I have an intuition that RFK is wrong about Autism. For now, it’s mostly an intuition. But it’s a strong one. I know ‘intuition’ isn’t an the autistic brain’s specialty, but anyway…
(For context, RFK thinks Autism is due to vaccines and is an unnecessary disability hampering many families. For the purpose of this post, I’m avoiding any discussion of vaccines because I think it’s irrelevant. We need to first understand Autism. And nobody in science seems to understand Autism.)
I want to frontload this piece by saying I take a huge risk in associating myself with “Autism.” Why? Because it calls forth many bleeding hearts who think I Just need a hug. But I get an adequate number of hugs already, and I’m very satisfied. This is really a declaration that Autism itself is not a disability. I don’t claim to be “disabled.” That category is well-defined and I simply don’t fit it. But I believe my take on Autism can explain many personality and vocational quirks. Please do not see this as some kind of “coming out” party. If anything, I’m declaring that high functioning Autistics might be significantly better off given the current situation, and RFK simply needs to understand the nuances of this personality type.
Of course some forms of Autism are devastating to families. Some forms are violent. Some are “disabling” in every sense of the word. There are parents struggling to get through the day, because their autistic child struggles to get through the day. Of course that’s true.
But my intuition is that “Autism” itself is not a disability, any more than “extroversion” is a disability. It’s a personality type. It’s not even always a disability in social settings: some autistics have nailed the timing and rapport of the conversation so well that you’d mistake them for socialites. But you know they’re autistic because, after some number of hours, they quietly bow out of social settings, go home, and process alone for the next 2-3 days, sometimes not answering their phones. They’re “doing the work” then.
If Autism is a “disability,” are socialites not also “disabled” then? How many socialites do you know who can’t be alone? How many of them admit that it’s hard being in a 1-way conversation where the other side isn’t reciprocating? How many of them get annoyed when Autistics “overthink things”?
While extroverts, socialites, and manic schizoids see Autistics, Aspergery people, and introverts as being deficient in the social sphere, we see extroverts, socialites, and manic schizoids as deficient in the internal, analytical sphere. They make conversation; we make theories. We need each other.
Autism-Schizoid, I believe, is the actual personality spectrum. And it’s a knife’s edge spectrum; I doubt anyone is truly in the middle. Most people probably fall toward the middle-extremes, depending on their tools and experiences.
The two personalities work with language very differently. Think of language like a shared ledger that sits in the middle of speakers. It’s filled with symbols and their definitions. All sides of the conversation are reading and checking the entries, while also simulating the minds of the other people (recursively), to use the right symbols. Schizoids are adamantly opposed to changing the ledger because it renders the conversation futile. They are experts at reading from the ledger and also at reading the symbols of the other speakers. Part of the conversation for them is reciprocating with other speakers. This is intuitive, easy, and fun when everyone is on the same page. Sometimes they will (usually, collectively) decide to write a new definition to the ledger, but in general they depend on a fixed ledger so emotional reciprocation can remain fluid.
They wonder why Autistics can’t just have fun or “flow” in conversation, or why we can’t just reciprocate. In fact, they get ANGRY that Autistics don’t use the ledger the way they do. We read the ledger too, but mostly we’re running a kind of an “analyze” command. We are averse to reciprocation on their level. We will, however, train ourselves to reciprocate in stereotypical ways to get you off our backs, but we know that’s not really us. Most of the time we are running functions like search, remove duplicates, verification, etc. on the symbols in the ledger. E.g., “This symbol could mean 28 different other things than you assume.” (Pronouns are the worst. “He” who? we tend to ask. We get hung up on this and lose the flow of the conversation.) We can’t analyze at parties, so do it at home and attempt to update the ledger later. Sometimes we come up with ways to organize Crayons. Other times we make E=mc2.
Autism is a ledger access function, as “schizoid” is. They are different. Both are important. But as coding and fabrication explode exponentially, my gut says autism is becoming less the disability. On the margins, Autism screams at itself when inundated by demands to reciprocate. The other one screams at buildings (and Autistics) when they fail to reciprocate.
Additional thoughts: I discuss “Quilt Man” in my book, which is an anthropomorphization of how my Autistic-y brain works. I doubt any Autistic brain is the same; it’s really more of a shop, with various tools cobbled together here, or some basic tools over there, work benches, lots of unfinished projects in this corner, very pleasing finished things on this shelf, etc. The shop is where we take problems, ideas, goals, etc. and work on them until we can emerge with something. Our methods all differ. So I imagine roughly half of all people are Autistic to some degree, and half are schizoid to some degree. I don’t think the balance can be anything else, since there appears to be a reciprocal function to these personality types. They tend to attract, which can be beautiful or disastrous, or the relationship might alternate between the two. At any rate, our sciences are so sad that we probably know less about Autism today than we did more than 35 years ago when The Wizard came out.
It seems that most people working with Autistics are either schizoid types who demand reciprocation from them, or other Autistic types who feel rather coldly about Autism. Schizoids might enter the therapy field to fill a hole in their own lives. They may feel that, if they can just get the Autistic to “feel” or “flow” in the moment, they themselves can be validated. They might see this as a “success,” when they’ve really just taught (or forced) the Autistic patient to build a tool to get them off their backs so they can go back to analyze mode. That may or may not be a success. I would challenge these researchers to try and be alone and see whether they’re more or less functional than Autistics when we are alone.
The other researcher, a high functioning Autistic, has spent his entire life developing complex tools. We sometimes look at low-functioning Autistics as though they have failed in this task. We’re possibly even harsher. I remember Autistic people sometimes coming into stunt practice and I think I was particularly harsh on them. (This is also why Autistics don’t have “community” in the same sense that schizoids do. We have maker spaces and workshops, and our interpersonal relationships hinge on 1-2 hour personal conversations. That’s how we understand “community.”)
Neither side is trying to understand the other. This is leading us into really dangerous waters. I believe this might be a bigger crisis than anything. I see it daily in Vegas, with people screaming at the clouds or complaining about “waves.” They think particle physics and String Theory somehow relates to behavior. I also wonder how much of String Theory is really just a schizoid take on particle physics, just pushing too far into the “wave” half of particle duality.
At any rate, there is a lot of work to be done, and the sciences, and RFK, are not spearheading this. It’s a worthwhile research endeavor.1