maxben said:
briankoontz said:
What's usually not understood about autism is that's its a psychocultural phenomena, which is why it emerged in the 20th century, the same century that introduced immediate apocalyptic reality in the form of mass media domination, industrial war, [the possibility of] nuclear armageddon, multinational corporate and bank domination of individuals, a unipolar world dominated by the West and the US military, and imminent ecological apocalypse largely ignored by the powerful.
In other words, the world has a whole lot of massive problems that so-called healthy, social people aren't doing much of anything about. Therefore a lot of people decide at a very early age to opt out of the standard psychological human model and move to a socially hostile model which allows THEM to control their own development, as opposed to the standard social model where humans are shaped by society at large.
Asperger's is not a psychological disorder - it's a psychocultural order. It's an attempt to free the self from society's influence, which obviously will never entirely work for various reasons. It's a conscious attempt to place oneself in objection to the standard thoughts and beliefs of the dominant society.
Asperger's is fundamentally social - just not in the standard manner. People with Asperger's are not invisible - they often have a profound influence on "normal" people. They are happy to have this influence.
The Asperger's psychocultural order asks the question "Just how 'good' are "normal" people?"
Or maybe it appeared in the 20th century because that's really the century that people took psychological disorders seriously and there was actual literature behind it and experiments done? Are you really going to say that Tay Sachs disorder only appeared in the 19th century because it took that long for it to be described by physicians? That would be crazy. Or that viruses only appeared in the 19th century because only then they were found?
Stryker said:
Just ignore the trolls.
They leave when they do not get the attention they desire.
This isn't a troll, Mr. 8 posts who is apparently such an expert on autism that no expanded views are allowed to be presented. If I leave, it will likely because I've been unfairly demonized as a troll, which you will ignore in favor of the self-supporting theory that "they didn't get the attention they desired, so they left".
You're using a strawman argument, maxben - I'm not saying that ALL disorders or "disorders" have cultural components. I'm saying that autism does.
The question behind a person's choice of psychological conditions is often "What is best for the world?" In a happy world there is no autism - in native american culture for example (far happier than modern global capital culture) there is no autism. The common argument here is the same you already gave - Autism wasn't diagnosed precisely UNTIL the happy native american culture was exterminated, so ha ha you can't prove anything.
It's true - once a world enters a certain condition and then "discovers" "disorders" to explain it's own condition there can no longer be "proof" generated concerning the lack of the condition previously. One cannot prove a negative.
Research on autism is only ever done in developed countries - a way to prove my point is to study autism in cultures still apart from global capital - such as those deep in the Amazonian rainforest. This has not been done, and the problem exists that doctors themselves are a part of global capital, so the experiment would be to some extent self-corrupting of the results.
There also aren't serial killers in (pre-colonized) native american culture, for exactly the same reason that there aren't autists.
So what is best for OUR world? What is best for a dying world (per ever-more-certain ecological disaster) where humans are lost in despair and anxiety? More people are "opting out" in one way or another. One method of opting out is autism, which gives the person more self-control over his own condition, at the expense of social integration.
By having more self-control in a world gone mad, there is more hope, since the world itself impacts less on the individual. (This is what autists believe, not reflective of my own beliefs).
My argument against autism is that modern problems are largely structural in nature - what's preventing ecological improvement is domination by high capital, not by insufficiencies within individuals. Distancing oneself from society doesn't help anyone.