Is It All Just A Story?

 I've been thinking a lot about the way my autism has presented through the years, and how it affects/presents in social relationships. One of the things I've understood to be different about me from the overwhelming majority of people I've met and known, is a reduced interest in competing for social status. If I'm completely honest, the one thing I've ever really wanted, socially, is to get to just be a human being amongst other human beings. I can recognize that we may be different in a number of ways, but those have always registered as variations really, not differences. It's a significant part of what I do enjoy about socializing with other people, and I do enjoy meeting and getting to know new people. A significant part of my love for the arts has been the degree it engages me with the vast spectrum that is the human being. It's why trying to choose a "best" when talking about any number of different human endeavors and creations makes me extremely anxious. There isn't a "best" to me. What I enjoy is that vast spectrum of how we go about creating, what we create, why we create, how all manner of different things effect all of those. Why choose this genre? How is it we can choose to create within a genre, and it's still particular, it's own specific variation, within that genre? Why choose to say this specific thing with this specific work? 

This, to me, is endlessly beautiful and awe inspiring, because we find all these different ways to do all of this, and to me... it seems like what we're doing, human beings, with things like art and history, is try to figure out what it is to be human, how best we might live together, who we are individually and collectively, recognize ourselves and each other in each other. So, when someone says, "What's your favorite...?" or "What's the best...?" my brain locks up, because the answer really is, "Well this does this, so well and it is so lovingly considered and thought through, and this does almost the same thing, just as well, but it's interesting, because it does it differently by..." I have preferences, but I don't really have favorites. I'm not interested in any of it to have favorites. I'm interested in it because of the way it all exists, together, in connection, in contradiction, in compliment and so on. Choosing a "best" or a "favorite" is in direct contradiction to what I love, and why I'm engaging with these things. 

I could be wrong, of course, but when I step back it seems as if the thing that's common to so much of the problems I run into, things that through forty odd years of trying to change, trying various solutions to solve, comes down to narrative. It seems like my brain does something different with narrative. It doesn't ever seem to let go of the idea that narrative is something different from a person, and that we might impose narratives on people, but those narratives are never the person or the people. 

Here's what I mean... If I use the word "student" it's a collection of ideas, in a box. We call that box student. A person has to try to become a student, with all the attendant behaviors and attitudes. In many ways, I can and always did demonstrate what we say the point of being a student is. A student's job is to learn. I do that, and I do it pretty well. I can take in, integrate and synthesize information with the previous sets of information I had, quickly and without a whole lot of effort. I learn and do so at a rate that was always considered accelerated. However, I could never put together the full set of social expectations for a student. There are ways those run into conflict with what I always understood or thought was just being a human being, and trying to be a decent human being. It seems to me, allistics, neurotypicals, don't have any trouble with resolving those conflicts. It's just something that happens automatically. 

In its way, the word student is a story. It's the story of a particular social position, the ways a person is expected to act, the roles they're expected to be able to model and inhabit. It's an idea, a thing human beings created, and then expect a human being to embody, whether or not it comes into conflict with the variations that exist within the species we call human. A person acts like a student, but they're always human, either way. They can be human, but not be a student. It's an idea, a story, about how to behave. 

I'm coming to realize, that's kind of at the center of all the things around me struggle with. It seems as if NTs are able to forget or sometimes maybe not even know what they're talking about is just a story, a narrative. I see the stories and narratives, all the time. Most of the problems I run into with NTs, and in most of my life, is not demonstrating a deep enough conviction in that narrative. I can know it's there, and even understand it's a dominant narrative, that adhering to it, acting as if it is real, is the way to get the results that are supposed to come of it. I can't ever actually believe it though. It's just a narrative, a story. It might be the best story we have right now for X, Y or Z, but it's still just a story. 

So, like the word "student" is a story, so are things like "cop" or "police." In most of our political discourse, what people are arguing about is the story around what that is. If someone says, "Defund police" they're telling a story about what they believe about police. When someone responds saying, "Blue Lives Matter" or "We need police and defunding them is juvenile utopianism," they're also telling a story about what they believe police are, so collectively, there's a whole lot of going around and around about the story we believe about police. What rarely ends up being the center of the discussion is, "What do we think police are, policing is, and is that producing the results we say we want?" Part of that comes down the results we say we want, and those are actually pretty different depending on who you're talking to. That's part of what's implied in the story though, the "Defund police" or "ACAB" and the "Blue Lives Matter" or "We need police." 

