WHY MANIFESTO?

   

If you want to know about gardening, ask a gardener.
If you want to know about mountain climbing, ask a mountain climber. If you want to know about being Asperger, ask an  Asperger.

The Internet is an ocean of trivia, misinterpretation, hearsay, repeated repeats of out-of-context quotes, pseudoscience, bad interpretations of surveys and studies, and information tailored to sell products and services. The Internet is like the mid-Pacific gyre, a vast floating collection of human products collected by ocean currents into a tangle of debris that must be teased apart and reassembled in order to discover the sources of its content.

The diagnosis known as Asperger Disorder is like the gyre - a collection of sometimes contradictory symptoms and behaviors, both vague and specific, negative and tolerable, treatable, but not treatable. Those individuals who are not diagnosed as children, but as adults, face a dilemma. On one hand the diagnosis is a relief: light bulbs go off and illuminate the mysterious tension in the dialog between the individual and society, but the light is also harsh, falling on failed relationships, on bullying and rejection, and on cherished goals that have receded across the horizon while one was simply trying to survive in an alien world. 

The unshakable feeling remains that the Asperger diagnosis reflects a hidden fact of nature: I am different, fundamentally and irrevocably different, and no diagnosis that claims that the Asperger style of brain processing is defective, simply because we are not socially-obsessed, can change the certainty that we embody an equally valid human type.  

Posted 18 minutes ago by gina rex 

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How to be Socially Normal

It takes years of training and supreme effort on the part of parents and teachers for human infants to be turned into acceptable members of society. The unfinished baby brain requires years of grooming and repetitive instruction to achieve anything like adult behavior. Here is how it's done in schools across America, where life is a one big happy cartoon.  




And here is the result:

 

From "What Do We Mean by 'Normal'?" by Eric Maisel, Ph.D.

"Whole industries grossing billions of dollars are built on the words "normal" and "abnormal" and on the ideas of "well" and "disordered." It is therefore inconceivable that the right thing can be done and that the situation can change. Even right-minded and high-minded mental health professionals can't really conceive of doing away with the current idea of "mental disorder." If they did away with it, what would they have and where would they be? Given that even the best and the brightest in the field are attached to an illegitimate naming game, there is probably no hope for change."

Full article can be read at psychologytoday.com Blog, Nov. 15, 2011

How much talent is wasted because society doesn’t like the package it comes in?

Mental illness and behavioral or cognitive deficiencies are defined, described, and catalogued by self-proclaimed “normal” people and show considerable bias and prejudice against individuals who have an asocial brain. This post begins to explore the hypothesis that the modern social brain developed fairly recently due to the concentration of human populations in village and urban environments. The environmental pressure for humans to "get along" in large groups was new and extreme and drastic behavioral changes were required to accomplish urban culture. A hierarchical social order evolved which was alien to "wild" natural humans who wandered freely in small groups, following water, game and collecting resources along the way.   

The classic pyramid of social power that we are familiar with, and still live by, exemplified by Ancient Egyptian culture, was dominated by the Gods, Pharaoh, and the Priesthood. Selection for individuals (especially females) who became fertile as young as possible, who were childlike and obedient, easily intimidated, dependent, and in a juvenile stage of mental development (magical thinking) produced a population that was easily controlled by coercion and supernatural belief. Magical Thinking remains the default type of brain processing in modern social people; the inability to differentiate between the supernatural fantasy and physical reality is a serious consequence of this arrested juvenile state.  

"Wild" or natural humans, who could not adapt to compressed social environments were driven off, isolated, and systematically exterminated. Very few so-called hunter-gatherer tribes remain, and these are being removed by destruction of habitat, exposure to modern toxic environments and by ‘soul death’ or the destruction of culture that is vital to their psychic and physical well-being. The wild brain type is rare today and continues to be actively stigmatized and aggressively defined as developmentally defective. 

It is possible that the Asberger sensory system, visual memory-information processing is a legacy of early humans, who lived in radically different environments that modern social humans. Although disparaged by social humans, our literal, reality-based, asocial type of human has been allowed to persist in very small numbers because of the extraordinary abilities in science and technology of some Asperger individuals. Literal, real world brain processing has built our technological civilization. Many Asperger types find refuge and socially approved work in academic and research institutions, where their social deficits are outweighed by talents useful to governments and corporations – ever more creative and effective weapons are one sad result. That is a relationship that has dire consequence for our species.  

I am interested in those ‘other’ Asperger people, who are not seen by society to have useful talents and are effectively discarded in childhood like damaged toys, that at best can sit on a shelf and provide some appearance of being normal, but which will never be included in a wider world. These children have talents and potential which are thrown away for the sake of behavioral conformity, for the sake of obedience, for the sake of the adult need to control children. There is a mean-spirited theme in all this blaming and labeling; other minorities have been subjected to the same social excuses for marginalization, but there does not seem to be an awareness of how badly Asperger and "different" children are treated.   

