Why do NTs sometimes react angrily to people with AS?

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Did you not go to Junior or Senior High School? Did you not see the kid get shoved in a locker? Kids pointing and laughing at the "loser"? The wedgies, the bullying, the teasing, the name-calling, the whispered insults, the gossip....


Either some people were completely blind to this sort of activity, called it "normal behaviour" (and wondered why people got so darned upset about it) or were participating in these activities along with their peer group, so it just seemed like the right thing to do. You don't see any "jerks" if you're one of the jerk-crowd and they're all your good buddies who treat you nice.

It's not just me being overly sensitive - the two worlds just don't communicate well because people on planet "Earth" have little desire to trouble themselves with the foreign "Martian Weirdoes".

Thankfully, the vast majority of the population is not twelve years old.

Perhaps I should have said that I haven't known any of those horrid jerks since I was a child. I do not know any adult who regularly shoves anyone into a locker or gives anyone a wedgie or steals their lunch money or calls them names. Do you?

And actually I was one of the people getting shoved into lockers, thankyouverymuch. (And yes, I'm NT. Shocked?) Guess what? Both the people who got shoved into lockers and the people who shoved them grow up and become civilized adults in the end. And while I doubt I'd ever be friends with the actual people who did such things to me, that doesn't mean that the guy in the office next to mine regularly pulls my pigtails, even though he certainly would have twenty years ago.

I don't necessarily get along with everyone I meet, but overall, everyone I know is basically a civilized human being who does not beat up their girlfriend for having AS and is not engaged in a vast conspiracy to exclude everyone who is not their clone from participating in society, because by the time one is an adult, most people have learned that you have to be polite to everyone and most importantly, that everyone is different and you have to get along with them anyway.

It's not at all like two different planets. It's like someone is from Los Angeles, and then someone is from Las Vegas, and then someone is from Flagstaff, and then someone is Albuquerque, and then someone is from Denver, and then someone is from Oklahoma City, and eventually there's someone from Portland, Maine. And while Los Angeles and Portland are really far apart, there are six billion people between one and the other, and each of them is so close to the next that there's virtually no difference.

I don't think you're being overly sensitive. I think that either you're a teenager dealing with other teenagers, or that you're grossly misinterpreting people's actions based on past negative experiences.

Nope. Full-grown adult, dealing with other full-grown adults doing the "grown-up" version of the same kind of things. Name-calling, cut-downs, exclusion, workplace bullying, workplace hostility, gossip.... you name it.

I'd have thought as you do, that these rotten kids would grow up and become sensible adults, but often that's just not the case. Many might be fine with their peers, but an outsider will still be cannon fodder as they were when in high school.


I'll admit I've been under too many thumbs, which has coloured my outlook and created a general mistrust.... this does not help me in any way. I can recognize the pattern, but I have a terrible time controlling it.

Even when I responded to your "I don't think they exist" and "everyone is different and you have to get along with them anyway" comments, I was very angry because I know they exist - they've abused me dozens of times. That someone on "the outside" doesn't see this happening adds a new level of frustration, because what hurts more is not just that I've been hurt by someone - but that noone believes me that it's happening so the abuser can continue to their heart's content with a free pass and clear conscience since it's even been condoned!



That said, I'm sorry you ever had to suffer in this way! I'm glad your suffering ended with high school - I wish mine had. Instead, it just became all the more elaborate and harder for me to understand.

Sometimes NTs are willing to give time to learn about us, others just don't give a crap. They are the ones who are nasty to us.

There are allot of people who never grow up. I've had to deal with them at every job i've ever had and i'm no teenager and neither are they.

I've only ever worked in one place like that. Only one piece of advice I can give you: leave. There are other places I've been that have had that sort of thing going on at a very low level, but it's possible to keep your head down and not be noticed, you can either try and find one of those positions (data entry is great for that, albeit not well paid), and most places honestly don't seem to have it. As you tend to progress down the pay scale and into traditionally "working class," jobs, I do think it becomes endemic, though. Find something in a professional office, if you can, and you'll likely not encounter it at all.

Also, it is worth bearing in mind that this isn't specific targeting of those with AS, it's just stupid cliqueyness, and you'll not be the only one.

