The Self-Reliance Disorder

On a common and commonly misunderstood condition.

It is possible that you were once invited to a party, and at that gathering, one of the guests made a comment about a tree or trees in general, leading to another person remarking that, in fact, there is no such thing as a tree. There are maples and oaks and pines and firs and cycads and sycamores, but plant species switch between tree and non-tree phenotypes so quickly, in evolutionary terms, that we have no cladistic definition—as we do with birds, who share common ancestors among the dinosaurs, even if not all species fly—of which ones are trees and which are not. Palms are grasses that evolved a new way to make wood and became, in most senses, trees. Banana plants are gigantic herbs, but function, ecologically, like trees. Surely, when you were told that “there’s no such thing as a tree,” you were informed of all this. You probably thought the person bringing the topic up was autistic.

Here our story begins. We know, with regard to depression, that there is not one medical condition called depression so much as it is a symptom produced by dozens of diseases. It is probably the same with autism, that there is not one condition of this kind but several—some crippling, some mild, and some possibly advantageous. It is telling, of our conformist capitalist society, how quick it is to classify mental conditions not with a desire to understand what they really are, but instead according to the inconveniences they impose on others. As with trees—trees exist, but they are not one clade—I suspect that what we call autism is a set of adaptations and traits emerging from a number of disparate neurological causes, some of which would not be disabling, except in the context of our deranged corporatized society where all signs of neurosocial minority language invite prejudice and discrimination. In other words, there are some conditions called autistic that are objectively crippling; there are others that would be harmless or beneficial in a society that were not so hellbent on pitting workers against each other in endless and often pointless competition.

We cannot directly measure or compare brains themselves, because they’re far too complex, but we can measure physical traits like reaction time, as well as psychological preferences and intellectual aptitudes. We could, in theory, record dozens or hundreds of measurements for each person, and plot each one’s neurological configuration as a point in this high-dimensional space. Since nobody—not even us shape-rotating weirdos—can visualize a thousand-dimensional space, let’s pretend there are two or three; the metaphor still works. There is a strong central tendnecy; that is, about 90 percent of the observed data points (neurotypes) will be close to the center and can be considered usual or typical—neurotypical. Of course, there is substantial diversity even in this central region, and it would be insulting to stereotype such people according to one example, real or synthetic, so we will not do that. There isn’t one way to be neurotypical, nor such a thing as a “typical” neurotypical. Or, as neurotypical advocates will remind you, if you’ve met one neurotypical person, you’ve met one neurotypical person.

The rest of the space, the world outside this central region, the “everywhere else”, is where 5-10 percent of us live and this is the neurodivergent space. It is, by its nature, larger and more variable than the neurotypical region. Neither of these categories is superior to the other, not is one innately defective. They seem to exist for separate reasons; human society needs neurodivergent people for innovation and exploration, but needs the neurotypical limitations of neurotype variation in order for groups of people to work together. The world would be worse with one and not the other.

A socially relevant third subspecies, which may or may not be driven by neurotype, is the psychopath. We know that some psychopaths (e.g., Charles Manson) are probably neurodivergent, while many others (e.g., most corporate executives) seem to be otherwise entirely neurotypical. There are also the issues inherent to confusing or conflating bad character—what most people mean by psychopathy—and innate neurological traits. I say this as a religious-leaning person who believes good and evil objectively exist, and that they must be chosen; in this view, it is impossible that an “evil” neurotype would exist, just as no animal is evil while following its natural programming. There’s a lot that we don’t know. What we do know is that conscience and empathy, like sensory hypersensitivities and limitations, impose constraints and reduce individual social fitness; if they are deleted, it gives a person, if not more options, more ease when executing the uglier options. Psychopaths, if we speak in terms of the social ramifications, are neither neurodivergent nor neurotypical—they fluidly adopt the superficial mannerisms of both categories, while experiencing none of the neurodivergent disadvantages. It is most likely, in my mind, that psychopaths exist both among the neurotypical and neurodivergent populations, although they tend to be mildly neurodivergent at worst, because (a) having too much empathy (without the competence to express it in a socially acceptable way) is a more common autistic trait than the lack of it, and (b) the social skills of the psychopath are incompatible with moderate-to-severe neurodivergence.

