Isaiah 58

Isaiah 58

There Is No Caste System in America; There Are No Oppressed Poor In America; There Are No Homeless Outcasts In America Who Didn't Deserve To Be Cast Out. No One In America Is Ever Misunderstood-And-Oppressed By Their Family, Their Militaristic Church, And Their Greedy Employer, Much Less To The Extent That It Results In Their Being Cast Out And Homeless; None Who Are Nearly Constantly Overwhelmed By The Discouragement Of The Effective Criminalization Of Their Homelessness Per The Sovereign Divine Right Of Those Who Are Well-off Enough To Borrow Money To Increase Their Own Already-Tolerable Lifestyle; None Who Are Endlessly Frustrated, Nor Suicidally Traumatized; None Who Ever Are Desparate Enough To Steal, To Do Violence To The Property-and-or-Persons Of Those Who Are 'Rich' In The Eyes Of The Destitute; None Who Are So Desparately Frustrated As To Blow Up And Start Hitting Things, Anything, In the Hope Of Communicating To You The PROBLEM WHICH YOU, At Least In Effect, DENY EXISTS.

If You Hate The Homeless, Then You Can Thank Your Own Pushy-and-Greedy, Profanely Dog-Eat-Dog Determination, and Your Health, and Your Connections, and Your Neurotypicality Contra Autism Spectrum Disorders, For Your Ability Never Yet To Be So Ruined As Never To Be Able To Help Yourself In The Rat-Race World Of Rats, Of The Normalization Of The Average Per The Profanely Sovereign Divine Right Of The 24/7 Protestant Work Ethic. There is Nothing Sacred, Including Christ In My Shoes, Unless You Knew It Was Him And Not Just Some 'Despicable' Homeless Person Who Has No Way Left In The World, For His Disabilities, Except To Scavenge In The 'Private Property' of Dumpsters. You Would Help Christ In My Shoes If You Knew It Was Him. But, His Point Was Not For You Kiss Up To Him, Nor Even So Much As To Help HIM AS SUCH. Rather, His Point Was For You To Help His Own Family--- Because It Is The Right Thing To Do. God, Who Is Omniscient, Makes It To Rain On The Just And On The Unjust. How Much More Ought You, Who Judge By Appearances, To Do The Same: To Water The WHOLE Field, And LIBERALLY SO, Lest You Fail To Get Sufficient Water To The Few Wheat Seedlings That Are Far Underneath The Shadow Of The Tares. Were I Your Son, Or Were I Your Mother, Or Your Long-Lost Uncle Who Went To War To Defend Your Safety, And If You Knew It, Then Would You Treat Me As If I Were The Lazy, Pot-Smoking Scoundrel That You Otherwise Love To Righteously Believe That I Am? HERE Is What I Am:


Imagine the U.S. Space Program found outerspace suddenly monopolized by a race of extremely friendly star-hopping aliens. And, imagine that these aliens, despite their awesome technological knowledge and power, consistently failed to see just how comparatively flimsy are our own spacecraft. The damage we would suffer from their friendliness would make us head back to Earth and stay there. This is autism.

As I hope is seen in this analogy, autism is not the disability. It is the 'place' of escape; the world of refuge. Like the heightened senses of blind persons, I think autism may be a neuro-plastic compensation for an underlying disability. Moreover, this compensation is of a type allowing a cognitive escape from the external context by which the disability manifests. In other words, autism is a specific type of neurological response to a 'vacancy' in the ecology of the brain; a type which creates a whole inner world out of what is left intact in the functioning of the brain. Nature abhors a vacuum---or, in the words of a character in the Jurassic Park movies, 'Life finds a way.'

The underlying disability of autism is a feebled dynamic autonomy. This is why autistic persons have difficulty facing the normal dynamic stressors that the rest of us take for granted. These stressors are what normal persons know as the substance of living; what stimulates growth and maturation, and what comprises the 'good stuff' of life itself. But, a person with a feebled dynamic autonomy lacks a well-formed, strong, dynamic sense of themselves as differentiated persons in a neurotypical social context. Worse, it is why they must avoid social contact on a normal person's terms. In short, they are unable to negotiate with the too-powerful aliens in the analogy above. It is also why the Sallyl-Ann test does not, in fact, directly test for the autistic person's ability to know of, and about, other minds, and other, independent points of view: the test is conducted by these aliens, these 'gods', and there is often too much damage involved for the autistic person in playing along with the test. Besides, it takes no great energy for him to simply rocket back toward Earth and then let gravity pull the rest of the way him home.

