Monotactism: The Real Reason Neurodivergent People Get Fucked Over in the Workplace.

It is 3:45—an ordinary afternoon in the ordinary office of an ordinary software company. Alan, a 25-year-old programmer, is deep in concentration as he tries to debug a piece of legacy software written by people who left the firm years ago.

The code is poorly documented and ugly, but the functions all seem to work individually, as none of the unit tests are failing. Instead, there seems to be an undocumented assumption about how the pieces of the program fit together. One run out of every 10,000, a catastrophic error occurs; the other 9,999 times, nothing goes wrong. Alan has added logging statements to the program to print out its intermediate state, but all of these subroutines get called thousands of times per minute, mostly without any issues, so the 5,000,000-line log file he has produced has more noise than signal.

After two hours of searching, he discovers a negative value for a variable that should only ever be positive. It is computed as the difference between two quantities, and so he looks through the code to figure out the provenance of each variable, and finds it to be the case that, in a multithreaded environment, when there is high contention for a shared resource and a mutex could not be acquired in time, it is possible for…

“Alan.” The custodian, Carol, has tapped him on the shoulder. No, it can’t wait. “Alan!”

This has happened before; it’s the third time this week. Carol is overwhelmed by the responsibilities of her high-stress job and she will throw an absolute fit unless Alan can talk her out of her own anxieties. She doesn’t really understand Alan’s work, but it always helps her if he gives, in complete detail, a full accounting of his working time over the past two weeks. This sometimes leads to rude follow-on questions, but Alan hides his displeasure. Carol’s job, as a janitor, is tough and she is sometimes just this way. He’s polite. He tries to be helpful. Carol’s questions, nevertheless, become increasingly pointed and even aggressive.

Others are listening, now. It will be taken to reflect badly on Alan if he does not swiftly answer each of Carol’s prodding questions. He must fluently decipher and address the custodian’s precise psychological needs and, if he fails to do so, he will lose the respect of his colleagues. He does not want to make a scene, but after ten minutes of Carol’s put-downs, he decides he has had enough. No longer able to suppress his anger and disgust, he gets up and leaves. Bathroom break. The question is: What happens when Alan returns? There is only one answer.

Or, I should say, there are zero answers. As told, the above would simply never happen. A custodian is not an executive. She, being lower in social rank, does not get to interrupt an office worker and ask stupid questions. She is not allowed to make her personal anxieties everyone else’s problem. It is Bill, the Vice President of Product Development, who is allowed to do that, because he has high social status. He can pester Alan with aggressive, idiotic questions, not Carol.

The company does what it can to make clear who is allowed to behave awfully toward whom. Alan, being a college-educated professional and therefore higher in rank than an essential worker, can be meaner to Carol than she can be to him, but within limits. Bill can more-or-less do whatever he wants, so long as it doesn’t upset his own boss, Dave. This is visible, to most people, by the clothing they wear. Carol, as she cleans the hallways, wears a blue uniform so she blends in with the scenery. Bill, the one day each month he comes into the office, has covered himself in sheets of very expensive organic matter, just in case anyone forgets who he is.

The story above makes no sense, unless we change it so that Bill is the one who pesters Alan with stupid questions, not Carol. No law of physics prevents Carol from doing so, but she wouldn’t; she would know that she’s not allowed to.

If you read the story above—about a janitor, of all people, having precisely the sort of emotional tantrum in which only executives are allowed (and, in practice, encouraged) to indulge—and did not have an immediate reaction of incredulity, you might be like me: monotactic. It is a virtue—we truly are the neuroyehudim, hated for thousands of years for our virtues—but also a cause of hardship.

We are learning that about 5 percent of people, most of whom will never be diagnosed as on the autism spectrum—indeed, many of them are able to fit into society just fine—are different enough in their neurological processes to be considered neurodivergent and, even though plenty of them are able to learn social skills and function, they tend to have minor differences that become disadvantages in competitive social environments such as workplaces. There is nothing wrong with these people—with us, since I am almost certainly among them—but they simply don’t communicate the same way as others, and it takes more cognitive energy to fit in. The other 95 percent are called neurotypical.