These days, we know that there isn’t one neurodivergence, but that there are several. Some people are monotropic but do not have the sensory or social issues associated with autism; this is called ADHD. A person who is monotactic but can read social cues will usually be able to survive most workplaces, although she’s unlikely to be promoted due to her lack of fluency in hierarchical workplaces—in her case, she might go undiagnosed. Epilepsy—a serious, objective disability—is generally considered a non-autistic neurodivergence, because it does not inherently increase the difficulty of learning social skills, though autistic people are far more likely to have it. A person who struggles, despite normal or high verbal ability, to parse written symbols is called dyslexic, but would not be considered autistic if that were the sole neurodivergence. We have defined autism, so far, negatively—the neurodivergences we understand, especially if they do not directly lead to social vulnerability, are generally considered non-autistic. So, then, is autism simply a “bucket of whatever’s left” category, a diagnosis of exclusion? Maybe, but I don’t think so.

Historically, the label of autism was only used in cases of severe childhood disability. When nonverbal children grew up to become adults of normal or above-normal verbal intelligence, they were considered “cured” of autism. We now know that autism is lifelong; they probably exhibited at least mild social ineptitude (Asperger’s Syndrome) in adolescence and were at high risk of anxiety and depression for their entire life—on the other hand, they were also more likely to be highly creative people with exceptional pattern-recognition skills and memory of detail. There is no “cure” for autism, or for any objective neurodivergence; some people adapt to the condition’s challenges and some do not. Autism was once considered to be a form of childhood schizophrenia (it wasn’t, and isn’t) or a version of psychopathy (when, in fact, it’s the diametric opposite of psychopathy, since it imposes social penalties) or, in some cases, intellectual disability, hence the savant archetype, which mostly isn’t real—most cases of “idiots savant” involved people of normal or high general intelligence who were written off by their parents, or by society, and prematurely institutionalized. Mild versions of autistic disability are associated with high intelligence—this used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome, which is no longer considered a separate condition.

Today, medical opinions seem to be converging on the view that: (a) autism is lifelong; (b) it confers benefits as well as liabilities; (c) it is not an absolute disability in many cases, but a relative social one, in the same way that people in Japan do not have an absolute lack of language skills despite their lower proficiency in English; (d) that there is a wide range of expressions and degrees, hence the spectrum; (e) that “high functioning” autism is actually the most common kind, although this label is no longer used because of the occupationally disabling bigotry even “high functioning” neurodivergents face; and (f) that it is not, nor has it ever been, rare, with about 5 percent of the population—most of whom will never be diagnosed—on the spectrum, a percentage that increases as IQ climbs above 120.

In the past, people were usually diagnosed based on when they were observed. Children with verbal regression had “classic autism”, the hard-core kind, but were thought to be “cured” if their verbal regression ended, as it often did. Those who had established normal or high verbal intelligence but struggled socially, either due to difficulty reading social cues or sensory divergences, tended to be found in late childhood or adolescence—the “little professors” with Asperger’s Syndrome. In adults, and especially in women, the condition has been so frequently misread—symptoms written off, attributed to a nonexistent malady called hysteria, classified under ill-defined “personality disorders”, blamed on poor character or attention-seeking behavior—it is shameful. We’ve gotten better, but it’d be a mistake to believe we’re out of the Dark Ages yet. On the contrary, there is no way for a capitalist society like ours—malignantly obsessed with trait laziness even though it probably doesn’t exist; focused on punishment at the expense of harm prevention; leaving individuals primed to take advantage of others’ weaknesses, especially in zero-sum social competitions like workplace politics—to handle mental health in a civilized way. This corporate-sponsored atrocity that passes for a society is a miserable place to live even for neurotypical people, so neurodivergent people often have no chance at all.

