Allism, the majority neurotype, is humankind in warrior mode.

It’s a set of options that optimizes the human animal for its group conflict, which is the standard explanation for the size of our brains, our supposed intelligence, the learning curve of conflict – and that’s problematic, isn’t it, it’s a thing that evolved because the environment changed – but the environment was us, so the environment changed because we changed too. It adds complexity, human social environments do not appear in the fossil record, and while the evidence of conflict is almost the only evidence we have, stone weapons and broken skeletons, that is all there could be, really, so it doesn’t prove much. We don’t get to look and say the equivalent of see it was wet here then and dried out over centuries, we have no corroboration, no physical trace of past social environments, no evidence for social change that would oblige us to explain how it shaped us.

I mean, even if we wanted to, which, this would be us searching for actuarial evidence and knowledge about ourselves – and for most, “Human Nature,” has already answered, made these questions irrelevant – people don’t change. Sure, maybe apes did, mindlessly, in response to the climate, etc., but “people,” don’t, and certainly not for each other. We are apparently controllable, but not changeable.

Again, I’m trying to shout and I think I sound like Goldblum, you’d think I was talking about the menu when I said in the first part, “ . . . the “Human Nature,” in which the Allistic finds us lacking and themselves lamentable but inevitable is really only one neurotype, and one with an off switch . . . ”  – I suppose it’s a different conversation, but this is not really an abstraction, “Human Nature,” – the whole world is structured around, it, I mean politically and legally.

“People don’t change,” is fucking law, despite the obvious falsity of it.

If law acknowledged causality in human affairs, it would disappear. With no static “Nature,” to simply control, a policeman is only hurting people and causing all the same problems as the criminals – which is exactly the case, in my mind. Sigh.

I’m not getting closer to the point, so let’s just teleport there and start again.

“Autism,” isn’t a thing; it’s only an attempt to define “non-Allism,” – but Allism, ironically to an Allist, is a thing, a discreet, heritable, definable thing, with specific traits and functions. It’s counterintuitive, because the numbers are sort of backwards, but Allism is a genetic thing, a variance, a sort of a mutation – while what we call “Autism,” is probably the whole gene pool. No?

So tell me, what are the Autistic traits and functions?

Isn’t every savant different?

Isn’t there a great deal of variety within what we call “Autism,” Autists who work and succeed, and Autists who can’t get out of bed? At some point, you have to give up explaining how everything is “Autism,” except a few things that are part of a much narrower spectrum, and name the narrow bit instead, Allism. Again: what if we are the whole gene pool?

The Allists, with their “Human Nature,” do not speak for humanity.

I mean, they speak, boy, do they speak – but they are not speaking for humanity.

It’s almost the reverse, what they speak for.

But this is the Big Picture: the human gene pool has neurodivergence, which means we always have traits that we can draw upon when the environment changes, active neurotraits and neurotraits in store for what may come, diversity is evolutionary  capital, the more you have, the safer your species is – and Autism is maybe not just one part of it, but it is us trying to name neurodiversity itself with a single label – when the structure is far more clear, simple and true when we say Allism is the label, the individual, discrete thing within the diversity.

I need a metaphor.

It’s like “Autism,” means “not a tree,” and “Allism,” means tree?

I try to say “Autism” is a bush, but no, some Autists are vines, says the community, and it’s sort of fair, fine, we are everything but trees, everything but the tall, strong, can’t see the forest for ‘em trees – so the trees are the thing, the creation, the genetic machines that build themselves out of the gene pool . . . no, I’m sorry, it doesn’t work, really every species of “tree,” created itself out of its previous species’ possibly diverse gene pool, the analogy wouldn’t be “trees,” it would be a single tree species against its genetic backdrop . . . and no easier, no help, we know less about that than about our own backdrop. Let’s try a different tack, go with Jurassic Park, life finds a way.

Is ”Autism,” trying to be a thing? Do Autists select other Autists and seek to outbreed and outlaw other sorts? Not so much, Autism just happens to us and many of us don’t even know about it – but it can’t but help my argument that Allism is the living, genetic thing that it does these things, selects for itself and actively tries to limit the spread of other sorts. On the one hand, it gives us the label – but in many other ways, it wears its label loudly and proudly. They are “just normal,” but rather staunchly so. “Trying to be a thing,” this is a definition for life, for a living thing in evolution – so Allism passes this test and maybe Autism does not?

So why is this hard to say, who am I arguing with? Society knows it is conformist.