I do certainly fall closer to the ACAB camp, because when I step back and look at the information we have about policing, what it produces, how it acts, the way it interacts with society, people who see police as the servants of institutions of power, regardless of whether that institution is acting in a way that produces the positive results for the society we say our institutions are supposed to serve, are giving a more accurate description. I don't believe all cops are bastards. I think they're people fitting into institutions, as best they can, based on the stories they believe, which is what most people are doing. There are definitely unique aspects to the way policing is destructive, but we have a whole lot of roles in society whose power is unique in how they can be destructive or ant-social, and we don't assume every single person who gets involved with every one of them isn't a decent person. Systems and institutions often require us to look the other way when our humanity comes into conflict with the roles they require us to fulfill or model. Part of the reason people decide to be police or cops, is because they believe the story about being a cop, that they're most familiar with, the one that's had the most influence in their lives. I also think part of what causes the destructive behaviors we see being common in police, in other parts of their lives, come from a combination of what the job requires, and the ways the story about what policing is doesn't match reality. I think, in a lot of ways, we set cops up to fail, because we're telling the same stories, despite the growing evidence the story doesn't fit the reality. I know there are plenty of people who would say, "I don't really care what distress police are encountering from being in the job, the job itself is causing harm to all kinds of other people, and the focus should be on them." I don't disagree. I just as much believe that the majority of people who engage in the majority of behaviors that have jail attached to them, are also doing so in reaction to the distress of social systems and the roles they create failing those people. Even the kinds of human beings who seem to thrive on conflict, the kinds that turn violent, are just reacting to the stories they believe about who they are, what we are as human beings and so on.  

At the same time, if what we're doing is constantly arguing about whether the right story is "ACAB" or "We need the police for...," we're not talking very much about what the thing police exist to do is, whether the way policing works is achieving that or even what might be a better model to achieve the end goal. The end goal, I think is justice because that helps foster and enable harmony and social cohesion. We have a "justice system" which is more fundamentally a system of punishment than it is about justice as a larger concept that fosters harmony and social cohesion. We know, due to what is now many years and reams of research, that punishment is not an effective method of behavior modification. Folks tend to dislike the term "behavior modification," but if you're talking about violent behavior and criminal behavior and how to deal with them as a society, punishment is a theory of behavior modification, and people just don't like calling it what it is. If punishment doesn't work, what other theories of behavior modification are available? We, collectively, encourage and discourage all kinds of behaviors. That is social engineering, and behavior modification. It's what culture does, and what laws are designed to do. These can be engaged in with thoughtful, researched and attentive intent and perspective or we can keep arguing about which story we are personally more comfortable with, itself usually the result of social engineering, because it's the one we've been taught since we were children. 

This is basically what the "culture wars" are, aren't they? People arguing about which story is "right." Rarely are they arguing about whether the story is accurate, but whether it's "right." 

Part of what I'm weighing right now, is whether or not part of what autism has produced for me, is a constant awareness that power is a relationship, and how much of our social framework is derived from the story we tell ourselves about that relationship. Where I've struggled with social norms and social behaviors, the kind of things I either haven't been able to overcome or can only be deemed "socially acceptable" if I engage in a degree of masking that is detrimental to my health, just about always comes down to, what at least at this point, seems to be the degree to which neurotypicals/allistics, don't seem to be aware of power dynamics or that power is a relationship, in and of itself. Power, as a concept, is a relationship. When we're talking about institutions of basically any kind they have power, in large part because of the collective belief in their power or the necessity they be given power. 

I'm also wondering if the framework through which talk and teach about human history is part of what creates that. If I talk to a geologist or climatologist, they talk about the eras of the planets existence in terms of the conditions on the planet itself, they're defined by the environmental factors. If I talk to an expert on human history though, it becomes a study of civilizations, broken up into the eras defined by whatever the "great power" was at the time. The eras, are defined by the preservation and continuation of the institutions that have power within nations and empires. There is some degree to which this makes sense, but it also, purposely or not, creates a basis, an implicit assumption of the point of nations and civilizations being preservation and maintenance of those institutions of power, when the study itself reveals, in the history of their existence, those institutions may or may not serve the people of those nations. They may begin this way, but it's not unusual in the course of their existence, for them to become predatory in their efforts to preserve themselves. It sets up a framework, a kind of scaffolding, which presents the idea that whether or not those institutions are predatory or not is less important than whether they are preserved, maintained and continue to exist. It also presents history as if the continuing clashes of power, the rising empire in competition with the declining empire as an example, as if this is what's most important. 

The way those institutions and those empires affect the lives of the majority of human beings who have to live in relation to them, becomes a kind of secondary afterthought. 

This seems to mistake the point of human civilization, so far as I can tell at least. Civilization seems to exist, to be something we created, to be able to create the conditions that are most conducive, most encouraging for, human well being and fulfillment. But, if we're teaching the definition of the success of a civilization is the length of preservation of its institutions, that sidelines whether or not those institutions are succeeding at that. 

It also discounts the degree to which history seems to demonstrate that it's often the institutions and structures of power a people accepts or erects that end up being the most significant threat or detractor from their well being. Nation 1 decides it's going to attempt to take over Nation 2. The story ends up being about that conflict. Rarely is the story about whether either of these nations actually had political or social structures that were effective at producing well being and fulfillment among their own populations. Nation 2 lost the conflict or didn't, and therefore ceases to exist, subsumed by Nation 1 or isn't. It's about the decisions, perspectives and interests of the institutions of power. 

The thing is, the overwhelming majority of human beings throughout human history have had very little access to power. Power is far more likely to shape us individually than we are to individually shape it. 

