The Autism Spectrum According to Autistic People

Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube

The Autism Spectrum
According to Autistic People

NeuroClastic

Change | Divergently

Autism

The ecological niche of A♾tistic peoples

Jorn Bettin December 16, 2023

Surviving on the edges of modern society is an Art. The Arts and regular immersion in genuinely safe Open Spaces help us imagine and co-create ecologies of care in which care and mutual aid are the primary values. Within the context of the polycrisis that shapes the modern human predicament, the urgency of cultural evolution can not be addressed from within the paradigm of a hypernormative education system. Healthy Artistic and Autistic life paths by necessity differ from “normality”.

De-powered dialogue

Jorn Bettin November 27, 2023

The smallest unit of learning is a feedback loop. Power is the privilege of not needing to learn. The dynamic process of life is best understood in relational terms. At human scale, all healthy relationships, independently of the level of intimacy, are characterised by the maintenance of de-powered dialogue – by a mutual deep desire to understand a precious living being.

Nurturing ecologies of care, healing, and wellbeing

Jorn Bettin November 21, 2023

Social power is best understood as a highly addictive and socially corrosive drug. Meaningful education in the era of the sixth mass extinction event has to focus on the majority of the human population that is not power drunk, and on the humane treatment of those who are ready to confront their addiction to power head-on. Conceptualising social power as an addiction provides the majority of the human population with a highly effective bullshit detection tool.

unWEIRDing Autistic ways of being

Jorn Bettin November 8, 2023

The mental health crisis, which is best understood as a crisis of pervasive cognitive dissonance, and which affects large parts of the population, creates plenty of profitable opportunities for ambulance at the bottom of the cliff approaches. Neurological and cultural diversity is the reservoir of imagination of the human species. In a time of existential crises the collective creative potential of neurodivergent people and marginalised cultures has become more important than ever.

Bringing our gifts to life

Jorn Bettin October 26, 2023

We did not evolve for a transactional world. It is time to stop trying harder to fit in. We have already done so all our life. We need to slow down,  to the relational speed of life that is compatible with our evolutionary history. This is well understood by many indigenous cultures in different parts of the world, but this knowledge, this deep wisdom has been actively suppressed.

Coherent theories of human ways of being

Jorn Bettin September 7, 2023

Autistic people support each other, love each other, and care for each other in ways that go far beyond the culturally impaired neuronormative imagination. It is time to remind the so-called “civilised” world about non-pathologising and coherent theories of human ways of being that are integrated into ecologies of care and the evolutionary flows of life in-formation.

Co-creating comprehensible ecologies of care beyond the human

Jorn Bettin July 16, 2023

Unmasked human life is an impossibility beyond human scale. Human wellbeing can only be understood in terms of the health of small, comprehensible ecologies of care. It can neither be understood in terms of an atomised self, which is what much of Western medicine is about, nor in terms of conformance to anonymous cultural norms and expectations, which is what the modern digital sphere of corporations, social media, and big government is all about.

Life is, at bottom, diversity

Jorn Bettin June 29, 2023

Just like a cell, a cultural organism has many critical interdependencies with the outside world; the state of environmental health is deeply entangled with the internal state of health of the cultural organism. Autistic life is incompatible within a society that lives within an Overton window. To understand why, look no further than the way in which Helen Mirra is conceptualizing autistic experience as holotropic. Holotropic people have naturally wide open sensory gates. To participate in/as the immense world without becoming overwhelmed, we holotropes have two central methods: in, by hyperfocusing our attention on one sensory or cognitive path, and as, through synthesising our experience into coherence.

web of life

The evolution of cultural organisms

Jorn Bettin June 9, 2023

Culture may not seem to change much from year to year, but if we look closely in the right places, major changes take place every 5 to 10 years. The toxicity of the industrialised paradigm is not the absence of cultural dynamism, but the systematic channeling of all cultural change into frantic busyness within an established and fundamentally misguided paradigm. For the Neurodiversity Movement this means that engaging exclusively with the pathologising silos of W.E.I.R.D. psychiatry and psychology is a dead end. The futility of cosmetic neurodiversity lite approaches becomes fully visible from a transdisciplinary viewpoint.

The relational nervous system of open knowledge flows between human societies

Jorn Bettin June 2, 2023

In an effort to “be the change”, in the industrial era, many Autists end up being sand in the gears of busyness as usual. Luckily, thanks to the Internet, this is not the end of Autistic people. The open question is how humans will treat each other and our non-human contemporaries on the journey towards being composted and recycled. Experiences may vary depending on the human scale cultures we co-create on the margins.

Skip to content