Autism & Neurodiversity…? Srsly?Neurodiversity…?
Humans come in a wide variety of colors, sizes, shapes, characters, ages, abilities…
And neurological wirings.
Some are better adapted to certain environments than others. Some worse… to specific environments.
Is this still controversial…?
Einstein was wrong. G-d DOES play dice with the universe. Every moment is a random event at the quantum scale.
It just… mostly… evens out statiscally in the world we perceive.
Genetics…? Same same.
There is no March of Evolution from Slime to Perfection… None whatsoever.
Humanity looks on evolution like a predator.
Basically those famous Evolutionary Trees… are nothing more than dressed up Food Chains.
We imagine a world in which WE are at the Pinnacle of Creation… cuz we erroneously believe we’re the most successful predator on Earth…
Everybody else is Food… a second-rate Competitor… or a Pet.
Which is arrogant stupidity on the face of it…
Bacteria got us beat by volume, mass, and sheer success …
We all end up as Food for bacteria.
Evolution works by Accident. Every time a gene is replicated, there’s a chance for mistake… Statistically.
That’s a feature not a bug…
Nature just keeps throwing shit at the wall. Some sticks… some don’t…
But over time, some changes become successful adaptations. In other words, they persist over generations in a significant part of the population.
Or, said another way, every single Being is just another noble experiment. At existence.
Each Being has some numerous “mistakes”… or experiments.
And most fail. They are NOT passed from generation to generation… for long.
It’s a balancing act. There is no forward. No back. No end goal…
Just balance in the moment. Existence… Being…
Or not.
Over time, a “species”…
a fairly loose group of individuals who are only connected by a shot at reproducing with each other…
may perform better than others at maintaining that balance…
Statistically.
The population on average becomes more in balance with the challenges & resources of its specific environment.
Which is a very different understanding than what you find in pop culture…
Which is generally stuck in the 19th Century rationalist dream of reason, understanding, absolutes, perfection, teleology…
And Human Exceptionalism. Separate & above… Nature.
Now, take psychology… in many ways a pseudo- science… pretending the models of classical physical science guide its research.
Since Freud, psychology uses the medical model to explore human differences…
And label more and more of us…
- Whom Northern European professionals don’t approve of…
- That is, those of us not designed to succeed in the world after 20th Century punch-clock factories & schools were suddenly invented…
As if we can only be understood by our deficits in the business world. Or the marketplace.
The loose concept “Neurodiversity” embraces schizophrenics, autists, people with wide mood ranges, differing attention spans, language abilities, whatever…
The entire human race and its checkered gene pool…
The complete range of human intellectual, emotional, cognitive difference that is rooted in neurological differences that are not learned “personality disorders”…
So that autists, and our related kin under the skin, have strengths and challenges…
Just like the arbitrarily named “neurotypical” humans who CAN thrive punching a clock…
Who, btw, don’t appear to be in the majority, if the results of the modern “welfare state” be the Judge.
Nature doesn’t preserve bad genes.
Not autism. Not schizophrenia. Not ADHD. Not Downs…
If the Neurodiverse have survived hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of generations…
They serve the purposes of the human gene pool. Or they’d be pushing up daisies with the Neanderthals…
The #ActuallyAutistic have always walked among you. Supporting the survival of the human race in niches they excel in… scholars, monks & mystics, dreamers, detailed crafts & scientists, artists, musicians, poets, STEM…
As do schizophrenics and the rest.
A purely deficit-based view of humanity is a…
humiliating…
disempowering…
destructive…
LIE.
Support #ActuallyAutistic artists, musicians, writers…
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Originally published at http://autisticaf.me on September 19, 2020.