This even extends to individual sense of identity. If I say, "I'm an American." What does that really mean? It's a legal definition, right? It denotes I am born or naturalized as the citizen of a specific nation. Now, we do make certain assumptions that this also means common culture. How true is that though? It may be true of nations that are both geographically smaller and have a smaller population, but that seems specious when you're talking about the United States. My cultural experience has been relatively specific, and there are a whole lot of people in the nation who have an extremely different cultural experience. I grew up in the northeast of the US, in a place with comparatively high concentrations of people who were Catholic or Jewish. I also happened to grow up and attend a school district with a comparatively high concentration of Black and Native people. That's not the norm for the majority of the nation's white population. Does that make my experience more or less American? 

When I say, "I'm an American," I'm identifying myself with a government and the geographic location is governs. I'm not either of those things though. I'm just a human being. I have only an infinitesimal influence over either of these things. It's a description of the power that is expected to have shaped who I am, and certainly has, but even if you strip being autistic, and therefore atypical of population the label attempts to describe, it's a legal status without any other context. Everything else we are saying, when we say, "American," is just a story, and believe have very different stories they tell themselves and each other about what that means, on top of a scope of experiences so broad and deep in the extremes of its differences for the label to be more or less meaningless. It's identifying an institution as part of our identity, part of who we are. 

I have a relationship with that institution, certainly, but it isn't who I am as an individual, and the label doesn't describe me conception or perception of the relationship either. It just says it's the institution which was broadly given the power to give me the legal designation as citizen, and even more ironic, it's a label, a designation that's given power because citizen is recognized universally among those institutional powers we call governments. We create identities involving a perceived relationship with power, whether the relationship we perceive is accurate or not. 

I think, yes, "American" has shaped my identity, but it's been less my relationship to the institutions of power than it has been the socialization and acculturation of the stories we tell about those institutions, not any real accurate accounting of what they do or how they behave. The institution isn't the story, and the story isn't the institution, and this has always been something I've stumbled over in the trying to talk about, communicate with other people, in talking about things having to do with power and authority. 

Power is a thing we create, through belief. It's not a thing that exists, on its own, separate from human beings and our social organization. A thing has power, essentially, because enough of us believe it does. It can attempt to coerce us into believing in it, but by definition, we have to be coerced to believe in it, to comply with it to adopt what behaviors it is attempting to enforce, because we don't believe in it. Whiteness doesn't exist. It's not real, never has been. It has power because a great enough number of people have believed it exists, and over time, its accrued more power, and the power given that belief then has the ability to effect and influence socialization and acculturation, to the point the belief itself inserts itself into the real world, has real consequences as measurable as any other, which in turn gives it even more power. 

I'm just a human being. Am I white because the culture I've existed in says I am, despite the fact that white doesn't really exist? There's certainly a socialization and acculturation into being white, and it does produce results in the real world. Does that make me white? Does that make white real? It demonstrates the belief and its existence, but I don't know it makes whiteness real, most especially because there is nothing about whiteness that is actually specific or particular to it. There's no behavior one can identify among people considered white that can't be found among people defined as something other than white, and vice versa. Whiteness is a story. That it was a story created to benefit nations engaged in the trans Atlantic slave trade seems to have no bearing on whether people believe it. Most don't believe that's why it was created in the first place, and even if they do, people we call who believe they are white have been socialized and acculturated to make it real. It is a story about, and created by, a relationship to power. 

Autism describes atypical information processing in the brain. That atypical information processing is what produces the stereotypical traits of autism, sensory tolerances that are atypical, atypical communication styles. It's also stereotypically said that people with autism have difficulty with social situations and social hierarchies. The thing is, the majority of these descriptions have come from outside of the perspective and experience of autistic people. We've been described by the world, most especially the medical community and field. As we've begun describing ourselves, not only are more of us beginning to recognize ourselves as autistic, but the backlash to this recognition has grown. I don't think it's coincidental that the focus on "curing autism" or treating autism as if it's a condition which has to be excised from society, eugenics essentially, has come in direct proportion to our growing willingness and ability to both recognize and express ourselves. It creates a contradiction to the power of the structures which are the medical community, but even more so, it creates a challenge to the power to define, and that power goes beyond the medical community, to things like government, social and other political institutions. If the medical community recognizes the definitions and experiences from people who are autistic, it means those other institutions have to contend with them. Many people with autism refer to it as a "social disability," in recognizing many of us don't lack the ability to engage in the behaviors our social environments require, and yet there's still a stigma, assumptions of motive, an assignment of a narrative to the differences in our social behaviors that is negative. Those assumptions are the result of narratives neurotypical people are imposing on us from the outside. 

Among people with autism, there is also a over representation of diagnosis with Pathological Demand Avoidance, Oppositional Defiance Disorder and Anti-Social Personality Disorder. What if 

What I'm wondering, at this point, is whether or not what we might start to consider is that if autism is atypical information processing, might it be possible that part of the difference in information processing is in how the autistic brain handles the information it perceives as narrative in comparison to how the neurotypical brain handles that information.