Some are more unequal than others

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I am still thinking about the neglect with which AS are treated. Greatly it's due to ignorance and absolute unthinkability of the condition. A blind person is in a very difficult plight. Not many are really capable of imagine the universe of a blind. This is true, in different ways of many other disabled people. I presume that this problems existed in pre-welfare, pre-industrial, pre-agrarian societies of hunter-gatherers (which still exist somewhere in the planet - in the Amazon). Perhaps an anthropologist could give us some information. I will try myself to find out.
But now? The basic fact is that autism is in most cases invisible. It emerges only when there is a serious difficulty in integrating in the productive (but productive of what really?) machinery. That AS are deprived of the fundamental need to love and be loved is not of great consequence for this kind of society.

I think that the reason why people neglect AS and people with it is because it's not a physical problem. Yes, I know, being blind isn't completely what you'd call physical, but it still is there in the way the person's eyes are closed or them wearing shades. With AS it's different because the physical signs aren't so easily connected, what with obsessions and all that. Because it's different, that's probably what makes others go "Stuff it, I'll just assume this". I say others because even those with AS can be mean to those with AS without knowing it. I should know, I mistreated another student with AS about a year ago (before I became knowledgeable about it, I might add), and I didn't realise he had AS due to my simple thinking. I'm still shameful about it.

I think since the industrial revolution ASDs have become much more noticable.

The world has become more complex but an ASD persons threshold of sensory tolerance probably hasnt change much if at all.

Think about it for a moment.

Today the act of gathering food entails so many complicated procedures to get to and navigate that den of evil known as the grocery store there are cash registers ringing, carts rattling, tinny music playing over the overhead speakers, people squawking into the PA system, annoying clerks telling you where they've hidden what your looking for only after playing verbal chess for a while, the bright painful lights, the colorful packaging everywhere, its just general chaos.

In a tribal hunter-gatherer society you walk down to the berry patch with a basket and pick some off the bushes.. you might have the wind rustling the leaves maybe some birds singing.. and thats it.

If only we could revert to those times for a bit, eh? I was thinking something along those lines when I thought that life in the Stone Age would comparatively more easy for an Aspie than one living now, or at least compared to an NT caveman.

Baron-Cohen and Uta Frith invented the expressions mind-blind ad mentalize. Mind-blind is very effective, like "mentally daltonic" also might be. But tell people that one is blind and you will see a costernated reaction (even if faked). Tell the same people that some one is mind blind and you will meet a blank expression. If you try to explain they will say: "Oh, that's nonsense".

I don't know if life would be better o worse in a hunter-gatherer population. It certainly would be shorter. But we have anyhow overproduction of thrash, armaments, toys (for kids, teens and adults) and, not least, excess of old people (I am one of them) being lonely, barely tolerated and badly assisted. And the goods you use are something you don' know at all how they work (you know only which buttons you have to push, and sometimes not even that), who makes them (Chinese kids in horrible factories)...

I usually explain it with something they can relate to like the little analogy "You know how you can lose your car keys and be looking right at them but not see them? Yeah its like that except all the time".

My problem with reality is that I still have trouble believing in it.

Reality for me has a dreamlike quality. It's not nightmarish, but lacking substance. Rogets'antonyms fore substance: falseness, illusion, make-believe, pretense. It's like a limbus. It's like seing myself from a telescope from Mars. No emotions that I can control. It perhaps a form of self-inflicted anesthesia, to avoid grief, pain, anguish. It's the only defence available.

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When I was very depressed, I felt a bit like the world was a dream. I spent days sorta looking through these two windows on the world, watching a man who behaved like me go round a boring, tedious little life, abusing himself and others for the sake of some kind of feeling.
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Now I don't feel like it's a dream - it's a bit like a comedy. I have this organ they call Mr Brain sitting in my skull, who's developed a great tendency for cynicism and sarcasm; if it was a dream before, it's like a whole string of brief stand-up comedies now. People and animals can be astoundingly amusing, if one merely takes everything they do and say seriously. Literal interpretations coupled to a powerful imagination, would seem to be the cause.

