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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are part of the web of life, including our imagination. As agents of the human cultural immune system we can expand the language of life and (re)imagine cultures that reconnect us to biological life and local biological ecosystems. This article can serve as a resource list for an education course on human cultural evolution, with a focus on the current human predicament.
As long as life is framed as a competitive social game failure is guaranteed – because then the suffering of others is simply another great busyness opportunity. A few weeks ago the authors of this article had the wonderful opportunity to hear from from a neurodivergent community in Iceland. We agreed to look for ways of ongoing collaboration.
Human minds can develop amazing capabilities, but at the same time, our cognitive capacities are limited. To ensure we understand each other, we must know our limits, and we must co-create safe spaces for engaging in de-powered dialogue.