Half a century ago, the term autism was only used for people with severe childhood impairments, and it was taken to be a death sentence, even though many children with serious autism grew up to be normal (or, at least, “high functioning”) adults. In fact, the truth of the “savant” phenomenon is that it mostly doesn’t exist—most historical cases of savants involve people of normal or high capability who were institutionalized early in life based on childhood indicators and a false presumption of permanent disability. They weren’t savants—they were “retards” who surprised people. It is almost certainly the case that “high functioning autism” (Asperger’s syndrome) is the most common kind, with a population prevalence between 3 and 10 percent, and this is not because an “autism epidemic” exists—I have not seen data past 2020, but objectively severe neurological disability has become rarer over time, not more common—because the neurodivergent have always been with us.

In fact, there almost certainly isn’t one thing called autism, so much as there are a number of neurological differences (neurodivergences) ranging from mild to severe; they are correlated, but not invariably linked. People who have monotropism (intense attentional focus that is difficult to control) will often also have monotactism (single-register social behavior) and be in the neurosocial minority that trusts explicit verbal communication more than implicit, nonverbal cues. These tend to come together, but not always. Age at diagnosis tends to play a role in what is diagnosed. If symptoms present in childhood and involve verbal delay, autism is a likely label; if they come in adolescence and produce moderate social ineptitude, it tends to be called (if informally, as the diagnosis no longer exists) Asperger’s Syndrome. In adults and in women, who have usually managed to achieve social aptitude, albeit at a cost—especially in subordinate roles—to volitional reserve (“mental energy”) it is likely to be read as an anxiety or depressive disorder; the condition is read as medicable and therefore unlikely to require long-term accommodation.

Of course, everyone’s social performance deteriorates under conditions—recall poor Alan, above—of overstimulation, overbearance, and operational exhaustion. At the levels of artificial duress that office cultures use to evaluate and rank people—there cannot be competition to excel, because the people in charge are too unskilled even to recognize excellence in others, so there must be competition to suffer—even neurotypical people struggle. But those of us who are neurodivergent, realistically, have no chance. Our decline patterns are quite visible. We lose the ability to fake a positive mood. In a society obsessed with atomized productivity and mindless conformity, the way we are—honest, because it is neurologically exhausting to be anything else—gets us tagged as having “attitude problems” when none exist.

I had always known people with autism spectrum conditions struggle with employment. I had faced my own struggles—I’m good at getting jobs, and I’m great at doing the work, and I understand office politics perfectly, but have no skill in the field and tend to fumble in even the level-1 political games—long before I accepted that I was neurodivergent myself. What surprised me is how severe this problem is. About 85 percent of college graduates with autism are unable to find full-time work, even though evidence shows they are not only as productive as anyone else, but often more so. These are intelligent, creative people whose disabilities are entirely cosmetic, but whose contributions our society is happy to lose.

Why? What in the hell is going on?

We know that there is a large amount of explicit discrimination—despite it being illegal—against people with autism and related neurodivergences such as attention deficit disorder. At the same time, I’ve already discussed that “high functioning” invisible autism is the most common kind; plenty of autistic people can go about and be affable, so much so that you’d be shocked to learn they have issues with employment, unless they told you so. They may not face explicit stigma, because their employers often never know, and they interview well enough to get jobs, but struggle to keep them for more than a year or two. Monotropism—a tendency toward single-minded attention—is often cited; most people are lousy multitaskers and struggle in today’s distracting offices, but monotropic people are especially bad. Managing multiple streams of incoherent information is hard enough; manipulating people and circumstances—a necessary corporate survival skill—while doing so is almost impossible.

As for monotropism, I call it Grandmaster Syndrome. We see something similar to it as people age; into their forties and fifties and sixties, they get better at their jobs, but experience a slight degradation in performance (or, at least, perceived performance) when required to manage incoherency. If you show a board state of a chess game to a grandmaster and a novice for a minute and ask each person to reconstruct it, the grandmaster will do better by far, surprising nobody. On the other hand, if a truly random setting of pieces is shown—one that would never occur in a real game—the grandmaster’s advantage disappears. As we get better at spotting and working with coherency, we grow worse at handling clutter and chaos. When the grandmaster’s mind can reconstruct the story that led to a game position, she understands it well and can recreate it on a fresh board; when she is shown garbage data and there is no story, she fares poorly. The monotropic brain finds, and quickly clings, to coherency—if underlying patterns are found, the suffering of detail loses its sting—but when there is none to be found or none worth finding, it is frustrating.