Are children being sorted and graded as if they are agricultural products?

From Understanding Color Image Processing by Machine Vision for Biological Materials By Ayman H. Amer Eissa and Ayman A. Abdel Khalik. 

"Machine vision and image processing techniques have been found increasingly useful in the fruit industry, especially for applications in quality inspection and defect sorting applications."

 

The purpose of agricultural sorting and grading is primarily for rejection of blemished fruit and vegetables and not for quality of nutrition. Western society increasingly demands superficially "perfect" specimens to feed consumer markets. Uniformity is a prime driver of a market economy that also sorts and grades human beings.  

 

According to 2013 statistics from the United Nations, 1.3 billion tons of food is thrown away globally every year, which is equal to one-third of the world's food. How many children are thrown away?

 

Society Sucks

I spend several hours each morning seeking information on the individual experience of what was formerly known as Asperger's Syndrome, but which has been "lumped" together with other socially unacceptable thought and behavior on the Autism Spectrum. The only justification I can see for this squishing together of very different human states is convenience for those making a diagnosis. 

My morning travel through Asperger information includes both popular amateur ideas and a stock of "studies" by "professional" researchers. It's a depressing journey - so one-sided. The source of the "problem" is the disobedient and / or too intelligent Asperger child. Much effort is made at not using the words obedient or disobedient, but the blame is there; despite the self-congratulatory claim of neurotypical empathy and social harmony that Asperger people are intent on ruining, little empathy exists, either for the different world view inherent in our very being or for the human condition in general.

There would seem to be no recognition on the part of the social majority that society is not what it is cracked up to be. Society sucks, to be honest, but honesty is condemned by those who police thought and language. That is the true source of antipathy toward not only Asperger individuals, but against any human who can't or won't conform:  

This morning I was doing my usual search when I became disturbed over the dismal state of human affairs: cruelty, poverty, violence, unequal distribution of resources, the trashed environment, the decimation of species, in short, the devastating and unconscionable behavior of social man. Along with this feeling of monumental horror, I remembered that my view of humanity had not begun this way: as a child I believed in artists, writers, and scientists and the general sanity and goodness of the average person. I believed in knowledge, education and political notions of equality, justice and fair play. The ideals of our nation and culture were in essence, instinctive for an Asperger child.

A half-century has passed, during which the society I had thought I knew turned out to be not so nice, especially to human beings, both at home and around the world. War has become a social institution, a paramount social activity in fact, which obliterates all concern for human value in the ecstatic quest for power and control, for wealth and greed. We have become a pornographic society, in which individuals no longer exist, only objects and categories of objects to be exploited by an uncaring social hierarchy: social hierarchies are not inherently bad, but ours is, and I never again want to hear that as an Asperger I can feel no empathy, no compassion, no caring for this world. But I know that I will hear this again and again.
 

Black & White Thinking is Necessary

The Algorithm is essential to modern technology. The Algorithm is a powerful tool in everyday life, despite being labeled “black and white” thinking and a “cognitive distortion.”  

Algorithm

Definition: an algorithm is a finite sequence of instructions, a logical and explicit step-by-step

procedure for solving a problem starting from a known beginning.

– the number of instructions must be finite

– to write the algorithm you first must know how to solve the problem!

– the solution must follow a logical path: the order of the instructions IS important

A flowchart is a graphic presentation of an Algorithm:

 

 

Pain, Empathy and Emotion: Scientific Version

I want to go ahead today and add a response I posted on an Asperger website after another poster quoted from "The Simpsons." The idea in the quote relates to the Asperger / Social Majority conflict over emotion and a possible explanation for the misunderstanding.  

Homer to Marge: "You don't appear to be in any kind of physical pain, the only type of pain a man understands".

I am female, but I am unable to tell the difference between physical and emotional pain. There are times I've gone to a medical doctor, because I really can't figure out if I'm sick or upset. This led me to read about how the brain processes pain and "feels" emotions. Guess what? There is only one circuit for both - emotional pain is physical. How could it be otherwise unless you believe that emotions are supernatural, which I'm sure many social people believe.  

Only three or four emotions exist: the flight or fight response of aggression and fear; disgust, and pleasure. From my own experience, I suspect that Asberger individuals experience a default "neutral" state. Social children learn to diffuse and differentiate their basic pain responses and to give those new states names - it's a fundamental task of social training. This is especially true for females. Inflating and dispersing pain via hundreds of descriptive words serves to keep females confused, distracted from anger and fear, and obsessed with subtle differences and changes in social emotions. This socialization of pain keeps women powerless. Society teaches females to imagine that real physical responses are thousands of subtle and entangled emotions that don't really exist!

