caring and supportive of me. I am sorry for those who believe that humanity is all, or even mostly, bad toward people on the spectrum. If you give people a chance, it's definitely not always the case.

i'll speak from experience here, as my father is highly likely to be on the spectrum and i feel that i've done this also

personally i think that the tendency to "rant" about the world and about humanity's dark side is an effect of hyper-focusing on detail. it's not really a valid perspective since so heavily generalized, but still based on experience and factual information. i think this tendency induces the formation of a rigid set of standards which are seen as "rare" by the individual. the standards are based on view of the world that largely fails to be ethical. i think this may also be influenced by the very abstract sense of self that can also be developed, speculated by Tony Attwood to be mostly due to impairments in theory of mind. the self then becomes defined by its core different-ness, and empowered by something it views to be a unique perspective that sees the wrong of the world in a way that most cannot due to the size of their greedy ego.

My immediate response to the phrase "the Aspie worldview" was the question, "Which Aspie?"

I think we get a lot of it here because people who are upset that they have AS or that they are being mistreated because they have AS are more likely to seek out online forums where AS is discussed.

I am living on a farm, and I guess what I see on the farm is the same pecking order I see in humans. Humans are an ape after all....

For example, Daisy and Stuart, goats, were on another farm. We had Buttercup and the 3 teenage girl goats. Buttercup would be a bit heavy-handed with these goats- one of them was her daughter, and the 2 that werent hers would get butted aside. Buttercup and her daughter would get the best grain and hay.

We had to separate Buttercup from the 3 girls, and put her with Stuart and Daisy, as Buttercup and Daisy are both pregnant. Now the situation is much different, as Daisy is dominant over Buttercup and butts her away from the grain. Buttercup now looks like a sad figure at feeding time and i have to feed her separately with her own bucket, and make sure there are 3 or 4 lots of hay as if there was only one or 2 she would have to wait until Daisy and Stuart had finished eating.

What I see in the human race is pretty much what I described above. The battle between the haves and the have nots play themselves out every day in animal herds too.

So I guess we people with AS are in a way separate from the human race and we see this sort of stuff play out, and are unsure what is going on. Often we fall victim to these pecking orders.

But another thing that i would like to point out is that pecking orders can establish themselves in autistic communities too. There are often leaders- they tend to be people who are seen to have more knowledge, or people who are more dominant and socially savvy. Though the hierachies are much looser and people are not as enthusiastic about fighting for and keeping their place, as NTs, as people with autism tend to have a lack of interest in hierachical social systems.

Also, some people with AS have been the bottom dog for their entire lives, and know nothing else. One of the reasons why we dont jostle for position is that a very long time ago we realised we didnt know how to jostle, and so stopped trying.