This is why a monotropic video game player can fend off five opponents in a multiplayer game—there is an underlying process, the game itself, in which the streams of information, events, and tasks make sense. On the other hand, in an office environment, 99 percent of the emails exist just to be emails and 99 percent of the works spoken exist just to be said; people are spouting gibberish because DDoSing each other keeps everyone employed. It taxes the mind to keep up with all the nonsense, and monotropic people are unskilled at it.

Monotropism is an asset in deep work, but it’s a detriment in most office jobs, where the cognitive demands are very low, but where one must possess the capacity to maintain a pleasant demeanor at all times while handling large quantities of incoherent tedium. The emotional needs of executives that are the real underlying cause of initiatives X and Y, which led to projects A, B, and C, which produced tasks FZN-137 and SQPR-1144 and FKJRA-101, are not truly random, but might as well be, because there is no utility in engaging with said agents or their emotional states, unless one intends to manipulate them, which people with autism spectrum conditions are (no surprise) rarely adept at doing.

Still, while monotropism can be a challenge, I suspect that it, on its own, is not the reason so many people with autism and autism-adjacent conditions struggle with employment. People do not, in general, get fired if they are only monotropic and thus unfairly perceived as scatterbrained; the organization finds a way to work around them. In fact, most people do not get fired because of performance issues at all. Most firings occur because people are disliked. In spite of stereotype, though, most adults with autism are perfectly likeable in normal social situations. Something has to go wrong to turn their benign neurological differences into serious social problems. So what does go wrong, and so often, in workplaces? Monotactism.

The first thing to understand is that people on the autism spectrum tend to be very literal. We do understand irony and sarcasm; some of us are professional humorists and very good at it. When a skill exists to be learned, we will usually do just that. However, this means we suffer in environments where people—convincingly and competitively—behave in ways utterly contrary to what they know to be true. One of the reasons office environments are so difficult for people on the spectrum is that all the fake crises executives invent in order to motivate people (“if we don’t pull an all-nighter, Sprint 77 won’t get out on time!”) feel like real ones. Neurotypicals in an office environment understand social status well enough to know that high-status people get to make their emotional problems everybody else’s, and that their own survival requires the mimicking of sympathetic concern (mirroring) for executive anxiety, but that they also can’t allow themselves to really feel these emotions because, if they did, they would become dysfunctional. Those of us on the spectrum are terrible at this; if our bosses are acting like Sprint 77 is an existential crisis for the business, we behave as if it actually might be.

On the broader topic of social status, there is an improv game where playing cards are dealt and attached to each person’s forehead. No one knows their own card. They must act out each other’s assigned social status for five minutes. Kings are, well, kings. Tens deserve some deference. Sixes are peasants. Twos are absolute dirt. At the end of this process, people guess which card they have been dealt. Usually, they get the right answer within one rank.

I want to speak carefully, because I am discussing subconscious processes rather than deliberate calculation, but neurotypical people are highly attuned to social status and can detect five or six levels of it, in any given context, based on how people dress, how they move, and how they speak. They figure out in a matter of seconds where everybody stands, and then they figure out where they stand, and they know how to act based on this information. When you talk to Bill, the senior executive, you use a specific tone of voice and you prefer body language that is not exactly submissive but is definitely not threatening. On the other hand, Carol is the custodian, so you can probably get away with taking your day out on her, so long as you don’t cause obvious drama. It is not the case—I want to make this clear—that neurotypical people are status-obsessed, manipulative, or deliberate flatterers, any more than we are. This is mostly subconscious. I used to find it disgusting, until I realized that neurotypicals have no more control over these survival adaptations than I do over my lack of them. Plus, most neurotypical people will agree with me that, from a distance, it is stupid and morally unsettling, the degree to which people are treated better or worse based not on personal merits but on whether they have the ability to bring consequences on others. They don’t like that they treat corporate executives with a lighter touch (or more tact) than people their organizations consider expendable; it’s just something they do, because subconscious polytactism is the least energy-draining survival strategy. If your brain automatically detects others’ social status and modifies your behavior without your conscious awareness, you have an advantage over those who have to learn the rules—this is doubly true in notionally informal environments that claim there is no hierarchy and that make it socially unacceptable to acknowledge status differentials at all—and then remember to follow them.

