How learning systems theory finally made me stop wondering whether I was really autistic, and taught me how to live better in the world of neurotypicals.
I’m Michael, and I’m a high-functioning autistic person.
My awareness of this has been incremental and extremely slow. Due to a lack of early intervention by my parents and teachers I was never assessed as a child, and as an adult who has managed (by and large) to overcome the many obstacles life has thrown at me, learning each time how to do things better, I am certain that I would no longer qualify for a formal diagnosis. Because of this, I have found myself constantly wondering over the past seven or eight years whether I’m “really autistic.” This uncertainty has weighed heavily, but now that uncertainty has disappeared.
I mean, sure, I plucked at my eyelashes until they were all gone when I was ten, something that should have provoked at least some minor reaction from the adults in my life. I suffer from chronic anxiety and used to write out whole scripts before making a seemingly casual phone call to a schoolfriend. I’m obsessed with the patterns in music, and I can get completely lost in a particularly well-executed percussion arrangement. I find eye contact difficult, unless someone’s eyes are either dark brown or black. I cannot read faces during conversation, although I can when I am free to devote my whole attention to expressions. But none of these things and more were enough to fully convince me that I was on the spectrum, mostly because I am intelligent, resourceful, and emotionally resilient, and have always managed to harvest my many social failures for more information on how to do things better next time. I am very good at social masking; possibly too good. I often get in trouble because people simply can’t believe that I really am on the spectrum, and as such never make allowances when things go wrong.
The reason for my uncertainty was that, so far as I could tell, no single autistic trait is common to all people on the spectrum, and to further complicate things, some neurotypicals exhibit autistic traits that are not connected with actual autism. At times I have merely thought myself broken in some undefinable way, unable to engage properly with the world of neurotypicals, but forever an outsider amongst people “really” on the autistic spectrum. For the longest time I felt that I had no home, socially speaking. But a chance occurrence changed my thinking. I wanted to share it will you all, on the off-chance that it might help someone.
A few years ago, I was introduced to “systems theory” whilst studying for a PhD that I dropped out of shortly after. However, despite terminating my studies, I grew increasingly interested in systems theory, as I began to see a greater and greater number of manifestations of the systems that lie behind the everyday as I went about my life. It is no exaggeration to say that it has completely transformed how I see the world. Whilst it would be a very long essay indeed if I started to recount the many examples in my head, I would like to focus on one in particular, as it is the one that allowed me to cast off all of my uncertainty regarding whether or not I am autistic, and has given me a new ability to navigate my way through the often-confusing world of ‘normal people’.
The Social Gestalt
As I have said before, it is widely believed that there is no one autistic trait that is present in all autistic people, and this is what makes identifying autism, particularly in high-functioning adults who did not benefit from childhood assessment, so difficult to pinpoint. I beg to differ.
Once I had started to view groups of neurotypicals in social settings, be it friendship groups, corporate environments or even ad-hoc gatherings of half-strangers through the lens of systems theory, I began to see what it is that neurotypicals do that makes them so sociable, so effortlessly ‘normal’. This process, which is unconscious, leads to the formation of what I call the ‘social gestalt.’ It is my hypothesis that every neurotypical engages in the social gestalt (unless they are impaired in some other way, such as having a learning disability, certain mental illnesses, or are being subjected to collectivized unconscious or conscious bias, such as being a black person in a room full of white supremacists) via sustained unconsciously-directed behaviour that creates a ‘holding pattern’ of improvised cultural norms. In a corporate setting, or a nuclear family, this holding pattern creates highly persistent norms, although changes in staff, divorce, deaths and so on can result in adjustments over time. During temporary interactions of groups of relative strangers, these holding patterns are constructed very quickly and dissipate just as quickly when they are no longer needed. The social gestalt is a dynamic creature and adapts its nature in real-time as required.
From my observations, no autistic person is capable of unconscious engagement with the social gestalt. They can attempt conscious engagement with it, but as with many highly sensitive emergent systems, even small deviations can create large, cumulative and often system-wide imbalances. Wherever an autistic person has found a niche in a social gestalt, this is almost always resultant from benevolent input from a neurotypical; in rarer cases, it is pure luck. We simply cannot do it on our own, and no, competence is not enough by itself to result in acceptance, even where the purported primary goal of a particular gestalt is productive output. Neurotypicals usually prefer a friendly incompetent to an effective oddball. Such is life.
What does this mean for autistic people?
If there’s one basic tenet that systems theory supports, it is that a pattern that manifests at one scale will also manifest at another; maybe even at all possible scales. Processes that can be observed inside galaxies have also been observed inside individual cells. Thus, I am not being poetic when I say that social gestalts are organisms, their patterns playing out in ways that resemble the functions and processes of an individual physical body for as long as the gestalt remains active. This observation is key to understanding and engaging with the social gestalt. Note well.
Sadly, many autistic people (myself included, more than once) will have experienced being constructively dismissed from a job despite being more than competent at it. To the autistic person this is highly traumatic – we cannot understand why logic cannot protect us from our hostile colleagues. We cannot see why reason has no effect.
Understand that, whilst an autistic person is only ever themselves, a neurotypical is capable of being two things: firstly, themselves; secondly, an organ in one or more social gestalt entities (sometimes even at the same time). The neurotypical is rarely if ever aware of this.