I'm not saying I don't believe the *actions* happen, because I know they do. I'm saying that I don't believe that there are giant roving bands of NTs whose only mission in life is to seek out people with AS and make them as miserable as possible, or who have constructed the whole of human civilization in such a way as to expressly exclude anyone with AS from ever living in it, much less that every NT on the planet belongs to that group. Which many people on here do believe. (Or at least, they state those things as fact. I suppose that doesn't necessarily mean they believe them.)

Some people torment those who are different (although I don't *personally* know any adults who do so), but they're not picking on you because you have AS. They're picking on you because they like to torment anyone they can. If you weren't there, they'd torment someone, NT or AS, who was young, or fat, or short, or quiet, or not so quick with the snappy comebacks ... in other words, whatever they see in you that's easy to pick on, they'd see in someone else. Also, a situation will indeed always look different to an outsider (who was it who said "There are always at least three sides to any story: the first person's, the second person's, and the truth"?), and I suspect that *some* (not nec. all, not even most, but some) of what you're interpreting as bullying etc. is not meant to be.

Overall, however, the vast majority of adults *do* grow up and learn to talk civilly to anyone they have to interact with. And I'm telling you, I do indeed interact on a regular basis with the people who were shoving other people into lockers in high school. We might not necessarily like each other, we might even be rude to each other sometimes, and I'm sure people have complained about me behind my back, but we can have a polite conversation about work-related subjects if we need to.

ChealseaOcean, your not seeing the big picture. Imagine living your whole life stigmatized, marginalized, systematically made to feel like a lower species. And your all alone, nobody listens to what your going through, most people don't CARE to understand. And those that do have this attitude like "too bad your not like us", and those are the people providing "help" services that do nothing but hold us back from living like regular people because of the pity stigma we're held under.
It's generally that way with anything that is a disorder, or considered a disorder. Because we live an such an ableist society. The disabled are perhaps the only minority group out there who it is generally considered "ok" to relegate to stereotypes and be shoved into that mold, or the only people it is considered "ok" to slander, marginalize, dehumanize, ridicule, and poke fun at, even in our media.
Many of us are forced to grow old alone and miserable, whenever we speak out about our concerns we're labled as "trouble makers", or "pathetic", or we're "pitying ourselves". Or sometimes they go to the popular ego defense, which is blatant denial that their society has done any wrong to us. Truth of the matter is most NTs consciously or sub-consciously KNOW this, and appear to think that "it's normal", and that we don't deserve to live with the same status and priveledges as they do.
In the media, the mentally disabled are labled as "potential murderers" and such, and are often stereotyped and made into the object of attemptive witch hunts. Look at Va. Tech. I'm not condoning what he did, because his actions were dead wrong. BUT, was he not pushed? At some point being systematically dehumanized and alienated can make people go crazy. And then the media uses it to further hold us down.

Just yesterday I was going to inquire about buying a house, (a friend of mine used to live at this house so I knew it was vacant because he moved out, but there was no sign on the window)... So I asked the real estate man (who happened to be there) how much he would rent the house out for, and he obviously picked up that I didn't have good social skills, and he flew right off the bat to accusing me of "tresspassing" or contemplating b&e. I had a notepad and a pen in hand to take down information on houses for sale, that should have been enough to convince him that I had no bad intentions. But he tried to intimidate me with comments like "you do know I'm good friends with the police around here".
With invisible disorders like Asperger, it's not just the label that we're discriminated on, even if we tell a person nothing about it, our "symptoms" will stand out, and often it's those "symptoms" that we're discriminated for.
I am working on a commune for my people. If you would like to know what it's like to be held under this constant pressure and stigma, and how it effects your self asteem and your mental health, then be my guest to pay us a visit, we can put you through a program where YOU'R the "weirdo", the "outcast", the "afterthought". Then you'll see why we feel the way we do.

I know someone who can help you with that stuff, shes a professional I work with for finding jobs. I could get her to talk to this guy for you if you want.

Look at how the media, groups like Cure Autism Now, Autism Society, constantly portray us as "problem kids", or a "disease", that "needs to be cured", while ONLY showing the low functioning autistics. Ignoring the please of many higher functioning autistics who are screaming "just accept us", we don't want to be "cured"... "Curing" us would mean destroying our identities and replacing us with totally different people. Many of us are proud of who we are, and we should be. Many of our greatest minds were Aspergian, or were thought to be. Albert Einstein and Bill Gates are both definately aspies. And for all our accomplishments, we're marginalized and dehumanized as "broken toys".