We’ll simplify our arguments by assuming we know what neurodivergences are—they are differences in the functioning and structure of a person’s brain that tend to result in measurable excesses or deficits of important abilities. There are probably dozens of these, including some that have never been categorized, but discussion of autism usually functions on those with direct social or sensory effects. These include, although this list is far from complete: difficulty interpreting social cues, atypical emotional expression, conversational monotropism (“special interests”), monotactism, minority neurosocial behavior, need for stimulation, and sensory issues if they interfere (e.g., misophonia) with social function. Of course, even here, there’s a lot of room for diversity. I would guess that I know at least three dozen diagnosed or diagnosably autistic people, and the truth is that they’re all quite different. Some are the kindest, nicest people you’ll meet; others (although this is uncommon) are nasty and intentionally rude. Some autistic people rebel against all forms of routine; others crave or require it. Some are introverts; some are extroverts. Some have absolutely no sense of humor; others are masterfully capable comedy writers and even comedians. Some are socially inept everywhere; some are socially adept—social talents are what autistic people lack, but social skills can be learned—in most circumstances. Some are exceedingly—in the view of those around them, detrimentally—honest; others (although, again, this is rare) lie pathologically. Some people’s symptoms are sensory more than social; for others, it is the reverse. There is no single pattern that always applies to every autistic person.

As no one clade of plant exists that can be called “trees”, there is probably no single condition called “autism”—it seems to be applied either in cases of socially disabling neurodivergence, or in cases of multiple neurodivergence, but there seems to be no specific neurodivergence common to all autistic people—and yet we have not deleted either word from our language, nor necessarily should we. Some people are clearly different in ways that are usually not harmful, but difficult and often insidiously harmful to hide (“mask”). It is hard to separate what is emergent or epigenetic from what is innate, but there do seem to be commonalities in the experiences and life patterns of people with autistic neurodivergences.

Here, we define autism most broadly—it includes the undiagnosed population, and covers all neurodivergences that are unavoidable social disabilities or that impose occupational constraints—by which definition about 5 percent of the population would be considered autistic. Many of these people have normal social skills and have been told they “can’t be autistic” because they don’t look the part, but reliably suffer discrimination in the workplace, due to their lack of fluency when it comes to zero-sum social games and hierarchies. Their need for dignity and reciprocity—their inability to accept “because I said so” as valid reasoning—is often labelled “pathological demand avoidance” even though it is no such thing; there is, simply put, a different implicit social contract from the one that neurotypical people have.

One might wonder why it is important that at least 5 percent of the population can be considered autistic if most of them will never be diagnosed. Are we not watering down the definition or, worse, gentrifying it by including people (like me) who can mostly function as neurotypical? No. What we have discovered is not the absence of a disability, but a disability that is sometimes invisible even to the people who have it, people who will reliably—through no fault of their own, and for reasons they do not understand—end up in low positions of workplace hierarchies, in spite of (and, if they are targeted by psychopaths, because of) capabilities that we would expect should put them near the top, or at least protect them. Whether diagnosed or not, the overwhelming majority of people with autistic neurodivergences are unemployed or underemployed, and this does not improve with education. We should consider it a virtue is someone does not exhibit skill in the zero-sum social squabbling that drives the corporate world; we should not be committing mass economic abortion against them. There are at least two reasons this is a problem. One is, simply put, social justice: if people who can competently do most jobs are excluded from them for irrelevant reasons, this is harmful and must be fixed. The second is that the struggles faced by neurodivergent people are diagnostic of pathologies in our society that affect everyone; likewise, improving workplace environments for autistic people will have only positive results (the “curb-cut effect”) for non-autistic workers.