Consider again the scenario above, where programmer Alan is interrupted and pestered and insulted—either by the executive, Bill, or the janitor, Carol. Let us further assume that Alan is monotactic—his brain lacks the internal language for social rank that is necessary for corporate survival. Instead, his brain puts everyone on the same level. If people are nice to him, he’s nice to them. If people interrupt him with stupid questions, he gets annoyed and, even if he has practiced most social skills and can respond politely, he cannot hide the momentary expression of disgust on his face that lasts for about 200 milliseconds. The company considers Carol expendable; it does not matter how he treats her. If he acts that way toward Bill, though, there’ll be hell to pay…

In you ask Carol what she thinks of monotactic Alan, she’ll probably say that he’s a sweetheart. He is one of the few people in the office who does not pretend not to see her, and who treats her like a human being. Bill, on the other hand, almost certainly hates his fucking guts, and he may not even be able to express why. Bill doesn’t have to ask anyone else for his daily fix of feeling feeling superior, but also loved—he just gets it, because of his high social status—but Alan, who completes his tasks but withholds the flattery, will be read as an emotional quiet quitter. The man in the expensive suit has become so addicted to others’ fawning and flattery that his brain fills up with anxiety—do they all think I’m going to be fired? is the company on the rocks?—if he does not get it. (He will probably die of a heart attack or, worse, suicide in the first six months of retirement. Withdrawal from that drug of high status is a bitch.) To Bill, Alan’s “odd” behavior seems passive-aggressive, as if the failure to participate in emotional labor were deliberate, but the truth is that Alan treats Bill exactly as well as he treats Carol—and everyone else. He treats everyone the same, as one should, but that’s also why he can’t hold down a job. If Carol asked him stupid questions, he would begin to see (and treat) her as a stupid person, but she never does this, because she knows she’s not allowed to do it, because she knows that she’s just a janitor. In Bill’s power-addled mind, though, Alan has been on a long campaign to inflict on him a series of microaggressions, none of which would justify termination in isolation, but which erode his executive confidence over time.

If you treat yourself as an eight (in the playing card metaphor) and everyone else as an eight, the people who everyone considers fives have no problem with you, but the people who consider themselves kings—like the VP, Bill—will fantasize about you falling into a trash compactor.

This will worsen, because the hostility between Alan and Bill due to Alan’s monotactism will spread. Alan’s colleagues will suffer collective punishments—note that status meetings don’t exist to root out low performers, but to turn the team against perceived low performers, because the high performers resent having their time wasted in status meetings—due to Alan’s own failure to “manage up.”

Alan, most likely, isn’t stupid. At some point, he will realize he has no future in the firm, and this will reduce his emotional investment in it even further, and he will no longer excel at concealing his dislike for his own unfair situation. If he doesn’t leave first, he’ll be fired for “culture fit”, which is what companies say when they are firing someone they believe might be disabled and are trying to get away with it.

He would have done better, if we’re being honest about the whole thing, to see that a three of clubs had been taped to Carol’s forehead, and that a jack was hanging off Bill’s brow. Monotactism, in the presence of polytactic people, is seen as insidiously disruptive. To people of high status, it reads as a deliberate campaign to subtly undermine them by refusing to communicate in a subordinate register. But it isn’t. Monotactic people only have one register.

I won’t claim to have any expertise on the physical and mental divergences that often attend to autism-spectrum conditions; the reason it is called “a spectrum” is that it is broad and wide. There are people with autism who are crippled by it; there are others who show few signs of disability—who are charming, even—and who may have never been diagnosed, but who inexplicably fail in organizational settings for reasons that are not their fault. It is probable that some people are monotactic but have no other neurodivergences and, therefore, might not even be considered autistic at all. It is out of my specialty to assess the degree to which this is the case.