No dude, I don't wanna buy that guys house, it's under police investigation because he rented it out to my friend and his family and apparently they trashed the place. I've got better places to call.

Not in any media I've seen probably in the last 15 or 20 years. That stuff used to be acceptable, it's inviting a lawsuit these days and seems to be mostly frowned upon.

I've wondered whether Cho had some sort of ASD, but I've never even seen it suggested in the media, and I did a lot of reading about the event at the time it happened. Never saw autism mentioned, not once.

You don't think that perhaps his reaction to you and assumption you might break in was more to do with the fact that your friends trashed his house than your AS, perhaps?

Look, there are plenty of a**holes out there, I won't deny that, but I think you're seeing systematic discrimination where none exists. Is there discrimination? Sure, those with bad social skills won't do well in social situations, that stands to reason, and there will always be individuals who don't want to spend the time talking to someone they perceive as awkward, and that can be tough. And there are plenty of bullies in schools - kids are vicious. And there are even disfunctional work environments, and I'm sorry that you seem to be in one. But that's not the same as intentionally stacking the system against you, all I can do is suggest that you find another job, if you can, and find a real estate agent who's willing to work with you to handle the social aspect of buying a house. Usually it's best to hire a professional for these sorts of things, anyway. And if, where you live, discrimination really is as widespread as you seem to think it is, move to a different state. Where I lived when I first came to the US, in the liberal northeast, I highly doubt you'd have any of these problems.

What issues does AS cause with authority and control? (I sound dumb asking this, but I'd like to read more about it if I can.)

Re: disability discrimination: we may have come forward somewhat from the eugenics years of the early 20th century where crime, poverty, and bastard children were blamed on mental retardation and the low people in society were often assumed to be ret*d regardless of how they scored on an IQ test. But there's still a tendency to present disability in the most dehumanizing and degrading of lights for fundraising purposes, for people to sympathize with parents who murder their disabled children, and for any kind of mental illness or difference to be mentioned and/or speculated in media articles about murderers even though the mental disability probably had nothing to do with the murder or the motives behind the murder. And institutions for disabled people, such as an infamous school for disturbed and ret*d youth in Massachusetts known as the Judge Rotenberg Center, still tend to treat their inmates very poorly. JRC may be more extreme on the physical end than most, but corruption is common in these organizations. My older sister once worked for a home for ret*d adults and found that the workers there were quite corrupt.

Frankly, that strikes me as typical NT condescending, sanctimonious, armchair pop-psychologizing. Channeling Dr. Phil? Or was it M. Scott Peck?

Aspies do not instinctively seek the subtextual guidance of their social environment. NTs do. This isn't about bullies per se, it is about the fact that 95%+ of what guides the behavior of NTs when they're interacting socially is generally unavailable to the Aspies (and apparently consciously unavailable to NTs). Oscar Wilde once suggested that, "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." That's as close as I can come to a definition of the neurotypical brain. "No man is an island." "Man is a social animal." What do you think those quotations mean exactly? They mean that behavior (or even theory) that is not predicated on what is 'acceptable' or 'conventional' is frightening and worthy of contempt.

Pick a subject, any subject. Find the heterodox position on that subject and espouse it to a group of NTs. The substance of your comments will be completely ignored because what matters most is that you're disrupting the social order. "That's just not how we do things around here" always trumps any notion of transcendental truth. So what that the way you're thinking of something might actually make sense or offer a breakthrough insight on something? What will always get you in the end is that you're upsetting the social balance. This isn't just adolescents I'm talking about, this is humanity writ large. This is why it took 200+ years for the enlightenment paradigm to become universally recognized. This is why people vote for feel-good legislation that reinforces some ostensible social value while trampling on that other fundamentally human characteristic: individual curiosity. This is why people walk past rapes and muggings and other heinous crap and do nothing. This is why the Hitlers and Stalins and Ahmadinejads and Pol Pots and Mao Tse Tungs and all the other will-to-power freaks in history have had such an easy time subjugating whole populations.