We wouldn’t be having this conversation if not for a power differential, if one neurotype didn’t get to declare itself “just normal.” Society knows it is conformist; it just doesn’t know there’s any other way to be. The Allists are apparently everywhere, and they are apparently in charge, so saving anyone or changing the world isn’t about Autistics, or ADHD folks (or POC, or LGBTQIA+), or anyone but them, about their type’s superpowers and disabilities, the rest is . . . I’m sorry, secondary. It wouldn’t matter so much that you’re any sort of challenged, aren’t we all, wouldn’t matter if you were drunk – if you weren’t driving the bus.

Apparently, the only people allowed to drive the bus are the ones who have no idea that they’re disabled.

Hold on, let’s have another restart.

Two weeks later – not happening, what do we say on Twitter, screw it, send. Ha.

Jeff

Oct. 12^th., 2023

Allism, the majority neurotype, is humankind in warrior mode.

A type is a set of options that customizes the human being for particular uses, particular environments, “neurotype,” refers to the customization, the model, perhaps of the brain, and the majority one is by definition, the one that exists for the majority environment. Look at the world, you ought to be able to infer how most people’s minds are working.

It’s conflict – so that’s your neurotype. I’ll point out: authority is conflict, and it’s ubiquitous. Where there isn’t actual fighting, it’s because the conflict is entirely one sided and somebody is doing what they have been bloody well told.

I feel like that should be all caps or something, not delivered Jeff Goldblum deadpan, conflict is everywhere, but you know, you do you.

You know it yourself, you are generally telling everyone about it yourself, your priorities are not a secret. No-one is in a better position to see it and point it out to you than the original non-Allistics, the Autists by which you avoid defining yourselves, we see it starkly, neurotype VS neurotype, where Allistics try to convert Autistics by entirely Allistic methods, army basic training, or simple torture: Allistics pathologize passivity – this should result in more than a discussion of the relative truth of Autistic passivity, it should make clear that the speaker is aggressive, how else would this work?

If it were aggression that were proscribed, then you’d know that the passive were in charge, in the majority.

The Allistic type is aggressive. If the passive were in charge, the aggressive would be singled out for treatment instead, but that’s not the way it is because the majority neurotype is aggressive and so the boys that fight look good and normal to them and the boys that don’t appear to be a problem. This is why in the past, girls and women have been under diagnosed with ASD compared to boys and men, because passivity is less pathological in girls in this society at this time. Own it, this is you. Strength is essential for life, right? This is obvious.

To you.

The opposite has always been true for me, strength has always looked like life’s greatest threat to me. Obvious – but I never knew I had a neurotype, I did not appreciate the purpose built limitations of my own reasoning. Neurotype is a meta concept, it’s not easy, and until I learned about Autism and neurotypes I could not see the way different things can be built-in obvious to different people. I’m saying, I’m certain that most Allistics haven’t imagined this strength orientation to be anything but obvious to every possible mind, it just appears as a universal truth to them, it’s throughout their science, Nature, rough in tooth and claw and all that – again, as my view of strength as a world destroying scourge did and does to me.

The Neurodivergent, we Autistics, the ADHD, the BPD, etc., we are forced to learn a theory of more than one mind, of neurotype, and this information is vital to our navigating the world, we must learn our type and how it differs from “the rest of the world’s,” but the rest of the world never does, they are aggressive and so conformist. They’re in charge and they don’t have to know themselves if they don’t feel like it, and they don’t. But science must move on, with or without them. There is a structure to all this whether they know it or not. The science and the answers are sitting right in front of us all, in plain view, depending on the brain behind your eyes.

Warrior mode explains a lot. Honestly, you (I’m addressing this rant to the Allistic, or more properly to all who share the Allistic view) just call it Human Nature, but the world is not Plato’s metaphor and Natures, essences of things are not how anything works; the “Nature,” doesn’t exist – but the idea, “Human Nature,” this very much does exist, as a rule in the Allistic mind. The fact of this idea’s ubiquity is a hard truth with disastrous consequences for the world. It is a rule that insures we stay in warrior mode, because it is part of warrior mode to get stuck in warrior mode. A warrior with a short attention span or a queasy stomach for it is not effective, a warrior must be stubborn about it, right to the end. So you don’t call it a mode, and you don’t imagine ways that it could anything but the way it is. Warrior mode is all in.

But it is.

There are other modes, the divergent demonstrate this, and they who have ears to hear may infer what they like, draw the connections they see.

Human Nature is not a “Nature,” those aren’t real – so “Human Nature,” is a neurotype, or the concept is part of a neurotype, I want to say an early, basic part of the thinking of the type, that sets the mode: if you believe in a static “Nature,” then you bring a different attitude into life than if you worried that everything you did pushed the people around you in some direction or other. In warrior mode, you don’t worry about personal development, you are dealing in existential matters, and if people changed, you wouldn’t need to be here. In warrior mode, there is only today and tomorrow, there isn’t room for any seven generations.