What I am suggesting is that Aspies experience basic physiological pain, not the "emotions" social children learn. Also that we have a neutral setting, which is our default setting. This benign state produces our familiar "blank reaction" when people say something unimportant or baffling. We just don't feel emotion/pain unless something in the environment triggers the fight or flight response or pleasure or disgust. Social people interpret our neutral setting as offensive; after all, to them, everything they say or do, and the reaction they get from people, is vital to the continuing existence of the universe. Social people assume that we don't care about human beings because we're not in their frantic (to us) emotional mode 24/7. Emotion for us isn't this fantastical overwhelming supernatural state that colors and controls the fate of mankind. For us it is pain or the absence of pain - and our response is most often flight.

I think this also may explain why Asperger individuals commonly suffer from anxiety. From the time we are young, social situations are fight or flight for us because we are rejected and treated badly. We are different, and social people react very negatively to that fact. Diversity is not really a social value.

If you whack a dog on the nose every time it gets up on the couch, and then force it to get up on the couch and whack it again for doing so, and repeat this cycle again and again, will that dog not soon be in a state of perpetual fear?

Empathy; the Religion of Psychology

                                                     

The ease with which the psychological concept of Empathy has been co-opted as a religious / moral value, and infantilized in the process, suggests that rather than having a real existence, Empathy is supernatural. 

The unexplained transfer of emotions, thoughts and experiences between 'normal' humans, without any objective or explicit communication between them, would seem to require a magical transcendence of physical law. The public can be forgiven for assuming that Empathy powers miracles.                                        

Animals Granted Empathy by Psychologists

Animals granted Empathy

 

      

Animal not granted Empathy:
Autistic and Asperger children.                                                
                                                    
                                 

My Asperger Parent

Although undiagnosed, my father was a classic Asperger male who had a terrible time invoking his social rank as The Father. He made attempts to use his status to make me “do what I was told,” but this effort usually fell apart, because deep down he didn’t believe that this was a valid reason for a child to comply with a parent’s wishes. Our relationship wasn’t perfect, but it was thoroughly Asperger.

We developed a deep friendship precisely because he felt it necessary to explain that his requests and concerns had a rational basis such as safety or efficiency, or to quell worry on his part that I would make a mistake or a poor choice. His appeals to my practical good sense usually worked, but I never felt that I had to obey him just because he was my father. This encouraged me to make my own choices, good and bad, and to recover from my mistakes, a task that is infinitely difficult for a perfection-loving Asperger child. Honest exchange sometimes drove us apart, but I never doubted his affection or that he would be there when I needed help. He could and would set personal judgment aside. He wasn’t warm, emotional or full of praise. At times, overcome by frustration and anger at a social world he didn’t understand, he would vanish into the comforting order of nature and science. His knowledge base was phenomenal and he was never too busy to answer my limitless questions, sometimes imparting far more detail than I could possibly absorb. Best of all, he was like me and I was like him, but not exactly.

Each Aspergerger individual has his or her own personality and is affected differently by social constraints. Girls and women have traditionally been excluded from diagnosis and instead have been diagnosed with one or more mental illnesses, a situation that is improving. Females being overlooked as Aspergers can be partly explained by the traditional view that being female is in itself a disorder or defect in many religions and cultures, a social barrier that has been imposed as part of The Pyramid. Women are on the bottom by virtue of their 'crazy' gender.

 

Neurotypicals: No Help Wanted

The tendency for an Asperger person is to assume that someone who expresses distress wants help, but this is rarely the case. If an Asperger offers an observation or suggests a solution, the well-intended advice is likely to be received with hostility – logic produces the wrong answer. An Asperger may observe that neurotypicals attempt to resolve real world problems through manipulation of their own emotions, and even more frequently, the emotions of other people. For the social majority, the environment is almost exclusively composed of other people, so bad feelings, aggression, shame and bullying are ever-present.     

One might think that after being yelled at thousands of times, we Aspergers would ‘get’ that people’s stories of frustration (which often are the result of failed actions repeated over and over, or are due to a simple lack of practical or scientific knowledge) are not requests for help. We stupidly persist because it is in our nature to solve problems. If a person describes a situation that is causing them confusion and pain, and if I can unravel a tangle of erroneous beliefs and misinformation that is causing it, why wouldn’t I make the effort?

This desire to substantially aid another human being is considered a great defect. As a group Aspergers people are accused of being blind to the minds of other people, and that empathy, compassion, or any ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes is absent from our soulless bodies. The truth is that it is our desire to help in ways that produce results. Unfortunately the social definition of empathy rejects and excludes rational response and tangible returns. A theater of gestures, facial expressions, and words of sympathy and commiseration are not only preferred, but demanded and scrutinized by the gatekeepers of ‘normal’ as the sole measure of human feeling. It’s a cruel system.

This narrow definition of what it means to be human not only impinges on the freedom of Asperger types, but neurotypicals as well are stripped of honest communication by the well-policed forms expression that society imposes. The majority of any population - low ranking children, women, minorities and the poor, are required to stifle their thoughts and reactions in order to preserve the power of the social pyramid. Empowering people with the courage to speak honestly is socially taboo, because honest communication between people confers equality.