Why do these neurodivergences, which incur a fitness penalty, persist in the human genome? And why do they correlate so well that a certain cluster—high sensory sensitivity, social awkwardness, high intelligence, monotropism, monotactism—exists? I suspect the answer has something to do with evolutionary game theory.

The irony of the name for this field, game theory, is that it is most often applied to interactions that, unlike games, are not very fun at all—the stakes are high, and there is no room for sportsmanship. The “prisoner’s dilemma”, whereby two individuals are given incentives to screw each other over, resulting in worse outcomes for both, is one example. You’d hardly call it entertainment. Game theory, in this sense, exists not when there is “a game” but when others’ actions will result in one’s own benefit or suffering and it is essential to be able to predict the choices of others.

A zero-sum game, in particular, is one in which each player’s gain requires someone else’s loss in the same amount, hence the name. Poker is zero-sum: if Tom wins $20, other people lost that money. Life, on the other hand, is not zero-sum in general. Breakthroughs in medicine do far more good than harm; environmental catastrophes hurt everyone. There can be more gain to go around than loss, or vice versa.

In order for our ancestors to reproduce at all, we had to develop a knack for conflict, and an inner—sometimes subconscious, sometimes explicit—sense of game theory.

Zero-sum conflicts tend to require quick action. Some people are going to lose (status, friends, wealth, position, life) and others are going to win, and often the only thing that matters is not being the loser. That these conflicts often “should not happen” at all—there is no moral value in them existing; there is only theft and the defense against theft—does not matter, because there will not be time for debate. Most neurotypical people have a strong innate sense for when a zero-sum conflict is about to start, what the sides are going to be, and how to position themselves to minimize the likelihood of losing. Since the world has plenty of thieves and dirtbags and overall rotten people, it is important to know that zero-sum conflict can happen at any time.

Life itself is not zero-sum, but positive-sum opportunities are hard to spot. They usually require attention to detail, creative thinking directed by deep knowledge and single-minded focus. These are all strengths, at times offsetting our social liabilities, of monotropic people. It is easy to find a zero-sum resolution to a problem—in office politics, the “Fuck Greg” algorithm always works if you pick the right Greg. (If you don’t know who the Greg is, the Greg is probably….) On the other hand, finding genuine positive-sum options requires a lot of work—one has to see the problem in a way that nobody else has, and then take on the social risk of introducing a solution, considering that even when a resolution is positive-sum it may have winners and losers, and also that people exist who hate seeing their rivals win, even when they do, and will block good proposals for that reason alone. The skill to find positive-sum options requires some degree of monotropism; the willingness to do it—given that the alternative survival strategy, of punching someone at the bottom of the hierarchy, rarely involves social risk—usually demands monotactism.

Well-adjusted adults know when they are in—and, subconsciously, prepare for—zero-sum games as well as positive-sum ones. It is mandatory, if one wants to survive a competitive social environment like a corporate workplace, to know which regime one is in, because this can change at a moment’s notice. A zero-sum conflict that will involve everyone can erupt anywhere in the office, and it is necessary to know in advance, so as to be prepared in case a cold war goes hot, who can be attacked and how. This requires polytactism. At least 90 percent of adults are hardwired to be capable in both kinds of games. When positive-sum opportunities exist, they will participate in the search for them, and usually extend protection, if they can, to the monotropic people leading the searches; at the same time, when a zero-sum conflict starts, they know how to fight for their lives. They are, in essence, “well-adjusted” according to the rules of society.

More confusingly for the neurodivergent, the social unacceptability of zero-sum games, and of those people who revel in them, requires the use of positive-sum language and theory. Corporate life is post-truth; it is might-makes-right, but it must call itself a meritocracy in which the good of the company, as well as the firm’s benefit to the broader society, actually matter. People almost never openly make zero-sum attacks; they always have to be dressed in positive-sum language. “I don’t dislike Dave, but the team have confided in me that…” “If we weren’t slowed down by all this diversity, our firm would be able to…” The best zero-sum players understand positive-sum language and thinking, even though they rarely invest in it themselves, so they can manipulate it.