Aspies aren't conditioned, nor do they have the neuro-anatomy to even be conditioned, to predicate their understanding of the world on what someone else thinks. That's why aspies are often obsessed with mechanical things; because abstractions allow rational inquiry. You can empirically test your theory about something mechanical and it will either prove or disprove your hypothesis without recourse to questioning your motives or the employment of ad hominem attacks. People, no NTs, on the other hand are first trying to figure out whether you're a no good s**t before they'll even consider your theses, if they ever actually do consider them.

Your skepticism on the existence of the de facto NT cultural hegemony actually helps to demonstrate why it is so difficult for aspies. If I had a dollar for every time some NT acted all confused about why some aspie couldn’t just “get along” or “play by the rules” I’d be the Donald. What do you know? Here’s you doing just that:


That’s just it. It’s not about “getting along.” It’s about recognizing the primacy of abstraction in the mind of the aspie. Abstraction trumps socialization for the aspie. In the case of the more high-profile ostensible aspies (Einstein, Newton, etc.) you see this in spades; these are people who have in many cases put their belief in the transcendental truth of their abstract knowledge over their social connections, whether they be familial or social in the largest sense. Einstein had the gall to advance a theory that was completely at odds with the entire edifice of physical science at the time. This wasn’t just a challenge to the reigning intellectual paradigm, it was an affront to a society of people whose membership in that society was predicated on their embrace of the reigning paradigm. It was a club. More than a few of them muttered things along the lines of “who does he think he is?” And these are academics fer chrissake. These are people who are supposed to be able to think about ideas on their merits and yet even they displayed this same perfunctory NT social cohesion crap. How could Einstein have done what he did if not for his likely disconnection from the usual neurological rewards that accompany “right behavior”? And if even highly educated NTs can act like a big dumb clique, then why is it so hard to imagine a bunch of blue-collar NTs acting that way, or corporate manager NTs acting that way, or lawyer NTs, or any other group of “right thinking” adults acting that way?

The NT universe will start to appear to me as something other than a big blind echo chamber when the notion that there really is such a thing as an individual is commonly understood. The only people I’ve ever met who seem to really understand the individual as a legitimate, viable concept are also the most socially marginal; the artists, the eccentrics, the philosophers, the aspies. They may diverge in their philosophies and methodologies, but they generally unite in their respect for that divergence. Incidentally, that’s what real diversity looks like – it’s not about culture or race or religion or sex, it’s about simply respecting and supporting the individual as the primary source of all human aspiration.

ChelseaOcean, I’m sure you’re a kind person. You just managed to sum up in a neat little package everything I find so ham-fisted about the way society (and medicine) appears to be determined to misunderestimate the statistically deviant neurology of the aspie/HFA. It’s the abstraction I take issue with, not you. Don’t take it personally, although I won’t be surprised if in recursive demonstration of my thesis, you do.

Well, what's brilliant about your post is that you've managed to take everything I said out of the context in which I said it, place it into a different context, and then argue against something that I never said in an incredibly intelligent and coherent way. Or in other words, you've done exactly what you accuse me of doing: totally misunderstand that which you are arguing against. (It's also impressive insofar as you speak like a book, which is something I am frequently accused of doing, albeit less so in my first language [English] as I've gotten older.)

For example, my point about "getting along with everyone" was not any reference to what people with AS should or should not learn to do. I clearly said that I believed that most adult NTs would have learned that one had to get along with everyone as they got older and therefore those adult NTs would not be shoving people with AS into lockers. Yet you accuse me of "act[ing] all confused about why some aspie couldn’t just 'get along' or 'play by the rules.'" I never said anything at all about people with AS getting along or not.

My point was, as I said, that by the time people reach adulthood, most NTs will have internalized the idea that, even if you don't like someone or understand them, you have to be civil and respectful to them, and therefore, most of them will act in accordance with that internal guidance. I know a great many people with AS, diagnosed and un-, and work with many of them. While others may not understand their motivations, that does not mean that NTs are rude to them because of it.

