Asperger's Love Physical Reality

Asperger types are described as incapable of being social or emotional, but this is a misunderstanding on the part of the social majority. Unlike standard social interaction, which is pro forma and fleeting, successful Asperger relationships are founded on intellectual give-and-take and may take long periods of time to develop. The focus is on shared interests rather than shared emotions. Honesty and trustworthiness are prime requirements and these personal characteristics are non negotiable, hence Aspersers people may have few friends. Being social for the sake of being social holds little to no appeal; an Asperger individual may put in an appearance at a gathering if necessary, but then vanish as quickly as possible. Constructing and maintaining a socially acceptable charade, especially in which one has no interest, is exhausting. Many of us don’t bother – which earns us the wrath of the socially addicted.

The Asperger ability to experience deep emotional attachments to animals, objects, equations, theories, and classes of things like transportation, machines, space exploration or numbers may seem improbable or impossible to neurotypicals, but it’s true. Some, like myself, feel that a specific landscape, or rock formation, or river, or mountain range – indeed the whole of nature’s manifestations, ‘speak to us’ emotionally or spiritually. This intense feeling of being embedded in the environment is possibly what animism was originally, before this intense identification became blurred with the magical fear that active spirits, which are capable of conscious acts of good and evil, interfere with human lives. The Asperger’s prime attachment is to physical reality and not to a manmade ‘supernatural’ dimension. 

It takes time for the Asperger ‘get to know you’ process to work and most social people just don’t have the time or interest to wait, or to participate in growing a relationship. Asperger individuals often don’t ‘get’ that the neurotypical person isn’t interested in getting to know them or anyone else for that matter. We do see that the social person wants immediate superficial attention. Status seeking neurotypicals are out to ‘score a hit’ and the less invested in time and sincerity the better. We instinctively don’t like this shallow treatment of human beings.

Surprisingly, what neurotypicals fail to understand is that permission to lie is apportioned according to one’s location on the pyramid, with those in power having almost unlimited sanction to lie without consequence. No one should be surprised therefore by rampant social and economic inequality, but amazingly, supposedly socially savvy neurotypicals don’t have a clue. It is a given that politicians lie to get elected and then promptly do whatever their funders have paid them to do. This has been happening election after election since politics (a social endeavor) appeared, and yet neurotypicals never catch on.

One way for an Asperger to cope with the social charade is to imagine that each and every neurotypical is running for an office – even if it’s a tiny niche somewhere in the vast social hierarchy, and that each exchange with another person is only a campaign stop. Unless you have (relative) wealth or power, you aren’t worth a second handshake.