Indeed, at the other end of this spectrum, there is a class of humans—in this case, possibly defined by behavior rather than neurology—who seek out and excel in zero-sum conflicts. For a contrast, the average neurotypical person, while able (unlike us) to wage a zero-sum battle when one must be fought, finds the whole practice disgusting and enervating. But the ultra-adept people in the small group I am talking about find zero-sum conflict energizing. They can wage office politics for 40, 60, 80 hours per week. Discord and humiliation and suffering are fun for them, so they outlast everyone else. In addition, they are highly rejection-resistant, they never expend the emotional investment that positive-sum opportunities require, and they are so affable and glib, they easily acquire positions of leadership. These people are called psychopaths. Some become criminals, some become dictators; most land in-between the two and become corporate executives, to the point that, in the upper ranks of managerial capitalism, psychopaths are a tone-setting plurality if not an absolute majority. People with total deletions of conscience rule the world.

Perversely and offensively, when autism was first discovered—at the time, the term was only applied to severe cases, not the mild ones more common on the spectrum—it was called “autistic psychopathy.” It was believed that people with this category of condition, then studied only in children, lacked empathy, conscience, and “theory of mind.” It turns out that none of this is true. Autistic children had less empathy than neurotypicals because they were children—all children have deficient empathy, relative to neurotypical adults. On average, neurodivergent people have more abstract, universal empathy (as evident by how we treat animals) that may or may not come at the cost of the superficial kind of empathy that a person must show to high-status individuals to avoid being disliked. In fact, it is because of our monotactism that we are perceived by people in positions of power and authority as empathy-deficient, but it is not really the case, and we are not perceived this way universally.

The issue of “theory of mind”, and of social skills in general, is more complicated. Neurotypical and autism-spectrum people both tend to assume symmetry and reciprocity—all of us seem to want to believe that other people have similar values to, and use the same social language as, ourselves. We both have the same theory of mind: “This other person is just like me.” Thing is, neurotypicals are right about 95 percent of the time; we in the neurosocial minority—I’ll use this term, because I don’t think all of us would be diagnosed as being on “the autism spectrum”—are right 5 percent of the time. It’s the same logical process, the same reasoning, but it’s wrong for us and correct for most, simply because we’re the minority. The discrepancy between how we are primed to view the human species (as like us) and the actual truth is much greater for us than it is for neurotypical people. We don’t understand neurotypicals and they don’t understand us; they would probably recoil at the thought of being dropped into a world were 95% of people are like us instead of like them, but that’s the world we live in every day.

There is a concept that has fallen out of favor in psychology—it probably has no medical significance or biological existence—of the sociopath, as distinct from the psychopath. (It is likely that one of the reasons the word was retired is that, in practice, they were used interchangeably.) A psychopath lacks conscience—he is not necessarily going to do evil things, but the internal processes that would penalize him for doing harm are not there. A sociopath, on the other hand, has conscience but, more particularly, lacks the conscience imposed by society. Pirates (“good sociopaths”) were less inclined to violence and more likely to run their ships is democratic fashion than legal privateers. Robin Hood, if he existed, fulfills this archetype to the point of being synonymous with it. Our kind of “sociopathy” comes not from a lack of conscience but a surfeit of it; it exists in people who are so moral, society’s conscience feels flat, hypocritical, and insufficient, leading us to ignore it. The dysfunctions of these “good sociopaths” can be similar—legal issues, disreputable behavior, unstable employment—to those of the mid-functioning and low-functioning psychopaths, but the causes are exactly opposite: these “sociopaths” are too moral, too conscientious, to fit in.

The death of Aaron Swartz in 2013 convinced me that there was such a thing as an “anti-psychopath”, and that such people are not all that uncommon. It is not hard to see why nature produced the psychopath—such a person is the cancer cell, individually fit at the expense of the organism. In pre-monogamous societies, psychopathy in a male led to 10 or 20 or 50 times as many sexual opportunities (and still does in modern casual sex; that, thankfully, is mostly nonreproductive.) So you don’t have to work very hard to understand why psychopathy exists, in a world where malaria and cancer also exist—things can be shitty but still “fit” in a survival or reproductive sense and therefore proliferate. But if conscience were a spectrum, there had to be an other side. What would that look like? It didn’t take much time to reach the conclusion that such an anti-psychopath, like sociopaths in the outdated terminology, would be seen as even more dysfunctional than the psychopath. In the modern business environment, where ruthless is highest compliment, psychopaths are seen as necessary, especially at executive levels. Businesses don’t love psychopaths, but they love “their” psychopaths. Anti-psychopathy, on the other hand, is disruptive and they have no use for it.