The fact that several million highly capable people have been excluded from the economy, and that this has gone largely unnoticed by mainstream society, is a shocking travesty and there is no excuse for it.

Although the neurodivergences themselves may be different, the neurodivergent experience tends to lead reliably to certain observable traits that are often considered trademarks of autism, even if they are not necessarily direct products of neurodivergence. One is verbal bluntness, to the point of seeming rude. We don’t mean to be. For neurotypicals, explicit verbal address is the second or third tier of conflict resolution—except when one party considers the other to be of very low status—after first-tier nonverbal cues have failed. When we jump immediately to this, we are not trying to lower anybody’s status—we do it because verbal communication comes naturally to us, even after we learn the social cues, as the our first-tier approach. I suspect this trait is a product of several neurodivergences—a result of sensory issues that influence the processing of social cues, pushing us to rely instead on a more explicit and precise language—than a specific single one. Likewise, there is an autistic sense of humor that I can recognize instantaneously, but that few people in the developed world understand, as it is rooted in the experience of being frequently betrayed, unable to trust most people, and in the constant presence of physical danger (autistic people are frequently assaulted and abused.) A very large percentage of autistic people, unsurprisingly, have PTSD, which can be far more disabling than the autism itself.

I used to believe autism was the wrong name for the condition—αυτός (autos) means “self”, but neurodivergent people are not more selfish or less empathetic than neurotypical people; that is an outdated and harmful belief that is not only false but, in some cases, antithetical to the truth. Still, there is an element of the autistic character to which I think this label applies. Autistic people strive to be self-reliant. Sadly, not all people with the condition can be—some have very high support needs and always will—but there is, I think, a sense deep within the autistic character that other people and especially society cannot be relied-upon. They have a strong tendency, when facing adversity, to try to figure everything out on their own. This is well-founded, too. From an autistic perspective, ordinary people (“neurotypicals”) are lazy—they care more (although, in adulthood, I see that this is not always a non-virtue) about socially correct results than literally correct ones—and duplicitous. I do not believe, morally speaking, “neurotypicals” are any worse or any better than the neurodivergent population. Some of them are saints; some of them are reprobates—same as with us. That said, there is a common refrain among neurotypicals on the political center and right: “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” My neurodivergent retort: If you’re so much more socially skilled than us, then why are most of your societies garbage? Because that is the truth, now isn’t it? “Neurotypicals” are not a monolith and most of them are not bad people at all, but the societies they build inevitably get infested at the highest levels with psychopaths, and therefore turn into dogshit places to live, not only for us but for them.

Neurotypical and neurodivergent people are both prone to exploitation by psychopaths. Neurotypicals tend to behave like sheep because it is socially advantageous to follow the leader; even if one does not want to challenge him for the position, anything less than unconditional enthusiasm (as is requisite in today’s oversocialized, arch-neurotypical workplace) will be read as obstruction or ambition and may result in open combat. At the same time, autistic people can be sheepish in our own ways; we get swept up into perverse cults too. I shan’t speculate on Ayn Rand’s neurotype, but her brand of pathological individualism was sufficiently charismatic, in the American century, to the autistic mind as well as the neurotypical one that it found acceptance even in supposedly intellectual circles. I suspect, as well, that many of the young men pulled into toxic grievance cultures (“red pill” pickup artistry and “black pill” incel rage) are on the spectrum. The difference, and what makes the neurodivergent brand of sheepish wrongness also dangerous, is that it fixates on ideas (wrong ones) rather than specific people, so personnel changes will not suffice—religious bigotries such as Islamic extremism can’t be defeated by dispatching a few hundred key people, while neoliberal capitalism (as the ideas themselves have no charisma) probably could be. The autistic loyalty model is inflexibly two-sided—we only show loyalty to people who show it to us, and that is very rare because we usually do not acquire high social status—while the rank-driven neurotypical one, at least in the masquerade that one must uphold in order to survive the workplace, is one-sided. Neurotypical people tend, except in the case of combat veterans and refugees, to see society (or “the system”) as something that could be or should be a home; autistic people see it as a war machine that will inevitably turn its devices on them.