But, given the analogy above, imagine there were no Earth to head back to. The means of escape from the context by which the disability arises has vanished, yet the disability remains. The autism has vanished, but the disability remains. What does this mean? Here's a clue to my hunch: While the incidence of autism is rather higher among boys than girls, the incidence of the underlying disability may not be so disparate between sexes. The fact is that many 'normal' women (and some men) have a hard time genuinely believing that they have a right to have their own needs; they're psychologically so focused on the needs, wishes, and opinions of others. Autistic persons have a similar problem: the inability to stand up as their own persons under the pressure of the personal social autonomy of normal persons. Just like the U.S. Space Program in the face of the friendly aliens. Autistic persons cannot readily afford to admit to gods that they recognize themselves as differentiated persons, lest these gods take too much for granted that 'simply being friendly' will basically solve the problem.

Here is a quote from Motor behavior and the autism spectrum disorders--introduction
Reid, Greg; Collier, Douglas
Palaestra
10-01-2002

Given the array of observation scales for autism developed over the years (e.g., Schopler, Reichler, DeVellis, & Daly, 1980) one might assume that individuals are diagnosed rather easily by trained psychologists or psychiatrists. In general, such is not the case (Wing, 1997, 2000). Enormous heterogeneity of behaviors and developmental profiles make accurate diagnosis very difficult. The difficulty of diagnosis was apparent to one of the authors when it was learned that a local hospital used PDD-NOS most frequently with newly admitted children. Real children clearly did not fall into other diagnostic subtypes, and the more general (and vague) PDD-NOS was deemed most appropriate.

I myself have a very mild case of autism---at least in regard to most things. But, I believe I have the underlying disability in spades. In fact, I'm now very ill, and very homeless, for it. The neuro-plastic compensation in my case seems to be...

...Firstly, a hyper-focus on the feelings and opinions of others (similar to Williams Syndrome), including their feelings/thoughts about/for/against me. My entire sense of reality is forcefully, even violently, changed every two seconds when I find myself in an ordinary conversation, or even when simply as an anonymous bystander in the midst other people's conversations.

...Secondly, a creative intelligence so 'high' that it seems to me able to take up the slack wherever my nearly absent conventional knowledge acquisition-and-retention fails.

All-in-all, I often appear not disabled at all when in social contact with more-or-less socially aggressive persons, especially if I have enough nutritional support despite my severe digestive problems so that I can function well enough socio-cognitively to at least force myself to respond as a normal person. The stellar language ability of Williams people masks their severe general IQ deficit, and all my own abilities masks my severe disability. I cannot be my own person in the face of others, and, given my current state, requires something which I cannot obtain: completely isolation from other people. The more distress I experience from the presence of others, the less able I am to find rest in observing non-humanb life forms, even to the point where I must look away from wild birds, and even bugs. I was the last to know that I was thought of as a budding socio-economic superboy. Only when I was forced by my bowels to seek isolation (despite my wish to continue to comply with other's wishes that I keep company with them) for years did it begin to occur to me, because while in their company I was simply trying to stay both alive and sane at the same time. Their militarism didn't help, either.

Given a multiple of apparently distinct elements, the brain at first focuses on each element as if it actually were inherently distinct from the others (functional distinction). But, when a medical problem is first brought to the awareness of doctors and professional researchers, and also to the public, the medical establishment is at first presented with only a vary narrow subset of all the cases that actually exist in the general population. Of course, doctors are concerned to give an accurate diagnosis for each case presented to them. But, so many of them and their researchers tend to go through a learning process in which they are forced, by stages, to keep reassessing their current theory of the disorder. So, at the first stage, they assume that all the similar elements (autism, aspergers, Williams, Down, etc.) are mutually exclusive, only soon to be forced to 'admit' that some of this was a mistake. each talking/writing as if he or herself had always known the new truth of the matter. This false innocence on the part of the establishment is a source of the most grievous frustration for those of us who have, or are intimately associated with someone with, one of these disorders. I have the disorder, and I can tell you that it is not a neat little spectrum of autism, but an ocean of all cognitive disorders, and that everyone is in that ocean. Simon Baron-Cohen is right about this, although I guess he still puts it in terms of an autism 'spectrum'.
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