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 

Subscribe in a reader

The Asperger Mind Makes Art

My education is in geology, but I do not work in the field, rather, my appreciation for 'how the world works' is expressed through photography. I am fascinated by manmade objects being broken down (or not) by the desert climate, and most significantly, by the effects of wind that scours the landscape and by patterns generated by the freeze-thaw cycle. The desert remains a wilderness despite generations of human occupation; old dumps, although covered, have been exposed by natural forces.
     The photographs begin as color photos, which I then manipulate in the computer. My desire to make art began very early, but I had no dexterity - what I saw in my mind was impossible to create on paper. I worked as an advertising designer for many years, but could not draw a damn thing! I got around the problem by creating collages. Photography allows me to show what I see without the physical need to manipulate materials.


Top photo: the coils of an old box springs.
Left: Children's hand prints in paint on the side of a house.

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:

 

 

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.