The Autism Spectrum According to Autistic People

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The Autism Spectrum
According to Autistic People

NeuroClastic

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The inability to think hierarchically is the ability to think and live relationally

Jorn Bettin November 17, 2024

Many Autistic people have great difficulties to think of the world in hierarchical ways. From what we know about our evolutionary path as humans, this is a reflection of innate human collaborative cultural capabilities in combination with a much reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance on an ongoing basis, which in turn can be traced to uncommon sensitivity profiles that fall outside the bell curve of hypernormativity.

The inability to think hierarchically is the ability to think and live relationally

Jorn Bettin November 17, 2024

Many Autistic people have great difficulties to think of the world in hierarchical ways. From what we know about our evolutionary path as humans, this is a reflection of innate human collaborative cultural capabilities in combination with a much reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance on an ongoing basis, which in turn can be traced to uncommon sensitivity profiles that fall outside the bell curve of hypernormativity.

The inability to think hierarchically is the ability to think and live relationally

Jorn Bettin November 17, 2024

Many Autistic people have great difficulties to think of the world in hierarchical ways. From what we know about our evolutionary path as humans, this is a reflection of innate human collaborative cultural capabilities in combination with a much reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance on an ongoing basis, which in turn can be traced to uncommon sensitivity profiles that fall outside the bell curve of hypernormativity.

The Performance of April and Autism Awareness Month

Emmanuel April 27, 2022

April is essentially a cash grab. April is a soapbox for well-meaning organizations and corporations to bank on us. We’re the inspiration porn, the example to strive for, the burden to be eased that’s big money to them.

An image for Nick Barry, nonspeaker who uses rapid prompting method or rpm to communicate. A person is looking at a screen and behind them are a ton of eyes staring at the screen. The image depicts how a nonspeaker autistic with autism is often denied access to privacy and autonomy.

The Right to Privacy for Nonspeaking Autistics

Nick Barry March 2, 2022

Nick Barry, a young nonspeaking advocate, writes about how the privacy and autonomy of nonspeakers is often violated by those around them, how it feels, and how to do better.

Celebrating the infinitely diverse ways of being human

Jorn Bettin February 26, 2024

The objectives of the neurodiversity and disability rights movements overlap significantly with the struggles of indigenous peoples. All people are fully human. Neurodiversity Celebration Week is not only about neurodivergent students, it is also about the many neurodivergent teachers, parents, artists, and professionals and entrepreneurs in all sectors of our economy – who are unable to act as role models for neurodivergent students when having to remain undercover, to avoid bullying, ruthless exploitation, and systematic discrimination in their workplaces.

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”.

Intersectional solidarity and ecological wisdom

Jorn Bettin December 11, 2023

The objectives of the Autistic and neurodiversity civil rights movements overlap significantly with the struggles of indigenous peoples. All people are fully human. Especially those who are systematically marginalised have developed distinct cultures and ecologies of care beyond the human. Much of the deep collective ecological wisdom and the sacred relationships that we can develop at human scale transcend the explanatory powers of the narrow silos of modern scientific disciplines.

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.

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.

Convergent and divergent cultural evolution

Jorn Bettin December 16, 2022

Supporting the neurodiversity movement and repairing the human cultural immune system is no longer a luxury, it has become a matter of survival, not only for neurodivergent people, but for everyone who is alive today and for all future generations.

Cultural evolution towards human scale

Jorn Bettin November 14, 2022

The neurodiversity movement is a human rights movement. No one and no organisation can genuinely claim to be supportive of the neurodiversity paradigm without committing to the political goals of the neurodiversity movement. There are no short cuts.

Autistic people are not for sale

Jorn Bettin November 11, 2022

The cult of busyness undermines attempts at creating a shared understanding at a very basic level. In a hyper-competitive world the unexpected non-compliant Autistic behaviour is often misunderstood.

The timeless and universal architecture of safety

Jorn Bettin October 23, 2022

The timeless universal architecture of cultural and psychological safety boils down to awareness of the limits of human scale, and to de-powering all our relationships. Humans excel to collaborative niche construction as long as we stay within the safe limits of human scale.

Repairing the human cultural immune system

Jorn Bettin October 18, 2022

Do you want real change? Within human societies Autistic people tend to be the amongst the first who point out toxic competitive behaviours. We live in a world where the cultural immune system of human society, i.e. Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people are being systematically weakened, marginalised, and disabled.

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