Ausome Memes

In an ideal world, sure, you don’t need to medicalize Autism…

No no. By all means, if you've got a psychological condition then codifying it and describing it accurately is great. I more think the impulse to say assigning career patterns or hobbies to psychological conditions omits a much more logical conclusion - that you learned a trade from your parents.

If you just tell people ‘these are common adjectives that describe me, these are way my brain works in that are different than most, these are things I enjoy and things that bother me’, without actually using the medical term… most people won’t believe you or care and will just tell you to stop being that way, to just change.

People tend to respect you as a human being just a bit more if they have at least a roughly accurate conception of what Autism is, but there are also a whole lot of people … like RFK Jr… who seem to only think Autism makes you an utter invalid who is essentially half brain dead.

Less a problem of someone who needs an education in autism and more a problem of a guy who is heavily invested in eugenics. But I think there's a danger in rushing to bucket people too quickly, as well. Once "liking trains" becomes a medical condition, people like to run off and treat the symptom (by persecuting train lovers) rather than the problem (by curbing the social impulse to punish neurodivergence).

We know that genetic heritability is a significant factor, but we have yet to identify precisely which genes actually do this, and to what degree…

Chasing down genetic markers for behavioral conditions is going to be a fool's errand for a whole host of reasons. Human brains are extremely plastic. For the most part, if you've got a brain, you've got the capacity to adjust your behaviors to some degree - which may mean adapting to cover up neurodivergence or imitating a trait to fit in with a peer group that share it or just spinning it out on your own in response to education or trauma or other strong stimulus.

Ultimately, it is the social bureaucracy that needs to adapt to accommodate a wider range of behaviors and emotional conditions, not the individual who needs to be tagged and sorted like so many cuts of beef.

Perhaps its my Autistic tendency to love accurately and dispationately classifying things speaking… but I would very much prefer a world where people would not be embarased by or stigmatized for using accurate and meaningful labels of themselves…

I am less worried about professional psychologists and amateur hobbyists alike rattling off new language for self-description than I am authority figures trying to pound round pegs into square holes because they've been given a very superficial understanding of what a given neurodivergent behavior looks like.

"Sociopath" is a great example of a term that inspires terror due to the way it has been propagandized to mean "soulless serial killer" rather than "person who struggles to connect emotionally with one's peers". The last thing I want is for some bureaucrat to use "love of trains" to mean "potential Clintonian Superpredator".