“Not worrying about personal development,” manifests in half of Allistic speech, here are popular examples:

What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

I hit them, but it doesn’t hurt them.

They need to learn about the real world.

People don’t change.

You are not what happened to you, you are your reaction to what happened to you.

If I don’t do it, somebody else will.

You’ll see that many of them are simply direct references to “Human Nature,” or simply rewordings of it, it really does encapsulate the entire suite of thought, even better than Christian Original Sin did, I mean it doesn’t leave anyone out, atheists and scientists can all share it too. It encapsulates and codifies not only the absence of actuarial logic but repeats endlessly that there can be no such thing as actuarial logic. People don’t change.

I have liked to say that it’s when we are, “spanked,” and told that it is not, “bad,” that it does not, “hurt,” us but makes us, “better,” that “we,” must believe or it doesn’t stop, but now I think the ground must be prepared for such basic logic, that indeed I heard it too and remained unconvinced, so that it is perhaps not that “we” are told and convinced, but that we were told and many of you were pre-wired to be convinced. Certainly, I would be surprised to hear of anyone who remembers having a different thought before and changing it.

I mean, I think my actuarial ideas are the same ones I was born with, no-one changed my mind from a previous thought – I’m painting myself into a corner here, I still think the spanking forces a change – just not from as clear a stance as I have, I think maybe the Allistic brain doesn’t have to make the complete one eighty from actuarial operation to Human Nature, I suspect it is born somewhere between and spanking alters the path forward in development, it doesn’t reverse things completely.

Obviously, war is a social matter, an extreme social environment, where in-group and out-group disparities couldn’t be more stark. Social discretion is part of warrior mode.

Ah. I suppose I have assumed that lesson to be part of the spanking too, that when your own brain registers “Ow! That hurts!” and then we are in the scenario at the top of two paragraphs up, trying to make the spanking stop, but our parent is telling us, “This is not bad, this is good, this will make you better,”  then the lesson is to ignore the obvious self-preservation logic of your own brain, ignore the obvious reality that point of hitting is to hurt and instead focus on the social reality of this human telling you that their words are more important than all that reality.

The spanking and the lesson shift you from rationality towards social thinking, away from your own processor towards others – what “Allistic,” means, right.

Theory-wise, it makes some sense for a type to have this capability, and it would seem like a magic power if we could simply turn it on and off by spanking or not, like if we knew that was how it worked, we could turn it on when the aliens attack and turn it off again after, it’s a brilliant genetic option . . . again, assuming war is ever “necessary,” except because of your own selves’ aggression. But as the Davids said, we seem stuck. The soldiers have taken control of the government, so to speak, and they only know one sort of project.

There is indeed an off switch, but you are smarter than Vader’s engineers, you left it off the plans, but this is hope, it is not an ubiquitous Nature that you are this way, and you are only born half so bad, suggesting that within you, long dormant, may yet be that other wolf, the good one.

But this is what Allistic means, warrior mode, which is a sort of hyper ability for conflict / something of a disability to worry about the living, and a hyper sense for social discretion / diminished sense of external realities. It’s not “Human Nature,” these problems, not every “Human,” has them, some have more actuarial sense and less aggression, some see real problems in the world beyond the competitive success of their group – the existence of Autistics and other sensitive sorts proves that everything about the “Human Nature,” in which the Allistic finds us lacking and themselves lamentable but inevitable is really only one neurotype, and one with an off switch at that!

OK, the actuarial disability, the hyper sociality, those are the big two . . . ah. Not the same level of importance maybe, but the language stuff, the empathy and the eye contact, non-verbal “communication.” Here I want to depart sounding smart and scientific, if I ever achieved it, and just say, “non-verbal communication,” is authority, you are simply to obey, what feedback is necessary?

Generally, what was unsaid was only that, “shut up and effing do it.” But also, besides authority, it is otherwise warrior stuff, ninja, green beret stuff, silent running, so no-one knows what you’re up to. Weird to think of the whole population thinking that way, but if you’re all one neurotype, which let’s face it, means mostly common superpowers, but it means that you’re all disabled mostly the same way too.

I mean, sure there’s non-verbal communication, but it’s not non-verbal because that’s the most efficient sort of communication or the sort with the most resolution, I mean it’s not non-verbal, “to communicate,” that you could do out loud. Obviously it’s non-verbal to leave listeners out of the conversation, limit the sharing of the information.

Loose lips sink ships, don’t you know, knowledge is power, because life is war for the warrior.

Jeff

Oct. 5^th., 2023