Autistic ways of being are part of a culture that deserves the same respect as any other culture. Over the course of months and years, de-powered dialogue and omni-directional learning amongst Autistic, Artistic and otherwise Neurodivergent people results in trustworthy relationships, and in a diverse network of evolving intersectional ecologies of care.
This is a really important message for medical professionals who have been trained to look at humans as individuals, at best within a context of an atomised family, but not as precious human beings within an ecological context.
The numbers and experience reports from Dr. B. Educated participatory research highlight deficits in the education of medical doctors related to understanding the human condition and human ecologies.
Our education team is keen to work with medical colleges and medical schools to expand the sphere of discourse to ecological diseases and disorders, and to shift away from pathologising individual ways of being. All assistance in this space is appreciated. We are learning every day.
The interactive Dr. B. Educated professional education courses are an avenue for disseminating essential knowledge and for nurturing greater levels of shared understanding, but we are also interested in public education beyond the medical professions.
Last year, thanks to Hans Georg Moeller’s work, I discovered Daoist philosophy, which has opened a whole treasure trove of wisdom. Daoist philosophy feels familiar, it reflects the culture that is emerging within Autistic communities, the timeless wisdom people in healthy ecological contexts have known for thousands of years.
The 57th chapter of the Dao De Ching is a good starting point:
A state may be ruled by (measures of) correction;
weapons of war may be used with crafty dexterity;
(but) the kingdom is made one’s own (only) by freedom from action and purpose.
How do I know that it is so? By these facts:
In the kingdom the multiplication of prohibitive enactments increases the poverty of the people;
the more implements to add to their profit that the people have,
the greater disorder is there in the state and clan;
the more acts of crafty dexterity that men possess,
the more do strange contrivances appear;
the more display there is of legislation,
the more thieves and robbers there are.
Therefore a sage has said,
‘I will do nothing (of purpose),
and the people will be transformed of themselves;
I will be fond of keeping still,
and the people will of themselves become correct.
I will take no trouble about it,
and the people will of themselves become rich;
I will manifest no ambition,
and the people will of themselves attain to the primitive simplicity.’
The psychology of human scale ecologies beyond the human
The online blog format is a great way for catalysing de-powered dialogue and omni-directional learning, one or two steps away from corporate controlled social media environments. However, the blog format, just like all other short-form writing, has limitations.
The wonderful de-powered dialogues generated only partially take place within the blog format, they also take place via various other channels. This is not a limitation that needs to be fixed, it is simply an acknowledgement that there is a much bigger sphere of discourse and relational context that can’t be compressed into linear language or even into any other short-form multi-media artefact.
Over the course of months and years, de-powered dialogue and omni-directional learning amongst Autistic, Artistic and otherwise Neurodivergent people results in trustworthy relationships, and in a diverse network of evolving intersectional ecologies of care.
Furthermore, conceptually, each blog post is like one thread woven into a fabric of hundreds and thousands of other threads via hyperlinks. On the one hand this allows for much needed additional context, but on the other hand, similar to the limitations of academic style articles, it makes the content less self-contained and less accessible to those who are not already familiar with the wider context.
Based on everything that I have learned, experienced, and written about over the last three years, including the way in which my own small ecology of care beyond the human has evolved in ways that I could never have imagined, it is time to embark on another book curation and distillation project. All the ingredients are already there, within the fabric of AutCollab articles, and within corresponding mental models within my ecology of care.
The overarching theme could be described as ‘The psychology of human scale ecologies beyond the human’, but I also want to highlight the key element that holds together all the threads, which has been systematically eroded in Westernised societies: the notion of trust, including the role of trustworthy, sacred relationships within the context of human scale ecologies of care beyond the human, resulting in the working title ‘Trust in Human Scale : Ecologies of care beyond the human’.
The book will build on the foundations laid in the book on the beauty of collaboration at human scale that I collated in 2021. Based on what I am currently learning, and as far as I can see, ‘Ecologies of care beyond the human’ will emerge as the enduring overarching theme for Autistic / A♾tistic / Artistic Collaboration going forward.
In a toxic hypercompetitive world many Autistic people have suffered some form of abuse throughout their childhood, often from their caregivers.
Broken trust is at the core of Autistic trauma. We are not equipped for life in industrialised societies that are all about deceptive perception management, where even “education” of small children in primary school is focused on “persuasive” writing and “winning” debates –
appealing to the majority;
demonising the “inappropriate” ways of being of all “insignificant” minorities.
What is completely lacking in the mordern hypernormative social world around us is a culture that appreciates the open dialogues necessary to nurture and deepen shared understanding, and to discover and openly acknowledge the boundaries of shared understanding at each stage of the journey.
Most of what Autistic people struggle with can be traced to trauma. The following observation is from our database of Autistic experiences in healthcare settings:
Not being believed or given the benefit of the doubt can be worse than the experience itself
The way this is obscured and muddled up in the Devil’s Sadistic Manual and then packaged in pathologising labels that make people look for faults in themselves and others is only making things worse.
As I was looking through materials on nurturing mutual trust and the erosion of trustworthy relationships in Westernised societies, I came across a mashup presentation on the topic of trust in the economic sphere that I had put together back in 2017 , the year of the first AutCollab blog post:
Since the time of this presentation, I am afraid the notion of trust has further eroded across all spheres of life in the global mono-cult, but at the same time, on the margins of society, we have experienced a heartwarming increase in intersectional solidarity and we are seeing emerging ecologies of mutual trust and care.