There is a personal element to this observation of extreme and pathological self-reliance. I am finishing up a novel called Farisa’s Crossing. It is almost entirely done. At this point, I’m mostly focused on minor edits that 99 percent of readers wouldn’t even notice, that are unlikely to change negative reviews into positive ones, and that certainly won’t influence sales in a major way. Literary fiction is, as I’ve discussed, exponentially harder than commercial fiction. Commercial prose must communicate the story and then get out of the way. Literary prose has to tell the story in the best possible way. And that is actually literally impossible, at least in practical terms, because the problem, even if we pretend objectivity exists, is exponentially difficult—for example, to find “the right way” to order the presentation of 20 items requires us to check 20! (2.432 quintillion) different possibilities, which is ridiculous. So, we have to make it look like we have done this impossible thing, and we are afforded some plausible deniability by the subjective nature of literature, but not all that much and very, very little by ourselves. This is what most people call perfectionism, but even that word isn’t right, because I know full well that perfection is impossible and it is not exactly what I am going for—it suffices if nobody can spot objective, meaningful imperfections, but even that is hard.

Anyway, the sheer amount of effort and emotional energy and time involved in polishing a 350,000-word epic literary fantasy to such a high standard opens me up to the question: why didn’t you just give up and toss it over the wall of a traditional publishing house?

Of course, “one does not simply” go into traditional publishing—it requires getting an agent, which is time-consuming and demoralizing—and then putting up with further rejection until a publishing house picks up the manuscript and offers a deal that, usually, will be disappointing. It’s hard. Most people, completely justifiably, give up. Plenty of excellent writers are and will continue to be excluded by traditional publishing, and even many who get in will never find a significant audience, let alone be able to survive on writing income, because the industry is not optimizing to publish the best books, nor is it even necessarily interested in commercial potential—that is too difficult to measure or define—but, instead, optimized to sell whatever is easiest to sell. The chain of approvals one must secure—one needs an agent’s intern to forward the manuscript to the agent, the agent must then agree to represent it, and there are several in-house sign-offs necessary to make a book deal happen means that authors are not trying to write books that readers will love, but that people will show to their boss. It’s ideal to get both, but they’re different objectives. And then there are issues of the work’s length—I would be forced to chop it into pieces, despite strong artistic reasons for not doing so, because publishers dislike big books—as well as my gender because, while the perception of publishing being biased against “white men” is halfway inaccurate—whiteness and race have nothing to do with it—there is an anti-male bias in today’s traditional publishing world. I don’t think this exists because of an explicit desire to exclude men, so much as that the business is so bourgeois, it runs in ways that exclude masculine ways of solving problems (which, incidentally, result in many problems never being solved.) You are not allowed, for example, if your print run is one-tenth of what you were promised or your marketing budget is misspent or your work does not get the publicity campaign it requires, to call people up and confront them and tell them to do their jobs and get things right. It is simply not done. If you want to stay traditionally published, you have to accept that it is your fault and only yours when someone else screws up. I suspect that most literary agents pass on male authors not because they harbor an explicit dislike for us, but because, even though this isn’t a male/female issue—there are plenty of women as well who “care too much” about the fate of their work and will go beyond the bounds of social acceptability in an attempt to have things done right—there is a feeling that men aren’t worth the excess risk of this. Trade publishing, in truth, is an ugly business. They may butcher your work to make it more marketable and this does not always actually result in decent sales. They may change your title or give you a rotten cover. They may screw up in ways that cause you to flop—an executive spends your marketing budget on hookers and blow, or reallocates your publicity opportunities to his grandson’s novel set in a prep school—and you are expected to accept this because, after all, you are privileged to be in traditional publishing at all and there are a million querying wannabes who will take your place. Your sales will usually be terrible, because the only marketing strategies that reliably work will never be expended on a first-time author. So, given all this, why do people put up with traditional publishing at all? Two words. It’s easy. It’s hard to get in—even if you have ChatGPT write those groveling query letters and those horrible two-page synopses, you’re still going to deal with a lot of rejection and never know why—and the reward isn’t usually all that great—your publishing house has an economic incentive not to invest much in an unknown author—but, once you do a few basic things that most writers can, if they put in the time, you can call yourself Published and, therefore, can show other people (it will do less for your own insecurity than you think) that you are not completely delusional about your own writing ability. In sum, traditional publishing, if you’re so sick of a book—and I won’t blame you, because this stuff’s really hard—that you just want to be done with it and have someone else handle the last mile, can be the way to go, even in 2024 with congested slush piles and the anti-male biases of literary agents.

