Underneath the surface of internalised ableism, no one wants to be seen and heard by many. Everyone prefers to be understood and loved deeply by a few, and everyone wants to love and help. This is what makes us sacred human animals. Continuous dialogues about commitments make life sacred. This is how humans create meaning for each other and with each other. This is the experience of life as a process of becoming.

Following the recent article on the inability of many Autists to think in terms of social hierarchies, a timely submission for the next NeurodiVerse Days of Intersectional Solidarity in December 2024 landed in the AutCollab inbox:

I’m the founder of a neurodivergent community and also a therapist and indigenous person. I’m interested in how to promote mutual aid within our community, when there is a lot of interpersonal trauma including difficulty with trust for many. 

The social challenges described and foreseen in Guy Debord’s and George Orwell’s work have become a highly disturbing reality, especially for cultural minorities and intersectionally marginalised populations. Early indoctrination in the belief in homo economicus attempts to transform humans into soulless machines. In particular, for many Autists, and possibly for everyone, the more we have an ability to relate to other humans and non-human living beings the less we are able to conduct transactional busyness.

Underneath the surface of internalised ableism, the following observation applies to all sober humans.

No one wants to be seen and heard by many. Everyone prefers to be understood and loved deeply by a few, and everyone wants to love and help. This is what makes us sacred human animals.

Commitments make us uniquely human

There is one healthy way forward, which is accessible on the basis of mutual trust and shared values, which involves a shift towards shared beliefs that represent sacred commitments at human scale:

Sacred commitments between specific people or across human scale groups can be verbal or in writing. They only scale up to the limited numbers of relationships that we can maintain. As needed we can jointly update these commitments to reflect evolving needs or constraints in the wider ecology we are embedded in. For those who identify as Autistic, a significant number of beliefs held fall into this category, especially agreements with family members, friends, and colleagues.

The massive trust problems created by homo economicus, the implications of which are well explained by the combination of Debord and Orwell, are cultural beliefs based on what others have encouraged us to believe, including beliefs that we have absorbed from from our social environment subconsciously, i.e. beliefs for which we can’t recall the origin. For those who do not identify as Autistic, the majority of beliefs held may fall into this category.

Unilateral commitments with ourselves act as our spiritual commitment to life and to Gaia.

Breaking our commitments makes us physically, mentally, and spiritually sick. Humans evolved this way. This is how we have become cultural organisms.

Bilateral commitments that are offered by one party are sacred invitations to others, as part our spiritual commitment to and recognition of the sanctity of all relationships with living beings. Both parties can make sacred invitations, and then they can be brought together, as needed via deliberative dialogue, in love and mutual respect and understanding, into the sacred form that becomes a spiritual commitment to each other.

In contrast to the practices in the industrialised factory model of society, there are no simplistic cookie cutter commitments. Every commitment is tailored to a specific relationship, either with ourselves – and by extension with Gaia, or with others.

By sharing the commitments that we make with ourselves and with others within our ecology of care, we are able to better understand each other, trust each other, and rely on each other. This is of course easier said than done when the wider cultural context is dominated by individualism and mutual distrust.

Deliberative dialogue

Continuous dialogues about commitments are a beautiful part of lived Māori culture. This is how we can all honour life and Gaia.

This is what makes life sacred. This is how humans create meaning for each other and with each other. This is the experience of life as a process of becoming.

Explicit social agreements beyond human scale have severe limitations. This is why Māori have to engage in the cultural practices of collective action they have developed.

In hierarchically structured societies, agreements such as laws issued by regional or national authorities apply to large groups of people, and by necessity have been developed with limited input from those who are affected. Such agreements invariably cause untold harm that for the most part remains invisible to the authorities. Humans did not evolve to live in hierarchically structured super-human scale societies. Pretending that we can maintain such structures without causing untold harm is a form of anthropocentric hubris.

Trauma is propagated between generations. We have to find ways of breaking the cycle without destroying those who are the most sensitive, who are the ones capable of nurturing ecologies of care not based on power and manipulation. The question of the evil of coercive power has been with me since I was a child. Coercive power is the root of all evil. Those who are capable of resorting to coercive power on a regular basis are the ones destroying and killing the entire planet. There is infinite timeless wisdom in the social norm against the emergence of any social power gradients. When civilisations erase that norm, unimaginable suffering unfolds.

Autistic people often make sacred commitments to themselves at a young age to minimise cognitive dissonance. When we make sacred commitments to other people we often learn that not everyone honours their commitments, or rather we notice how many others seem to go through life without any genuinely sacred commitments or firm convictions.

In the modern socially hyper-competitive world experience with the practice of de-powered deliberative dialogue is very limited. Life without sacred commitments is experienced as empty and meaningless.

The religion of Homo economicus systematically generates lost souls, searching for meaning without a solid foundation that allows meaning to be found.

Co-creating ecologies of care

Sacred commitments based on a basis of deep mutual trust and shared values are the foundation of all healthy cultures.

De-powered dialogue to deepen shared understanding is the tool to maintain and evolve commitments on an ongoing basis, along the way deepening love, compassion and mutual trust in a virtuous cycle, even through the most difficult times. All indigenous cultures know this.

This is also what Māori culture is gifting to the world in these difficult times, which humans collectively have inflicted on Gaia in their culturally generated ignorance and arrogance.

• Peaceful protest and intersectional solidarity against all elite attempts to consolidate power
• Never handing over framing and interpretative powers with respect to indigenous rights to modern big government authorities

Intersectional solidarity across indigenous rights movements, the neurodiversity movement, and the disability rights movement is at the core of healing from the cultural cancer that has caused the metacrisis.

This is not theory, this is consistent with our lived experiences in depowered egalitarian worker coops. De-powered dialogue, omnidirectional learning, and consensus based decisions shape our daily practice. This experience was the first part of my healing in a world dominated by the religion of homo economicus. 

Hunter-gatherers also engage in deliberative dialogue and reach decisions by consensus. It is beautiful. This is the art of living at human scale, as cultural organisms.

De-powered deliberative dialogues in a safe environment co-created by shared commitments allow us walk each others minds. In these dialogues we share what think, how we think, and what we believe in. We can also do this in writing. The important part is the commitment to ongoing dialogue, to share our inner worlds with each other. Of course all of this is completely incompatible with the religion of homo economicus. Yet this sharing is what our nervous systems evolved for! It is no surprise that many Autistic people are continuously operating at or beyond their emotional limits.

Furthermore, the more time we spend stuck in the digital world, separated by “interfaces”, the more the essential ability to extend deep trust has become an increasingly rare gift in our time.

Our nervous systems are deeply connected. We are embodied spirits, everything is connected. Interfaces limit our humanity. They are non-living anthropocentric machines. We evolved to be fully present with each other. This is what we know and feel deep down in our hearts.

Co-creating ecologies of care is sacred work. We can only do it together.

Onwards!

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Jorn Bettin

Knowledge archaeologist by day and neurodivergent anthropologist by night at S23M

The more we help each other to question in ways we otherwise wouldn’t – and correspondingly discover new insights about the world and ourselves, the more we are able to learn from each other, and the more we start to understand each other. The gift that we all bring to the world is the (re)generative potential of all the trusted relationships that we co-create.

Latest posts by Jorn Bettin (see all)

• Gaia loves making senses - December 19, 2024
• Autistic human animals – a factor in cultural metamorphosis - November 27, 2024
• The ability to relate deeply is the inability to conduct transactional busyness - November 22, 2024