As an example, a group I belong to recently had cause to approach someone in a professional context who is clearly either strongly AS or HFA, in order to ask him something about his particular interest and his work related to it. He was clearly uncomfortable talking to the people who first approached him and they were unable to communicate what they wanted from him and he told them they didn't need to know what they were asking [which was something we really did need to know--we were planning a function in which he was to participate but for which we had ultimate responsibility] and walked away from them. Many people here seem to believe that the natural reaction of all NTs would be to get angry and probably abuse him in some form. My point was merely that, being mature and responsible adults (who nonetheless understood absolutely none of what had just happened), those particular NTs returned to the group, explained what had happened, and asked for suggestions, and we came up with an alternate plan based on the experience of someone who had a prior professional relationship with the man in question and knew how best to approach him. Because they, not he, had learned that "everyone is different and you need to get along with them anyway."

I never said they did, although I suppose I wasn't clear enough in saying they didn't. In fact, I believed the poster was likely misinterpreting others' actions precisely because of an inability to instinctively understand the subtext of the social environment.

My point with the statement that the previous poster was likely misinterpreting based on past negative experience is that people with AS, since they lack the instinctual ability to see why someone would do something, look for logical patterns in others' behaviors. Therefore, as they grow older and have had more time to refine their theories and those logical patterns, they may therefore assume based on (the logical pattern that they have perceived in) past experiences that someone's behavior is for the same motivation as someone else's similar action in the past, and not understand that the second person's motivations are different from the first person's, and therefore one might apply the label "bullying" (certainly a description of a subtextual motivation and not of an action itself--shoving someone into a locker is an action, but ascribing it to bullying is a description of motivation in performing that action) to an action which had previously been performed as a way of "bullying," when it was possible that the more recent action was not performed due to a desire to "bully" but due to some other motivation (say, the shover was in a rush, or was the type of person who express affection through physical violence--I don't understand these people, but I know they exist).

In fact, I believe that ascribing a motivation to an action based on the similarity to another action, while failing to realize that the motivation and thought process between two similar actions may still be different, is one aspect of "lack of Theory of Mind," which is a symptom of AS.

(As for teenagers, I think the meaning of that half of my statement is clear enough: I suspected the poster I was replying to was a teenager because he referred to being shoved into lockers in middle and high school. And many teenagers are little ****s, no two ways about it.)



Now, this is very interesting to me. I don't know a bunch of blue collar NTs, so I can't comment on that, but I work with a great many managers and lawyers, and to me a central feature of both jobs is the ability to think in innovative ways and judge solutions on their merits, because a solution that is popular but has no merit just plain doesn't work. Lawyers, particularly, devote themselves to researching an issue as thoroughly as humanly possible, logically applying what they read to the facts of a new situation, and then writing detailed explanations of how their current case is similar to Case X and different from Case Y, while the other side does the same, except they have to explain why the current case is more similar to Case Y and more different from Case X. Then the judge has to consider the arguments logically, do his/her own research, and decide whose arguments were more logical and more correct. Frankly, it's always seemed like a profession that people with AS would be excellent at, and in fact I'm quite sure that some of the lawyers and judges I work with do have AS. (It probably bears mentioning that I work with the best judges and lawyers ... when I worked in lower courts, I certainly did see plenty of the idiocy and blindness that gives lawyers and judges a bad name.) Trial lawyers have to argue in public, of course, but (besides the fact that not all lawyers are trial lawyers), they are arguing about their special area of interest, and in any case, many of them aren't very good at it and it clearly makes them uncomfortable.

But while you have written a brilliant analysis of the differences between NTs and people with AS, that was not what I was talking about. My statement, twice, was that I do not know any adult NTs who actively seek out and harm people with AS just because those people ahve AS, that I do not know any such people, and therefore am disinclined to believe those exist. I don't doubt that all the differences you enumerate exist between some (even many) NTs and some (even many) people with AS, but that in no way changes my statement that most adult NTs do not go around shoving people with AS into lockers.

And if you want to see examples of people being ignored and disparaged for espousing heterodox positions on a subject, read the reactions to poster MarieElana, who is frequently accused of being an impostor and not really having AS and told to shut up and go away, because despite the fact that she has AS, she disagrees with the majority of posters on this site on some key subjects. Pot, kettle.

Oh, and Dr. Phil is an idiot.


(edited because I left off half a sentence about lawyers)