A psychopath is, arguably, individually over-fit. He can act like anyone else—even an anti-psychopath—for an unbounded amount of time. He will please the high-status people around him and he will flatter them with mimicry, exploit their biases, and punish their enemies for them, until he is accepted as one of them. The psychopath is diseased, but in no way disabled; the anti-psychopath is, by her excess of conscience, disabled but not diseased.

I don’t know whether all anti-psychopaths are on the autism spectrum; I would guess that many are, and that many are not. Certainly, I have met a number of anti-psychopaths who have no signs of autism, and I have met autistic people who do not seem to be anti-psychopathic. I am sure, though, that a correlation exists, because anti-psychopathy is objectively a neurodivergence. The socially fluent (probably non-autistic) variety of the anti-psychopath might be aware of polytactism and the narcissistic needs of high-status people, but she still seems to be monotactic in spirit. My guess is that a fully non-autistic anti-psychopath would be able to get and keep jobs, and that her natural conscientiousness might help her get promoted into middle management, but that she would never thrive there. The executives may not fire her for being too good of a person, but they will never fully trust her, if they know she is a good person, to put the bosses’ interests above those of the people she manages. because that something good people do not do. At some point, they will ask her to collect some human ears so show that she is a “tough” and that she is “management material” and, when she refuses to do so, they will decide she is not up to serious work.

Worryingly, there are a number of people in high places in the technology industry who use an affected aura of autism—I suspect, in most cases, they do not have it—as a smokescreen to disguise their psychopathy. We do not think of “nerds” as being capable of intentional harm, but it is not hard for a business executive to fake Asperger’s in an industry that pretends to be tolerant (even though this toleration, in truth, only extends to upper-class white males) of idiosyncrasy. A lot of these technology bosses, however, are known to be full-bore psychopaths. It is very likely that they are faking mild autism to give themselves plausible deniability.

Still, in people who actually have neurodivergences, I suspect there is a strong tendency toward anti-psychopathy. Psychopaths are optimized to win zero-sum conflicts; anti-psychopaths are built to find positive-sum opportunities, because it’s the only way we can survive. If one thing strongly links autism spectrum disorders and anti-psychopathy, I suspect it is the tendency toward monotactism, coupled with a genuine desire (even if it does result in the verbose sharing of information and, sometimes, impractical idealism) to be helpful to everyone.

There is so much that remains unknown—about neurodiversity, about monotropism, about sensory processing, and about human social development in general—and a full analysis of our situation would require books written by people with far more expertise than me. I do believe, however, that I have answered one of the most pressing and vexing questions, which is: Why do people with mild autistic traits—even the pleasant, interesting, and downright charming ones who do fine in standard social interactions—struggle so much with employment? Why do people who clearly aren’t doing anything wrong fail still to meet society’s standards, even though those standards are, for neurotypical people of middle- or upper-class origin, very easy to meet?

The broad answer, of course, is that corporate employment is itself a dysfunctional institution—it exists not out of need for work, but as a way for upper class people to pay their rivals not to do useful work. Google pays people $400,000 per year to work on tickets not because it believes their work is worth that much—it knows that the same work could be done at one-tenth the price overseas—but as a way of encouraging them not to form competitors. It isn’t enough to show up at a job like that and do the (easy, minimal) work; you also have to do the emotional labor. You have to make clear—overly clear—not only your operational loyalty (i.e., commitment not to directly harm) but also apparent personal loyalty to the bosses and their elevated social status, in which you must present yourself as an absolute believer. This, for monotactic people who start out not knowing the rules, and who later learn them but find ourselves disgusted and unable to hide our disgust for very long without volitional depletion, makes it very hard to hold down jobs—a non-issue for neurotypical people.

What we observe in the existence of monotacism is a “minified” bug report—a clear case where people are punished for their virtues, but also an explanation for so much in the broader field of social dysfunction.