The Autism Spectrum According to Autistic People

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The Autism Spectrum
According to Autistic People

NeuroClastic

Change | Divergently

Culture & Identity

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.

Surviving + De-powering + Thriving

Jorn Bettin October 30, 2023

Ingredients for slowing down to the relational speed of life and cooking up de-powered social operating models. Many Autists realise that the best we can ever hope for in this hypernormative civilisation is acceptance of our existence in bare survival mode, performing the function of a mindless busy cog and consumer in the sensory hell of the industrial machine.

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.

Life is not a performance

Jorn Bettin October 13, 2023

In a performance-oriented culture getting ahead is what matters most. Finding ways of meeting the numbers is what matters, being perceived in the right way is what counts. Our society has increasingly cult-ivated performance,technological progress, and the “art” of perception management.

Life without the false God of Normality

Jorn Bettin September 16, 2023

Understanding the emergence of Autistic and neurodivergent cultures requires leaving behind the God of Normality, and imagining the possibility of de-powered forms of creative collaboration. The life denying metaphors of humans as machines and society as a factory are no match for the big cycle of life, for the love of life that resides in all living beings.

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.

Autistic survival tools – Daoist philosophy

Jorn Bettin August 6, 2023

The writings of Zhuangzi can also be understood as an in-depth exploration of the social model of disability. This turns the book into a tool for understanding and articulating human rights violations that arise from the pathologisation and marginalisation faced by Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people. The topics covered also make it obvious that the paradoxes, cognitive dissonance, and suffering thrown up by powered-up civilisations are as old as the oldest empires, making the Dao De Jing relevant to our era.

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.

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