Hated at One’s Job
Another good thread on the Aspergers subreddit about someone who people treat poorly at their job. There are some really constructive responses.
I never had trouble being treated bad in a vocation situation until I volunteered at Calvin in the summer of 2011. The dynamic was not in my favor there being the old guy doing the same work the college kids were doing but as unpaid (this experience has scared me away from working in an office ever again). In other vocational situations I was always on the level of my compatriots whether being paid or volunteer.
Religiosity and ASD
Great Reddit post where people on the spectrum share their religious views.
Uncanny Valley of Prayer
I think the people who pray a lot and the people who don’t pray at all often do the most good. The people pray a lot prime themselves for action so even a materialist will see some effect of their prayer. For example someone who prayed constantly for people affected by the Ebola epidemic probably would give money or service. An atheist would put no stock in the efficacy of prayer and either take action or not. It’s the lukewarm people in the middle that often do the worst, just praying a little and thinking that does a lot, an act of ease and convenience. This group is what prayer shaming is aimed at. If you really hate mass shootings you’ll do something about them besides praying.
Social Skills
From a post on my other blog:
Social Skills: Again this term does a poor job of describing what goes on in the real world. Take the term woodworking skills. It describes someone’s ability to form good things out of wood. The point here is the wood isn’t resistant, it is pliable and always stays the same. In social interactions there are all kinds of feedback loops going on. If there is something wrong with you the loop generally starts out negative and continues along on that path (as an individual with a physical disability and mental illness I experience this daily). A better word for “social skills” would be social traction because that is a more accurate and holistic way of describing what goes on.
Autism is Beautiful
Autism is Beautiful blog post:
It’s okay to have your own sensory needs. Be comfortable. Don’t force yourself to dress a certain way because it’s what the world expects you to be like. If you’re the most comfortable in yoga pants and a t-shirt, rock it! Most comfortable in tunics and leggings? You do you!
My little sister (who is smarter than me) said the hardest thing to do is be normal. Which is very funny thing to admit given we live in a culture that plays lip service to self-expression and individuality while exhibiting and enforcing the polar opposite. Yes sexual mores have loosened since the 50’s but everything else has pretty much tightened.
used on you
There is often a very easy explanation for the beliefs one uses to navigate this world of ours. How beliefs are used. People figure if someone is using a belief on them it must be good enough for them to use. A few hypothetical examples:
Susie is a 23 year old college graduate who is 30 pounds overweight. She double majored in math and psychology. Like many women her age she has body image issues and doesn’t have the metabolism needed to become slender. She has seen therapists before who told her she was fine just the way she was but she called bullshit on them. In conflict here is business to business (b2b) verses and business to consumer (b2c) psychology. Susie absorbed the messages from advertisements vetted by b2b psychologists and felt their direct and indirect (mediated by male and female peers) effects of a thin-obsessed culture. For Susie poor body image isn’t an anomaly, it’s something handed down deliberately with the aid of b2b psychologist by a culture obsessed with thinness. A b2c psychologist would stick the pejorative “insecure” label on her. This same therapist might tell her she has innate worth regardless of her weight but outside the psychologist’s office this belief is not being used on her. So she doesn’t use it.
Bill is an unemployed 26 year old who had to move back to a town with no jobs to take care of his dad who had a stroke. His parents are religious and are always trying to get him to go to church. Bill goes to a few services and the church talks about how there is hope for everybody, even the least of these. However the people in the church treat Bill like he’s invisible. They use conjecture to assess his future and come to the conclusion that he has none. Bill assumes rightly that if conjecture is ultimately what’s going to be used on him, it’s worth him using. Bill tunes out all the blathering about hope and stops going to church.
Nathaniel is a 28 year old working at a small local animal rights nonprofit. Every day he’s writing grants and soliciting donors. He wanted to work in a nonprofit to get away from the dollar driven world but it just didn’t work out. When he gets home he’s greeted with oodles of mail from places he’s donated to once asking for more money. Eventually Nathaniel succumbs to the idea he was running away from so hard, that money is the most important thing.
brain as computer
“He saw himself as a scientific materialist; he believes that metaphor—the brain as a computer—has done more to increase the number of atheists than anything by Darwin.”
This is a quote from a schizophrenic programmer who wrote his own sixteen color operating system called TempleOS. The whole article is very interesting but I’m mainly focusing on this brain as computer analogy and how it causes us to see ourselves differently. Being a Computer Science graduate I gravitated towards seeing my brain as a computer so much so that when I had a psychotic break one of the things I wanted to have them do is run my brain through the old-school DOS Scandisk to look for bad sectors (the Scandisk from the Windows 95/98 days, the one that would run on the boot after the computer failed to shut down properly). More recently I’ve talked about sandboxing relationships that meant a lot to me which I didn’t do when I was in my early 20’s (much to my chagrin because I am still not over them). Sandboxing is when you run a process cordoned off from the rest of the computer’s resources so it can’t crash or manipulate the rest of the system.
The metaphor of the brain as a computer when internalized subconsciously is incredibly materialistic, leaving out the soul or supernatural agents. It breeds scientism and pragmatism. Things are framed as inputs, processing, and outputs. This is one reason millennials (who often exhibit this metaphor) absolutely can’t metabolize hypocrisy. Because they see clearly the inputs, the outputs, and the disconnect between the two. Output and outworking are what are paramount, existence precedes essence.
