IMHO The Ultimate Question

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If an "NT" was raised in an autistic society, would he or she be socially impaired within said autistic society?

for sure they would feel out of place like we do now. Nt's are just as clueless about my body language and thoughts as i am about theirs, maybe even more so since they have not had to adapt to autistic frame of reference like people on the spectrum are forced to learn everything about society.

Not sure. In some ways, yes, but in other ways... there's more to autism than just cultural differences.

They'd be diagnosed with Neurotypical Syndrome

I thought body language was something you learn. How could they know how to interact if no one taught them? Are NTs born with it?

Yes, that's the idea. We are the ones who lack instinctual social habits so I imagine a NT raised in an AS society would just be very confused.

The ultimate question is "why?"

No matter how many questions you answer, you can still ask, "WHY?"

Well why should I ask the question why? That's why I think it's a stupid question. This question can be used to determine whether or not Autism is really at all a defect and if normal people are really the defective ones.

Before you debate that, shouldn't it be debated whether an autistic society could hold together.

I'm fairly new here, maybe it has?

Said NT's, according to the (A) DSM, be diagnosable with a PVDD -- Pervasive Verbal Developmental Disorder. "They just use us too many gyrations to get the point across."

It's a part of the ultimate question, or is at least a penultimate question. Since we have not had a chance to attempt to create an autistic society there is no way to figure out if it could be stable at the present time.

I think so. NTs (and I am one) have a need for social contact that is more intense and pervasive than autistic people. NTs with no social contact will actually fall apart mentally, sometimes to the point of insanity (which is why solitary confinement is considered such a fearsome punishment for prisoners). NTs with limited social contact don't go insane but do experience depression and other psychological problems. An NT in a majority-autistic society would probably get limited social contact- the limitation being that the autistic majority would tire of any given social contact with the NT considerably faster than the NT would.

The symptoms seen by (autistic) psychiatrist and considered pathological would be:

1)depression (already seen commonly in NTs with limited social contact)

2)clinginess ("over attachment disorder")

3)some variant of ADHD, which is how it would be characterized when a naturally very extroverted NT tried to ease the pain of loneliness by flitting from one autistic person to the next so that they had constant social interaction that would necessarily be provided by an extremely large number of people (anybody who tried to satisfy their social needs with just a few people would have over-attachement disorder)

Last edited by Janissy on 11 Dec 2011, 6:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Yes, because the norm would be autistic behaviour.

NTs learn body language but it is literally never explicitly taught. It is picked up by combining observation with context. So I don't think this would be an actual impairment. The reason why NTs are currently unable to read autistic body language is because it is different from NT body language- the one they (we- I am NT) already know. It is the same as traveling to a country where you don;t speak the language. If you are raised there, you learn it automatically.

For what I think would be the actual social impairment, see my above post.

I agree, this is what I was thinking but I was having trouble putting it into words.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIhvXmjHSrQ[/youtube]