On the other hand, if you self-publish, you have to deal with all sorts of difficulties on your own. Self-publishing properly is much harder than using a traditional publisher. You don’t have a team of people whose job is to keep abreast of changes in Amazon’s algorithm, so you will have to figure that stuff out yourself. You aren’t able to get 1000 people (these days, they’re probably bots) on Twitter to talk about your book so people start buying it in order to, at least, pretend they read it. (Obviously, you prefer the real thing, but a sale is a sale.) You rely on word of mouth—which can be exponential, but it’s a slow exponential—rather than the devices and manipulations that traditional publishers use to make even their midlist authors appear organically popular. As a self-publisher, you don’t have someone in your camp who will—this is how the sausage is made in Manhattan—ensure a New York Times review of your book by threatening to block people’s kids from prestigious preschools unless the job is done on time. You have, as a self-publisher, no social proof, no way to assure potential buyers that the work is any good. Price your book high, and you’ll seem insufferably arrogant, which you is a look you can’t afford yet. Price it low—or give it away for free—and you’ll both devalue it and, empirically, you are at risk of getting worse readership—lower completion rates, lower review rates. If you self-publish, you have to find a way to reach readers despite every information channel being congested and most of the important resources having been stolen by capitalists long ago.

When it comes to writing, and especially self-editing, my neurodivergence is an absolute strength. The fact that I can rewrite a sentence or scene five times and still find ways to improve it, taking it to 97 and 98 and 99 and 99.5 when most people would have stopped at 90, makes me quite rare, and I suspect this is not because I possess extreme verbal talent so much as it is a factor of patience. That kind of detail-oriented work is something most people can’t stand—even in the top 10 percent of trade publishing, it is rare to see one author give a work that kind of attention. At the same time, neurodivergence can be a disability when it comes to heterogeneous task streams (“executive function”) and thorny social problems—such as when to address and when to ignore the inevitable negative reviews. Even neurotypicals, at some point, end up needing to build a team. We are actually not always terrible at this. When circumstances emerge and a leader is actually necessary, it is usually one of us who steps into the job. It is when leaders are not necessary except as a measure of social rank—as in business, 99 percent of the time—that we are selected-against, because our of lack of skill in the zero-sum social competitions among humans that are actually about nothing. Still, in any case, building a team requires resources—connections and money—that do not come easily to neurodivergent people. The jobs where real money is made are rare and we are almost never able to get them.

The self-reliance that comes from being a perpetual outsider may be a gift. In a real crisis, our insights are needed and our leadership is welcome, but people do not like states of crisis, and we realize over time that, the more right we are, the less likely we will be to be able to convince others to see things our way. We think in different ways from peacetime neurotypicals. We want to see the best idea achieve implementation, and we happily stand down when someone else’s concept or proposal is better than ours, but errantly expect that others will do the same, while the truth is that most people just want “their” ideas, not necessarily the best ones, to win—the faux-meritocracy of the corporate world does not exist to get the right answers, but to assert the inherent correctness of viewpoints held by specific privileged people. We learn over time that we can’t trust others very far; most of them will betray us if people of higher status ask them to do so—forget thirty pieces of silver; they’ll do it for free—and they won’t even feel bad about it. We become stubbornly self-reliant as a point of pride, and often we reinvent wheels and overextend ourselves, but we also learn things about society and survival in it that most people would rather not acknowledge. And we tend to become very good at whatever we decide to do.