We are not very happy as a result of isolation and difficulty in finding acceptable jobs. These are practical hardships, but weigh terribly also on our psychological survival. Apart from practical life, if these things can be separated (and clearly they cannot) we still have to cope with the tremendous fatigue of “pretending to be normal” in all interactions, put up faces, feigning competence in cases in which you cannot take refuge in a status of invalidity that most people (I would say all) ignore in its implications. You can find a slot where interactions are limited (a librarian, a translator, an editor) but it still happens that you have to call for a plumber if you have a leak in your apartment, a fiscal expert to pay your taxes, a doctor if you are sick. This means that anyway, even if you have a protected job situation, you have to put up with intrusions that may be horribly hard to sustain. And the you have your distant relatives to keep sometime at bay. They think they have some obligations to pay you a visit once in a while and again you have to put up faces, talk of things of no interest for you. Asperger has come to be known in the nineties bur only in specialized circles. I don’t think that all this problems can be solved in the fabric of modern society, where most relationship are based on some form or another of soft or hard predation. This is an open question I don’t have in mind any solution. In the middle ages there were monasteries, and the choice of hermitage was accepted and at some extent compatible with some form of earning a life and protection. Even ritualism which seems to be vital for autistic people, was organized in institutions in the form of prayers, chores, and particular codes of conduct. I am convinced that monasteries, that thrived in Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist religion did not particularly cope with the enhancement of the faith, but with the protections of social misfits.
Now? There are only closed institutions, lunatic asylums clinics for the cases most severe and disrupting of social traffic. Unfortunately there are the sects and organizations revolving around telepreachers who fill the vacuums, without any control of the traditional religions.

I remember an occasion when i was at university. A friend's mother visited and asked me what i wished to be when my course finished.
I studied mathematics, so naturally i replied that i wished to be a monk.
I've never had any faith in any religion; not then and not now.
Your convictions regarding the function of monasteries are sound.

I no longer wish to be a monk; there is too much pleasure to be had from music and movies.
The internet gives me opportunities to use my talent for numbers, so that i have no need to find sociably acceptable employment. I consider myself lucky. If born a hundred years ago, then a monastery would be my best (only) salvation.

Funny you guys say that, because though I happen to LOVE being in nature, I consider my greatest strength is my adaptability in reference to technology...

Have you ever lived a day with no power? no technology? nothing? Its awesome for thought, but it kinda gooooooooooesss reaaaaaaaaaaaall sloooooooooooooow..

Personally I'd like to combine the two, a cabin in the hills outside of town, totally surrounded by nature, but with a good net connection and music studio..


All sounds intrigue me, its most people that I suck at being around..

I know I have not the force to renounce some conforts, especially a warm place in the winter, the media (the news of the BBC, and of course the Web and all that is good of the movies). But, although I am not religious in any of the common traditional forms, still I feel some longing for a life non encumbered by objects and absorbed in some form of ascetic intensity. I am also growing more and more detached from the news, and I feel more fascinated by the growing of a tree or the blossoming of a flower then by the squabbles of Gordon and Tony. In fact I see all of them as only different in their idiocy, as Angela Carter would have put it.
It's odd (or not so much) that this trends to reject mundanity were stronger at such early epochs as 600 o 400 hundreds years A.C. with the Tao and with the Cynics than now with our submersion in gadgets and the increasing total senseless and vulgarity o human enterprises.
No inclination for New Age things. They are part of the delirium.

I believe its completely irrelavent what medium you use, if you can find a place free of material desires and free of the consumerist society, it doesnt matter how.

I get lost in electronic music, but I feel that it has a direct connection with my ancestry, as in the RHYTHYM.

There seems to be an anti-technology trend going around lately, but I bet almost all of us find the greatest joy through the use of technology.

Its just a tool, its not the reason the earth is this way, we are, I'd rather create sounds out of frequencies than have to organise an entire percussive orchestra at my door each day.

Sometimes though I wanna escape and get away from all of it, which is why we have camping!

I like technology as it is, and all it's advancements and all that, but I also find relaxation out in nature to be relaxing. I like staring at the nice flow of a river, and just drifting off into my own world, it's very soothing to me. In fact I often find my best relaxtion to be a combonation of the two; I would probably listen to my MP3 player most of the time while staring at this mystical and enchanting river. Unfortunately, I'm 16, and so I don't have time for that sort of thing due to school! Oh well, I'll have the time when I'm older and writing my story.

Oh, and Paolo, where did you get your Avatar from? What is it of? I'd like it if you would elaborate on it