There’s an issue in the Autistic brain where the Autistic is torn between 1) empathy and 2) objectivity. These can and do coexist in most, if not all, Autistics. It’s worthwhile to dive into how this manifests in Autistic behavior.
Every brain, no matter how Autistic or Manic, introvert or extrovert, wherever the individual is on that spectrum of personality, will experience the influence of others’ intentions (which I just call “intents”). So long as the senses are functioning, the intake of these intents is a given. The processing and expression of these intents is what varies.
In a pure form, Autistics will import intents, process, categorize and express in a linear format. For example, if leaves are rustling loudly on a fall day, this is taken in with all the other sounds and sights, this is processed as air pushing through the subject’s space due to the meeting of 2 different air fronts, and is expressed in some meteorological formula. This thereby “resolves” the question of “why is it so windy?”
On the other side, in a pure form, the Manic will import these same intents, process them as a “desire” for some entity to go from here to there and change the season to make way for the next harvest, which is anthropomorphized into some goddess, monster, etc., and is expressed in some kind of ritual gift-giving of first-fruits to this entity as though he/she is a king/queen. This serves to “resolve” the changing of the seasons in a very different way.
These are vast generalizations and no person or group does these things exclusively, but I am attempting to bucket personalities into two major categories.
We can see that my classification of “Autistic” processing is now the dominant thought pattern in meteorology. No weatherman says that Demeter is moving West across the Rockies to find Persephone at the usual time this year. And yet many will experience “seasonal depression” because these shifts aren’t very well resolved these days, aside from some harvest festivals like Halloween and Thanksgiving. We don’t really *attack* the problem the way ancient society did, because giving first-fruits to an invisible harvest goddess is a waste of food. That’s the Autistic way of thinking about it.
We can think about the intents of people bearing on the 2 personalities the same way. To the Autistic (who might be staunchly averse to dancing, like me), dancing as a communal activity is seen as a security threat. It’s like antivirus software warning against going into a torrent website. There are too many loopholes here. Autistic thinking is averse to excessive intent-loading because there’s an implicit understanding that this rocks the system. The percussion and dance formula allows for weird concepts to leak in. Most dance parties end in everyone having a good time. Often they descend into behavior that many participants regret the next day. Mania sees this as finding life for the individual in the group. Autistics see this as death of the individual due to the group.
Most Autistics have some personality nodes that still find value in group activity. There’s always a strain of Mania in there somewhere. These might conflict. Someone does you wrong, you abandon them, they crawl back to you for help, and you now have to choose between objective reality (“They screwd me over”) with empathy (“They could still use a friend”). When you choose the empathy route and let this person back into your life, this might infect other parts of the *stack* and invert memories and cause other weird dysfunctions. Autistic thinking, at its core, therefore lashes out hard against Manic attacks against the system.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Manic personalities do the same. There’s probably some level of objectivism in every Manic, who might find this incompatible with being in a community. Dysfunctional Manics cannot be left alone, because the Autistic ordering of reality pushes against this “oneness.” So there might be a Manic refusal to order reality wholesale, giving exception only to a concept that’s anchored so hard in reality (i.e. some spiritual code or holy book) that nothing can actually shift it. I think this is why Manics seek out Autistics, who come to be less anchored than expected, and it devolves into chaos.
The key takeaway here is that the mainstream consensus about Autism as being less empathetic is founded on old language. “Empathy” is classically defined as an expression of empathy. Autistics do empathize, but we are not likely to express it. Doing so would be a shock to our ability to perform vertical coherence and create hypotheses over time. If a researcher *demands* that an Autistic express empathy, then you can expect the Autistic to recede further, possibly into catatonia. They hear and see everything, but expressing anything would destroy the ego at that point. This doesn’t make the Autistic ego any more “truthful” than a Manic ego, since it inverts memories just as easily. It just shows that most Autistic research is founded on an ancient, Manic lexicon that has difficulty understanding Empathy at the processing level.
Overall, lexical progress entails movement toward Autistic thinking, where vertical coherence and theorizing become higher value, and away from community and oneness. Individuality is emphasized, to a fault, to the point where each person might begin claiming their own language, and there might be an AI system eventually that can automatically translate between them (and collect a lot of weird data along the way). Manic thinking still survives in domains like UFOs, so-called “sentient” AI, charismatic religions, and the idea that chimps are just like us. Both strands of extreme thinking are lending to dysfunction, but overall Autism appears to be “winning,” since the most dysfunctional Autistics are given the world, while the most dysfunctional Manics who scream at the air are thrown out to the street and feared. This is lexical “progress” in scientific domains but regression in many interpersonal ones.
We can see this lexical regression in the relegation of possession and exorcism rituals into mere “superstition.” They’re predicated on the Manic concept of interdividuality (to use Jean Micheal Oughourlian’s term) and had their proper institutions in the ancient world which did a reasonable job at mitigating hysteria and the like. The Catholic Church combined the exorcism with Platonism, which basically nullified the entire idea. To the Catholic exorcist (and the modern mind in general), an individual exists as a unique entity, and then becomes possessed by Satan or some spirit. The exorcist maintains the formula of 1) identification and 2) removal (which are Ericksonian techniques too, in different garb), and these work, but what remains? To the classically trained, the person remains! But to the ancient mind, a crab without a shell remains, and the shell has to be reconstructed, so they do a possession ritual after the exorcism. The Catholic exorcism is an example of the unfortate trend from inter-dividualism to mere individualism. They’re instructed to go to Church, pray, etc., and the rest will be sorted out naturally. In reality, the person is going to suffer another possessive attack.
It’s like the factory worker going to the chiropractor, who adjusts his neck and sends him back out to hunch over the assembly line for another week. The “neck” shouldn’t be the focus. The issue is the assembly line. The worker should seek another career, but this would be bad for the chiropractor. I don’t think exorcists think like this, but that’s how the system is organized.
In the modern world, we don’t have a term for “possession.” We just call it “mental illness.” When a woman on a train attacks another passenger, we have no idea what this means (though the person taking the video has an idea).
Does this mean demons are floating around with pitchforks? No. As bundles of intents, they can be depicted in lots of ways, none of which negate the fact that 1) humans are susceptible to others’ intents, even the “intents” of objects, and 2) we process them and 3) express that processing in some way. There’s a lot of science of “mental health” but the idea that inter-personal intents can be expelled through “exorcism” has been ejected from the conversation simply by virtue of its old wording. New wording can easily be applied, if one wishes to try and translate from the Manic language it was written in, and these ideas could be reintroduced into psychotherapy.
We’re headed toward a purely Autistic and carpentered world. The Autistic can intent-load this with little issue, since we built it all and it suits us. The preponderence of right angles and perpetually spinning things allows for an ordering of reality in conformity with our baseline personalities. We will feel an old primordial yearning for interconnectedness, and there will be some rituals that inject that into our routines. But overall the carpentered world will maximize our ability to process. Meanwhile, the Manic personality type will intent-load all the carpentry and lack of human connection in their way and make functional modern art, or dysfunctionally shout at the sky and attack people on trains. It’s critical we parse these terms together so that we know what we’re actually looking at.
Part of the research I’m doing for the Art of Violence is predicated on a new model of psychology called Intent Load Theory (ILT) which attempts to parse the intake-processing-expression process into more linear terms. It’s Autistic in its linearity, but Manic in its understanding of the sort of spiderweb of “intents” that are all out there, which the 2 personality types both process in very different ways.
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