Crassus wrote:
I said it in another Greentea thread and it applies just as well in this one. It comes down to Doing things Right, in a world of Do things Together. Here's the thing folks, sometimes doing things together actually is more important than doing things right. One of the more useful ways in which humanity has learned to compensate for the unreliability of our perceptions, memories and understandings is the tendency to check ourselves against peers. The problem is that left unchecked this leads to the tyranny of the masses, hence the necessity of a consistent application of logic and reason.
When your brain is shifted away from the ability to "relate" and towards the ability to "systemize" enough, you end up in a catch-22. You are better able to understand how things interrelate and therefore make accurate extrapolations and predictions, but you are less able to express what you observe in a way that those who don't systemize in the same manner can still relate to. In the World of the Blind, the Seeing man is Schizophrenic. In the culture of getting things done now as a group, the person who wants to wait until we can all do it the most beneficial and rational way is a poor employee.
We are herd animals because herd animals have distinct survival benefits that we have capitalized on such as the ability to specialize. In modern cultures we often express this herd behavior and specialization via the mechanic of employment in industry. Somewhere along the line of establishing these modern cultures of ours, we took our eyes off the ball. Some of us learned how to co opt the will of the herd to work toward ones own benefit rather than the benefit of the herd and chose to make use of that knowledge to engage in all manner of exploitative purposes.
It is my belief that much of the conflict AS individuals experience interacting with society at large has to do with an understanding, on the part of the AS individual, of the system of language and culture present in modern societies. The ability to systemize our perceptions and experiences in a more in depth manner leads to the realization of these abuses being perpetrated all around us on a constant basis.
One of the traits associated with strong systemetizing ability is greater capacity to consider multiple related aspects at once and the way in which they interact. If I were writing down the concepts I am expressing in this post for a primarily NT audience as opposed to my expectation of a primarily Spectrum audience, I would be breaking this all down into a lot greater granularity and spreading it across multiple posts. It would simply be too much information to expect the majority of people to process at once while still having a high level of comprehension. Note that I don't mean ability to agree with me, I refer to comprehension whether they agree with and support or disagree and refute.
One of the tools by which a society institutionalizes exploitation is through the discouragement of individuals below a class threshold learning the skills of logic and reason. The language by which communication happens between individuals can be rigged to make the application of these skills more difficult. Cultural rules regarding the use of language and establishing specific taboos to discourage the exploration and understanding of certain concepts are important parts of this rigging.
End result? Many AS individuals (and a significant portion of NTs as well to be sure) find themselves more aware of things then those around them and the deck is stacked against them being able to explain it to those that don't figure it out on their own to some degree first. You know who hears what you are saying and understands it? The people making use of this knowledge to exploit others. These are the bad managers, the corrupt CEOs, the dictators and tyrants. The bullies. The parasites. You are trying to out them and oust them. You are a threat. You are fired.
Excellent post!
08 Jul 2009, 7:32 am