Undoubtedly the book on trust will benefit from further Autistic dialogues in the coming months, and from the database of Dr. B. Educated participatory research, i.e. from your lived experiences.
With a bit of luck the book ‘Trust in Human Scale’ will be published by the end of 2024. In the meantime, all your input on this topic is much appreciated, especially pointers to related earlier work, and of course your experiences from all spheres of life.
If you would like to assist as a reviewer of a draft of the book later this year, please let me know!
The beauty of collaboration at human scale
So far the book on collaboration at human scale has been available in electronic formats. As part of the efforts of the AutCollab Education Team to connect with schools and to educate teachers, we realised that it might be good idea to produce a printed edition, and then to approach libraries and school libraries to buy copies.
The thought of publishing via Amazon was not appealing at all. With a bit of digging around, and remembering that we live in a world of on-demand book printing services, we came across lulu.com, which advertises itself as “a Certified B Corporation, Lulu is committed to balancing purpose and profit. We prioritize sustainability and strive for the highest standards of social and environmental performance.” and operates printers across the Anglosphere. We figured this is probably a better option.
You can now purchase a truly beautiful A4 size textbook edition of The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale at lulu.com.
Or even better, save trees by downloading an electronic version and ask your local library and your local school libraries to purchase copies of the book, perhaps together with other books by Autistic Rights and Neurodiversity Activists!
The quality of the binding, the paper, and the print is great, exceeding my expectations, including the quality of the large easily legible diagrams. If you prefer paper books, if you enjoy annotating books, and especially if your eyesight is poor and you prefer a larger font size, I can recommend the lulu.com print edition.
Together with an Autistic friend in Colombia I am collaborating on a hand-crafted translation into Spanish. As part of the process I am hoping to learn some Spanish. More omni-directional learning.
‘The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale‘ explains how losing track of our evolutionary heritage, and ignoring the limitations of human scale, has allowed a small minority of power addicted primates to infect human societies with a life denying and life destroying cultural disease. Today evolutionary forces far beyond human control are pushing us back towards the rediscovery of the limits of human scale.
The evolution of ecosystems is best understood in terms of collaborative niche construction over periods of many generations. In this context evolutionary “success” of a species is neither the result of fierce head to head competition within species, nor the result of ubiquitous competition with other species. In healthy ecosystems, collaboration within and between species is ubiquitous, it is an energy saving strategy. For any species, competition within and between species is energy intensive. Any species that relies on competition as the default strategy, especially within a species, rapidly goes extinct.
The evolutionary context of trust
Humans have only survived in the face of much stronger top predators in various ecosystems by being able to collaborate, and use symbolic language to better understand each other’s intentions and to coordinate our actions.
The biological evolutionary heritage of our capacity for culture and symbolic thought and language is directly linked to – and dependent – on our ability to fully trust each other in life and death situations.
Yes, eventually we displaced the top predators in all ecosystems, and we became the most prolific primate on the planet. But this would have been completely impossible if symbolic language had evolved primarily to allow us to engage in fierce competition with each other, and to deceive each other. Generalising to an ecological context beyond the human, Janine Benyus summarises the evolutionary process of life as follows:
Life creates conditions conducive to life.
When competition and deceptive communication takes over within the ecosystems that we refer to as multi-celled life forms, we refer to it as a cancerous disease. And yet, we currently live in a global mono-cult that pathologises those who have an unusually strong innate predisposition to extend trust and be trustworthy, and a strong innate aversion to deception:
Children with autism, when studied under experimental conditions, have been shown to have difficulties both in the production of deception and in understanding when someone else is deceiving them. … a deficit can be revealed even in the highest functioning individuals with an autism-spectrum condition in whom general comprehension problems can be ruled out.
– From ‘Theory of mind and autism: A review’, from the International Review of Research in Mental Retardation, Volume 23, 2000, Pages 169-184
That something like this passes as “science” should make every human stop in their tracks. If, as a species, we have one responsibility within the planetary ecosystem, it is to recognise that it is time to set the record straight on the toxicity of a culture that normalises and even celebrates competitive and deceptive behaviour.
As part of the oneness of life, we can only resolve the cognitive dissonance that is killing us all by fully appreciating human biodiversity, by realigning our many cultures with the local foundations of life, and by committing to minimise the human and non-human suffering that lies ahead for many generations to come.
While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is “The Middle Way” and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics (1966), therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.
Whether A♾tistic dreamers are able to establish alternative ecologies of care beyond the human is no longer up for debate. We have nothing to lose. We deeply appreciate the wonder of life, and we can clearly see the global mono-cult for what it is.
We are A♾tistic. We are fully human. We are alive.
Somehow the wonder of life prevails
A♾tistic people support each other, love each other, and care for each other in ways that go far beyond the culturally impaired hypernormative imagination.
Onwards!
- How safe do/did you feel growing up? - April 23, 2024
- Trust in Human Scale - April 16, 2024
- How unsafe do Autistic and intersectionally marginalised people feel in your presence? - April 11, 2024
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