“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”
Archibald MacLeish
Came across another article on autism (link now expired). Confirmation for the apparent significant increase in the number of cases in recent years in the United States which can’t be attributed to shifting goalposts in diagnosis (which is often a large factor in changes in disease incidence statistics).
I can’t help but feel we’re missing something here. It has to do with our assumptions about what constitutes “healthy” and “normal” and about how apparent deviations from these states should be defined and treated. These children are described as “damaged”, as having a “disorder” or “disability”, yet many of them exhibit abilities far and away superior to those of “normal” individuals, and don’t appear intrinsically unhealthy within themselves. Even children diagnosed with the so-called relatively “high functioning” states on the autistic spectrum, such as Asperger’s Syndrome, often seem to have quite remarkable talents in certain areas. What if, in our attempts to “normalise” them into behavour that we feel more comfortable with, we are the ones who are disabling them, not their condition? Perhaps there’s very good reason for their apparent inability to appreciate the social “norms” we all take for granted? Perhaps it’s time those “norms” got to be seriously challenged and questioned?
When you spend time with these children, it’s clear that they are open to, and taking in, far more information about their environment than so-called “normal” individuals who screen out the vast majority of sensory input. It’s overwhelming: hence the lack of communication because opening up to more than they already are is too much; hence the repetitive behaviours which serve the purpose of blocking out some of that input for a while and providing something to hold onto amidst the maelstrom.
As the Article of the Moment on Daniel Tammet showed, we have an enormous amount to learn from autistic states which may well turn out to be of benefit to all of us. Isn’t it time we stopped automatically labelling everything outwith the bounds of our collective comfort zones as “damaged”, “disabled”, “dysfunctional”, “disordered”, etc, and consider that we are the ones being wrong-headed about it all, not the ones we’ve labelled as such?
“It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.”
Giordano Bruno
