@justice-turtle replied to your post : (under a cut because I reserve the right to delete…
(having trouble getting the usual reply blockquote to work, so I’ll italicise instead)
I keep wondering if a certain type of verbally-oriented autistic is the only person who actually questions – maybe who CAN actually question – feelings and assumptions that everyone else seems to take as bedrock. :P It’s a discouraging possibility.
(also: emigrant from an overtly hierarchical society here. I can attest you still get told the problem is with you if you don’t fit in, questioning the people who have power is still dangerous, it’s only those OTHER societies (communist russia anyone?) whose different trappings on the same structure make them problematic, and everyone else insists they actually feel the way they’re programmed to. I don’t know. Neurotypicals are weird. :P)
Sorry, I’m babbling. What I’m trying to say is: apart from the specifically anti-authoritarian trappings, this all sounds startlingly familiar given how opposite our cultures are. Like, very specifically familiar in individual details. Does everybody actually live in the same sort of toxic power structure and out-group everyone else so thoroughly they can’t recognize it? I feel like that kind of thinking is awfully… like, “I am special, I see what others can’t”, kind of attitude, but (cont.)
(cont.) but I haven’t got an alternate paradigm that would still fit these parts of the evidence.
I did wonder if “the problem is with you” was too negative a way of putting it, given that the contexts I originally encountered the idea in were autism (generally a positively-connotated trait around here) and asexuality (grey area, but while some people say asexuals have equal status with straights (that is, no status), the people talking about growing up feeling like all allosexuals were lying aren’t those same people). In such cases, it isn’t the trait itself they consider a problem, just that it’s harder to navigate being surrounded by people unlike you if you don’t even know they’re unlike you, let alone how to account for it.
Part of me feels like a society where questioning your superiors is genuinely permitted is too much to hope for, and a more feasible goal is a society that doesn’t pretend questioning is allowed but then punish you if you actually do it. That would be the point of moving to an overtly hierarchical culture: not an attempt to reduce the total number or restrictiveness of rules, but an attempt to increase the number of written rules and correspondingly reduce the number of unwritten ones, and especially instances like questioning, where written and unwritten rules contradict each other. (The opposite of the usual description of hypocrisy: “do as I do, not as I say”.) That you still got everyone insisting they actually felt as they were programmed to is a bad sign for that idea, though.
Re: “I am special, I see what others can’t”, it kind of seems more like missing something, some aspect of morality that would allow for the proper sincerity…but I remember you saying something about how you used to believe you were sociopathic, and that you don’t think that anymore. Was that a similar thing?
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Relatedly, a few months ago @deusvulture (who I’m apparently not allowed to ping) wrote a post speculating on ideological “hobbits”. Like The Authoritarians, the post assumes no members of the group it’s talking about are in the audience; unlike The Authoritarians, it tries not to call its subjects inferior beings who are likely to get us all killed.
The post stayed with me because my reaction to it was “damn, where do I sign up?”. Pay lip service to a given hierarchy, turn up when it’s in need of sheer numbers in ways that don’t require you to put yourself in harm’s way, perhaps use some of its dialect in a non-status-y way when casually chatting with friends, but mostly you and it ignore each other. It sounds too good to be true.
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#justice turtle #replies #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
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