About Aspergers and my world view at 25.

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I wrote the following text at 6am whilst on holiday in France. If you get past the first paragraph it gets interesting.

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Does every mature person want the same things? The human race is a unique kind of animal in the world. We are a new species, but; I would argue one that suffers greatly from having been domesticated. My interpretation of the word domestication is ‘animal that lives in the home’, but it goes further than that. Modern domestication’s about transforming a creature, or a person into something more useful to other humans. It’s about being dependant on other humans, and on the system for our food, drink, shelter, energy and almost everything else. The worst part of domestication is others mastery over our minds. Ever since the dawn of agriculture it’s been necessary to ‘educate’ people, through slavery or serfdom into performing tasks in order to advance the cause of humanity, the continuous multiplication of our species, or parts of our species. Increasing our number seems to be the one task human’s excel at, and we now have, within a short space of time, 7 billion people and our numbers are rising exponentially.

The human population should be limited by how much food we have; or by other factors, but we’ve learned to used oil and other non-renewable resources to temporarily extend our population potential to previously unimaginable levels at the expense of our long term survival odds.

Which brings be back to my original question, does every person want the same things: Control, wealth, food, shelter, love, friendship, family, mental stimulation, physical stimulation and to fulfil our bodily desires?

I was born with mild Asperger’s, dyspraxia and mild dyslexia. Whilst I’ve struggled in the past to fulfil everything that’s been expected of me, I’ve largely overcome many of the challenges I’ve faced achieving a 2:1 degree after years of struggling. Although I’m able to fulfil many difficult and technical advanced tasks in academics, computing and a range of other subjects, I still find it hard to socialise. Out of my list above, I’m still struggling to find love, friendship, and the wealth that follows from these activities. It seems strange, that despite spending 17 years of my short life in education it’s the innate abilities others take for granted that still elude me.

They say normal, experienced drivers make terrible driving instructors. Many take their driving skills for granted, and feel driving’s as easy as walking. When asked how they drive many will say that it’s almost instinctive: they don’t have to think about it; it just comes naturally. Many people with Asperger’s have the same difficulty as a learner driver, but normally without a highway code to follow.

Socialising problems have caused me to lose jobs by performing badly in job interviews, have made it difficult to have more than a few close friends and has made it harder to build loving relationships outside of my family. I know other people face similar problems; but it does make me wonder: if everybody wants love, friendship and enough money to live on, isn’t it tragic if they don’t achieve that?

The top computer programmers in the world have struggled for years to create a program that can fool a person into thinking it’s also a person, so what hope do I have when I have to deal with, on a daily basis, the far more complex social structures that are an integral part of every day life? I’ve been thinking of taking acting classes to better perfect those social masks we all put on to fit in. Perhaps one day I’ll be the life of the party, the star in that job interview and may finally find the words to express how much I love and value the person I’m with.

Friendship, along with our impact on the planet, economics, human history and the reason we are here; should really be taught in schools for those of us who aren’t blessed with what most take for granted. I initially talked about the domestication of man, and I would like to finish with a sobering thought; have you noticed how damaged many people are? They may hide it under social barriers, but really when you get down to it most people seem slightly insane; No other creature would spend its life playing computer games killing imaginary creatures for thousands of hours, spending its life in a building performing the same almost pointless tasks over and over, or clinging rigidly to what it thinks is control through its habits and customs.

There’s the body deforming mind-set that makes us believe we are ugly; almost all women and most men worry they are. Television that lets us pretend we have friends, even though the actors have never met us. There are so many problems with substance abuse, alcoholism, obsessive compulsive behaviours and stress: bad diet, obesity, anorexia, physical and mental problems: social anxiety disorders and depression. Some of these mental problem’s manifest into physical problems; loneliness has proven links with cancers, anxiety with weight problems and general bad health, depression can shorten people’s lives. Feelings of inadequacy, or being worthless, or being stupid or talentless or ill-educated or poor have blighted so many people’s lives. Our water’s polluted with industrial and hormonal by-products; our food’s bleached, sterilised, mashed up and sugar-coated, our air’s polluted with car and other pollutions that are proven to reduce lung capacity by 10% (if you live next to a road);

The human being is a wonderful hunter-gather species forced into domestic servitude, and we are suffering massively from it. Most people never fully recover from being forced through the school system. The artificial construction of scarcity drives people to fight, all their lives, to make money because we have a deep down fear of going without. Television, advertising and modern life aim to shape us in ways we don’t even realise and at the centre of it all are some deeply damage people who have lost their traditions and have become no more fortunate that an intensively bread pig suffering in a monstrous battery farm.
Even if you disagree; it seems obvious that we are being physically and mentally harmed by this monstrous society we have helped create; and at its heart is the biggest fear; that we have no real control over our lives because that control has been taken away from us through being domesticated.

In short: This monstrous thing, this global empire the ‘developed’ nations are building is destroying the planet and it’s destroying us! You can change how you live and improve the world just by reading, and thinking and fighting to make this world better. Destroy your domestication by growing food, making your own goods, by reading books, buying locally and by making your own entertainment: Overcome these monstrous social superstructures by being kind and compassionate to all creatures and every one of your fellow human beings. Ignore the laws, and rules you know to be unjust and fight for those without a voice, if we all treated others how we would like to be treated imagine how much better the world would be. Rebuild your relationship with lover-earth: most people have lost the connection to the world our ancestors lived with. Try not to be greedy and share what you have when you can: love yourself and others, live and be free. Remember that making friends is the most important thing in life; take it from someone who struggles. All good things in life flow from love, not from competition, governments, acquisition or the latest thing in those adverts.

-David Beck
dwbeck.com

Very interesting read. To answer your question, no, I don't think everyone necessarily wants the same things. But we are often told that we do, and for the most part, this is true. We cannot escape our biological programming, after all.

Also, while I find your comparison of human society to that of animal domestication very interesting, I feel that it is a false equivalence. I've never heard of a case where an animal was domesticated entirely for its own good; the dominant party party always benefits in some way. Humans may be domesticated, but we control both the dominant and submissive sides of that arrangement, and obtain the costs and benefits from both. That is a very different type of relationship in comparison to human on animal domestication.

I also find your mention of video game addiction interesting as well. I constantly hear people say how they can't possibly understand how people can devote so much time and energy towards virtual games. Personally, I can empathize with that course of action perfectly, and I don't understand how other people don't understand it. The whole point of human society if to progressively remove the restrictions of the natural world, to ever increase our independence from our circumstances. Video games are a realm in which we decide which natural rules we shall keep and which we shall discard, a world entirely of our creation, created specifically to fulfill our needs and desires. Is it any wonder that some people would be drawn to this realm to the point of addiction?