I suspect strongly that we need neurotypicals—that, even if we were the neurosocial majority, we would still have cause to welcome them into our world (even though most of them are not, in general, willing to do this for us.) At many tasks involved in administering to the needs of a collective or organization, they are usually better. At the same time, they need us. They might not perceive that they need many of us, and they find us annoying so they try to reduce our number when possible, but whenever there are none of us left, decay sets in quite rapidly. Consider corporate life. Once the weirdos are driven out, the environment becomes homogeneous and bland, to the point that even neurotypical people hate being there. There probably were a few people like us around during the innovation stage, but they’re put out to pasture once the company goes—and it wants to do this, for the sake the financial security of founders and investors—into maintenance mode, at which point we are deemed unnecessary (as, in fact, we probably are) to fulfill basic business functions. Does this lead to slow decay? Sure. However, corporate executives understand that this kind of gradual degradation of function is the future’s problem—an executive’s real objective is to get the next promotion as soon as possible; if he’s in the same place in ten years, he has failed. What companies lose when we are gone is usually not an immediate need. So, neurotypical societies tend to get rid of us quickly—the psychopaths target us, while neurotypicals rarely mean harm but are easily sold on the value of conformity, the “unified front”—at the expense of their long-term vitality. In not much time at all, the organization or society becomes a place where neurotypicals can’t stand to be either. Neurodivergent people are, for reasons we do not understand, vital to the functioning of the collective, as are neurotypical people. At the same time, nothing is really gained through the proliferation of stifling, rank-bound work environments that keep neurodivergent people out—our society would be better off without them, as they are not a necessity for getting useful work done.

In 2020, it became clear to me that our society was going through the same sort of decline that began in the 1980s within the Soviet bloc, between Chernobyl and the Romanian crisis and the ambitions of psychopaths (e.g., Yeltsin, Putin) who, because they (like our current Davos-attending elites) stood to become very rich and powerful through their nation’s dissolution and defeat, brought such events on. The promotion of extreme capitalism has made us so averse to socialism that we have instead been led to worship antisocialism. It is increasingly common for adults to be friendless and single; they have “contacts” at the office, but no real chance of meaningful relationships, because circumstances can emerge at any time that force a worker to stab another in the back or lose his job. Young families and new parents are discovering the extreme difficulty and expensiveness of raising children in today’s world wherein “the village”—that is, the network of mutual aid that existed before capitalist workplaces and mindless media empires maximized their ability to command everyone’s time—is gone. Alcoholism—overreliance on that rotting-fruit potion that makes corporate life tolerable and that makes neurotypical special interests actually interesting—is on the rise. I say this not to gloat but in concern: neurotypicals are becoming a lot more like us. The reason is not a silent epidemic of neurodivergence, but trauma.

As I said before, neurotypicals have the skills necessary to build complex societies but, once we who are neurodivergent are driven out, they end up with worthless ones ruled by psychopaths. In fact, we are usually the first ones the psychopaths target, at least if corporate experience is indicative. This decay is attributed to “human nature”, but I ask: which humans? The fact that at least 5 percent of the population, even though most of them were never diagnosed as autistic or even recognized as disabled, have been systematically maltreated by employers, and that nobody figured this out until recently, suggests that we as a species do not have the strongest possible understanding of what our true nature is, let alone what our limitations are. The tendency of human societies to fail—to fill with psychopaths in the upper ranks, to therefore lose executive function—may not be inexorable; it might be possible, if we listen to the right people, for humans to build societies that actually work.