One in four of us millennials has a mental illness and in this regard we see religion as a software patch attempting to fix a hardware problem (as if brain chemicals could be put correctly merely by force of will). We see religion like an annoying friend trying to photo bomb every picture we take. It inserts itself into places it has no business being like how one can “pray” the mental illness or gay or whatever away. By design it’s the one thing, the only thing, the most important thing. Just follow these spiritual disciplines and things will improve and if they don’t improve you’re not doing it right, it’s your fault. A lot of time people will judge you based on whether your life compiles. If they see any fatal errors in you (not living up to what they expect of you) they’ll simply ignore or scorn you.
Then you have apps like Shazam and SoundHound. Suddenly we can consult an app to see who what we hear is coming from. God’s voice can’t be Shzam’d and it makes taking instructions from a deity just seem more and more ridiculous.
truth we can handle
the mentally healthy can take religion
a kernel of crazy stuff
with a shell of rationality
but those of us mentally ill
eat through the shell and cannot handle the kernel
I don’t choose what to believe
the evidence
chooses for me
Listened to an amazing Blind Hour podcast on bipolar. One of the things I took away from it is it’s very hard not to give in to psychosis. This has been a fundamental to the way I reckon truth. I have deeply personal reasons for tying truth to the things I tie it to. For me it’s a grounding mechanism, a bulwark against encroaching psychosis. The guy in the podcast who was bipolar said the medication kept 95% of the psychosis away and my experience bares that out. Belief in the supernatural and in particular that a god is talking to me has caused me a whole heap of trouble in the past so I avoid it now. God has basically told me to date women out of my league, drink piss, and kill myself so I don’t think too highly of his advice.
Communications with God are so hard to shake off, no matter how toxic, because communicating with a deity is, by its very nature, extra-rational. You consult a deity when you need an opinion that might not line up with reason or what those around you want you to hear. Crack open a Bible and you will hear God telling people to do all kinds of interesting stuff. Delusions of grandeur brought on by psychosis are easier to combat because once you start thinking rationally again you can read cues from the rest of the world as to your place in society and since those cues persist through all levels of sanity they’re easy to accept.
And then, whaddaya know I got people shoving religion down my throat because I am in a low position in society and the answer to all your problems (even your problems with religion) is more religion! You don’t shove peanut butter down the throat of a kid who has peanut allergies do you? Then why do you shove God down the throat of someone who obviously had adverse reactions to God and religion?
Bad Information (Climate Change, Evangelicalism and the Global South)
Perhaps the most important thing to know about bad information is it does not have a uniform effect on the people it is given to. It has a disproportionately adverse effect on those who are at the margins. For example telling people a diet of deep fried foods is fine will hurt older people with a risk of heart disease and stroke the most. Low risk people in their 20’s who take this advice will generally do fine.
As the center of gravity of Evangelicalism shifts to the global south I am hoping the center of power follows suit for the simple reason that a faith that doesn’t address climate change is one that destroys lives and livelihoods and foments instability (the Middle East drought was one of the catalysts for the civil war in Syria which ultimately gave us ISIS). In America we’ve been comparatively lucky though climate change was probably a factor in a few droughts and strengthened Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy. But places like Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Ethiopia are experiencing unprecedented droughts and the Marshall Islands are disappearing due to rising sea levels. If you read the world news you’ll see many more stories like these.
I am not heartened by the attitudes towards climate change I see in American Evangelicalism. I think a lot of ministers believe in it but a large portion of their flock does not and it’s not a big priority because for most of us Americans climate change just means a few more nice days in the fall to take a walk or a bike ride. But I think of billionaire investor Mark Cuban’s quote, “never take advice from someone who doesn’t have to live with the consequences”, applies here. We can give bad information about climate change to those in the global south because we aren’t hurt by this information the same way they are. I am heartened by Pope Francis’s willingness to address climate change and I think that willingness points to a less first world centric view the Catholic church has taken on. I just hope the Evangelical Christian church can embrace this more global perspective and think more critically how their choices affect those on the rest of our planet.
non communicativeness
I have been unfortunate in life in that the two closest friends I have had became uncommunicative in the end. The first friend from junior high I had a falling out with and the second one from college I became too low status for. These people aren’t stupid, they did what they knew would hurt the most, not necessarily to hurt me but as a show of force. For the first one it was paying me back for our falling out. For the second one it was to make a judgement on my failure lifestyle. To communicate with me would be to condone the way I’ve lived my life, being a net drain on society rather than a net gain for it.
You’ll find that adults use non communicativeness as a weapon against people (particularly people close to them) who live a kind of lifestyle they don’t agree with. For example if a woman realizes she likes women and has a girlfriend, her fundamentalist Christian parents or relatives might simply stop speaking to her.
For me as an aspie non communicativeness will always remain as something I don’t have the head to grasp (maybe that’s why when used on me it hurts more than it would when used on the average person). I can understand not talking to someone for a limited amount of time while you’re steaming mad at them but not for an indefinite period of time. Maybe I’m just too socially needy I don’t know.
Jesus’ admonition to forgive falls hardest on the aggrieved party but with his admonition to reconcile, the aggrieved party often gains as much if not more depending on how much they cared about said relationship. For example reconciling with my best friend from junior high would be a godsend for me. I don’t think there is any hope for my friend from college because that judgement against me is based on who I have become, not some wrong I did.
A bitter irony in the whole thing is non communicativeness is seen as a perfectly acceptable behavior for neurotypicals but when we do it we’re stigmatized as nonverbal and have our rights taken away.