Divide and Profit: Extinction of the Individual

We must look to the wisdom of the past when so little can be found in our contemporary world. I'm old now; I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, supposedly a less free, more conservative time in the United States. But, I have never felt so confined, defined, categorized, unhinged from history, from common humanity, from belonging, from kindness, from the "values" of a democratic society than I do now. The individual has been erased and replaced by stock characters in a game of ‘diversity-demographics’: Divide and profit. This ongoing process of extinction of the individual is critical to those FKAA(Formerly Known As Asperger) for whom individuality and its correlates, Honesty, Justice, and Equality are essential.

The very act of 'doing away with' the Asperger's diagnosis demonstrates the willful 'doing away with' our personalities, preference and voices - we are subsumed into a 'spectrum' of socially undesirable persons, classed with psychopaths, but grudgingly said to have some usefulness to society, which is a very narrow and easily removed permission to exist.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

“It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia.”

_Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983

“The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity. You will do things in the name of a group that you would never do on your own. Injuring, hurting, killing, drinking are all part of it, because you've lost your identity, because you now owe your allegiance to this thing that's bigger than you are and that controls you.” _George Carlin, Last Words  

 

For those who would have Asperger children 'ape' so-called normal behavior: "Imitation cannot go above its model.”

“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.” _Ralph Waldo Emerson, Divinity School Address
 

And from old school psychology and psychiatry: “Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations...” _C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 1875-1961 

“The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.” Sigmund Freud, 1846-1949

 

INTJ / Bipolar / Asperger's

Not true: The MBTI doesn't label
personality preferences as pathologies. 

I'm not the first person to notice the intriguing similarities between the Myers-Briggs INTJ personality type and Asperger 'symptoms.' The difficulty we face is that having invented Asperger's Disorder in the 1980s, those responsible for writing the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) have deleted Asperger's Disorder as a discrete condition and have moved us onto a new invention, the Autism Spectrum. 
Those of us who are Formerly Known As Asperger's (FKAA) have been killed off with mere words, erased from the DSM-5, and loaded like shades or ghosts on to the back of an overcrowded bus, while psychologists and psychiatrists figure out what to do with us. Makes them appear kind of silly, doesn't it?

I have exited the bus and will continue to examine how it is that I qualify for three different labels: INTJ, bipolar, and the currently nonexistent Asperger's Disorder - FKAA. I must have won some dysfunctional lottery!