Consider the subordinate bully in a friendship group of bullies – the one who’s obnoxious in the presence of their dominant friends, but perfectly agreeable on their own. In this case, the head bully (the one with the most influence in determining the overall nature of the social gestalt) radiates a kind of proximity-based social contagion that hijacks the neurotypical’s brain temporarily, turning it to the service of the gestalt by overriding its individual behavioural and cognitive patterns. On the very largest scales, social contagions can cause wars by producing very hostile gestalts. I believe that Nazi Germany is an excellent example of this.
The autistic person is absolutely right to fear the neurotypical tendency to form these collective consciousnesses, as they are frequently turned against us. Nevertheless, I fully accept that they can also be beneficial: watching a benevolent social gestalt in action is like watching a latter-day miracle unfold, made all the more fascinating by the fact that none of its constituent parts are even remotely aware of what is going on.
The mistake that autistic people tend to make when engaging with a social gestalt is not engaging with the social gestalt; instead, we have a tendency to engage with the individuals operating within the gestalt as if they are entirely independent. This, as many of us have no doubt already worked out, is futile. Whilst it may seem in these situations that we are dealing with individuals who have taken leave of their logic, what we are really experiencing is gestalt logic, which is hugely different from individual logic. It is only by engaging with this gestalt logic, as neurotypicals do unconsciously, that we can begin to improve our personal outcomes.
Engaging with the collective logic of the social gestalt
Take the following example. Your manager, who has made no attempt to understand you as an individual, has decided that you have behaved inappropriately in the workplace, but will not tell you why in overt terms. This is clearly unfair. Experience tells you, however, that pointing out this unfairness does not work. You are referred to HR for disciplinary; you still don’t know what you are supposed to have done wrong.
You meet with the Head of HR, Susan Smith. She is smartly dressed and superficially friendly. She makes too much eye contact. You try to keep your head, because you know that this is important.
Understand first that you are speaking with an organ of a particular social gestalt that might also be called “So and So Company Ltd.” Susan Smith is also an individual (at least, we assume, some of the time), but you are not meeting with Susan Smith: The Individual. Appealing to Susan Smith as an individual, in these circumstances, is like speaking to someone on the phone after they have hung up. Don’t try to speak to Susan Smith: The Individual. It will get you nowhere.
Who you are speaking to is Susan Smith: The Organ. I like to think of HR departments as being similar to the kidneys: their job is to locate and remove those elements considered toxic to the overall functioning of the body. Susan Smith, in this moment, is exhibiting kidney-like behaviour: she will use this conversation not to hear you out, but to try to identify whether you are toxic to the gestalt entity. If she decides that you are, she will do everything in her power to expel you, fairness be damned. This is gestalt logic: the logic of bodily functions. You can reason with Susan Smith: The Kidney no more effectively than you can reason with your own kidneys. This is neither an analogy nor a metaphor: this is literal truth.
So, how should you deal with Susan: The Kidney, Head of HR?
Forget fairness. Forget logic as you know it. You are dealing with the gestalt, which does not even notice such things.
You will only get through this meeting by presenting yourself as non-toxic to the gestalt entity known as “So and So Company Ltd.” Your primary goal is not to prove that your manager is incorrect, and that you have been wronged; the onus is on you to prove that the entity is better off with you than it is without you. As far as my experiences go, this is achieved by displaying superficial courtesy, submission, and conformity. Competence may be considered a fourth, supplementary ingredient, but it is strictly optional so long as you make sure to get the first three right.
Controlling toxicity levels during engagement with the gestalt
Being submissive, downplaying your competence, and limiting the spontaneous expression of your individual character is likely to make you miserable quite quickly; believe me, I know. Bear in mind that, in a crisis you will have to exhibit very high levels of Courtesy, Submission and Conformity, but as time goes on you can scale these back, so long as you keep track of the ‘toxicity tipping point.’ As is now well known, complex systems invariably contain hidden ‘tipping points,’ whereby even a slowly changing system can exhibit sudden explosive changes once certain conditions are met. The global climate is a highly pertinent example of this, but it is certainly not the only one. It is up to you to analyse the gestalt that you are part of and discover its toxicity tipping point, as far as it relates to you – the point at which the gestalt will become aware of you and attempt to remove you.
For my own part, I have responded to these recent insights by removing myself from corporate gestalts entirely by becoming a freelancer, but I fully recognise that this is not always possible. Should you decide that you must stay within a particular gestalt, you will find that if you can manage to ascend through the ranks, you will become able (as one of the only “organs” conscious of the gestalt) to mould the gestalt’s nature to more closely match your own, making conformity both practically and emotionally less taxing. Freelancing, or creating your own company, is a much quicker way to reach a position of high influence, as you place yourself in a position of maximum influence immediately. In such circumstances, you may even be able to mould your neurotypical employees to make them ‘more autistic.’ But this is pure conjecture.
But wherever you are, I would advise you to become better-acquainted with the gestalt, or gestalts, with which you find yourself interacting. See your colleagues for what they really are: an individual you’ll likely never meet, and an organ you must deal with every day. Become conscious of your gestalt’s structure and processes, and you will greatly improve your chances of fruitful engagements with it.
05 Mar 2020, 10:38 am
