As long as society confuses homo economicus with homo sapiens we are more than “a bit off course”. The exploitative nature of our “civilised” cultures is top of mind for many neurodivergent people. In contrast, many neuronormative people seem to deal with the trauma via denial, resulting in profound levels of cognitive dissonance.
Our world is changing: pandemics, climate change, technology. Will society respond to these crises with revolution or with collaboration?
The Autistic Collaboration Trust is currently engaging with the autistic community and the wider neurodiversity movement to solicit input, to jointly develop a trustworthy and globally accessible employer rating service that is administered by autistic and otherwise neurodivergent volunteers. You are invited to contribute.
If neurodiversity is the natural variation of cognition, motivations, and patterns of behaviour within the human species, then what role do autistic traits in particular play within human cultures and what cultural evolutionary pressures have allowed autistic traits to persist over hundreds of thousands of years?
The Autistic English Dictionary (AED) is the principal dictionary of the English language for autistic people. In order to be comprehensible to autistic people, the English language needs to be updated with explicit definitions of the continuously shifting unspoken semantics that neurotypical speakers attach to specific words and phrases.
We are starting to experiment with ways to reduce interactions to human scale and are starting to learn. We may even learn that there are many different ways to contain the virus, but a focus on human scale and a bias against super-human scale busyness will be the common thread through all these approaches.
The objectives of the autism and neurodiversity civil rights movements overlap significantly with the interests of those who advocate for greater levels of psychological safetyContinue Reading
The tools of civilisation, including money, have undermined our appreciation of interdependence, and within the Western world we have culminated in a toxic cult of competitive individualism.
Autistic social motivation is deeply rooted in the desire to share knowledge and in the desire to learn, and this has big implications for theContinue Reading
Jorn Bettin, in collaboration with the autistic community, has come up with a communal definition of autism. We ask that you use the comment section below to let us know what ideas you have to improve this definition.