The Standard Review

Dignified not Objectified

The most basic human right I can think of is being treated with dignity. If humans are simply, by the act of being human, seen as deserving of dignity, then most other basic human rights will follow.

Due to psychology being mass marketed the way it is, it doesn't matter so much that a particular psychological theory (or treatment that results from a theory) is meant to encourage dignified treatment or not. If those who implement the treatment are only interested in using the theory as a means for control, whatever dignity was intended gets lost in the translation.

I don't see enough acceptance in the implementation of psychology that most people being treated have rarely if ever been treated with dignity. If this population isn't who psychology is meant to serve then it is by default a means of oppression.

When this lack of being treated with dignity is due to their social class, and they are being asked to trust a treatment which is obviously being used for social reform, they are likely to ask, "If the class system is unfair (which it is) then how can a reform that accepts and promotes that class system be fair?" Without trust there is no environment for people to be helped.

Once the purposed treatment or therapy has been seen by them as part of the problem and the goal of that treatment or therapy is to achieve something, which seems to them to be based on the same type of objectification they are accustomed to, there are few chances to establish trust.

This is what I see as the biggest threat to autistic rights.

When self-actualization/awareness/humaness is a goal, people who are behaving in ways that don't appear to have reached that goal have their behavior (and what society has taught them is who they are by association) seen as an object to be fixed.

If the first step to turning that around is to teach them how to achieve dignity rather than be objectified, then the first message you have reinforced to them is that they are nothing but objects to begin with. It doesn't matter if individual therapists don't see them that way or, even if the therapeutic goal is more sophisticated than that. They will judge what they see based on what they have been taught is a threat. This will automatically be seen to them as a threat.

Too often people want to separate autistic kid's needs from those of autistic adults rather than looking at the similarities of how autistics are wrongly treated in public programs at all ages. It doesn't matter how old someone is, they won't be accepting much other learning or a lot of responsibility to change (including how to behave "properly") until, or, unless they are able to accept being treated with dignity. They must be taught that they and everyone else deserves it. People know this instinctively but yet are constantly taught otherwise.

It's not so much a matter of the government instilling dignity, but at this point they are too often stealing it (or at least discouraging it).

In public schools, at a certain age, they decide that the welfare of the mainstream is what's most important and that those who don't fit are either seen as not trying or not interested in education. This leads to the population who doesn't fit having their needs become secondary if not ignored altogether. Again their self-esteem, based on the dignity they are shown, suffers.

As they get older they are likely to be even more objectified by public programs and put in even more situations where they are warehoused without any goals for their betterment whatsoever. The cycle that teaches them that they don't deserve dignity also reinforces how they in turn objectify others. If schools accept the responsibility in the beginning and teach dignity before anything along with not trying to force any other teaching until that goal is met, we wouldn't need the systematized objectifying boxes.

If advocacy for human rights isn't willing to look at the system that teaches the denial of human rights, advocates will by default exclude and objectify people in the same way as the system they are trying to change. Ultimately, with this happening no changes are made.

That public systems that needs to be changed rewards the best and brightest and the most popular because to do otherwise would indicate that the system which evaluated and assigned them the distinction as that way in the first place was broken. Advocates that follow that system are ultimately sacrificing peoples human rights and their dignity for very little progress. In the long run, it will be worse than no progress at all.

 

The Importance of Every Effort

When working towards a combined goal or cause not all efforts are worth the same. In every case that the effort is towards that goal one effort is equal to any other. However, not everyone who gets involved can put away enough of their personal agendas and selfish needs in order to get involved with the community that is working towards a common goal. Any number of motivations can be more important to them that distracts them from the plural efforts but one way that a personal agenda is shown very clearly by someone is when they attempt to show their efforts and their personal identity as best or even the only "real" efforts that are important.

Neurodiversity can't include lots of demands on how people express themselves and what expressions are better or best.

As I wrote in my last post "The Hostages Have Been Identified", identity politics becomes nothing more than a game which is always won at the expense of someone else's human rights. People who flex their muscle to show themselves as being better or having a contribution that is more worthy of respect than someone else's have bought into a hierarchical set of values which by its very nature automatically infringes on someone else's right.

quotes from the main link referred to on that post:

"Identity encourages purity. If we believe that concepts like feminism can be embodied in individuals, then some people can be more feminist than others. This leads to debates about ‘real feminists’ and how feminists should act (e.g. debates regarding feminism and heterosexuality). Feminist purity allows for hierarchy (e.g. more or less and thus better or worse feminists) and encourages guilt (e.g. asking yourself 'should real feminists think/act like this?')."

AND:


"Identity creates opposition. By dividing the world up into opposing pairs (e.g. men/women, heterosexuals/queers, ruling class/working-class, whites/blacks), identity creates opposite types of people who perceive themselves as having opposing interests. This opposition means that people fail to recognise their common interests as human beings. The opposition of two forces pushing against each other means that very little changes."

I also see this leading to things such as cyber bullying and sexual harassment. Someone sees how their personal rights being infringed on is a justification for doing the same to someone else. This means that they are endorsing the myth that oppression isn't systematic and keeps them from seeing how they are privileged in a given situation. This attitude hurts everyone involved.

As far as contributions to a cause go, it shouldn't matter whose rights are being infringed upon or how their type of contribution is judged as being less worthy. If humans are all to have equal rights based on nothing more than being human than the only valid judgment that makes one person less worthy of respect than other must be based on how what that person does infringe on someone else's rights.

One of the worst ways I see these judgments being made is when someone has to make lots of assumptions in order to make someone else look bad. The more assumptions someone has to make about another person, the more likely they are to make wrong assumptions. The most obvious reason for making assumptions is to make someone else look bad so that you look better.

It doesn't matter so much who someone relates better to, whom they are best able to encourage, or how their advocacy efforts are presented. Doing your best and being yourself is never ablist. It matters most if their efforts are geared toward encouraging others or are geared to discouraging them. Anyone whose goal is to encourage is worthy of respect no matter how efficient they seem to others to be accomplishing that goal or how far they are along on their personal journey toward learning how they can best do that.
When people believe that political efforts for human rights can be made at the expense of the respect and dignity I'm describing, those efforts are worse than just being inefficient. People get hurt as a result.

Human rights and equality are not separate issues. Principles must be followed so that individuals don't get hurt. It's completely impractical as well as being void of ethical considerations to hold certain personalities or political agendas above the very principles of the goals you are trying to achieve. It doesn't make sense and ultimately people lose their human rights as a result.

The Hostages Have Been Identified

The autism rights movement is defined by Wikipedia as a group involved with identity politics. Identity politics makes hostages of the nonpolitical (less active politically) people who identify with the same label by adhering to the same political hierarchical judgments about peoples worth. Identity used this way can hinder rather than help a group's cause. When the methods you are using for liberation are completely controlled by those who need to oppress you the result won't be liberation at all. In other words, " The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

The people who are in the most affected by political decisions are always the most discouraged from getting involved. They are usually the least educated and therefore, are thought to be unable to offer valid opinions due to their lack of how things work in "the real world". As always, this makes their experience unworthy of attention or respect so the knowledge of *their* real world is never known or considered in political decisions.

There is a corporate need for exclusion and hierarchy and hierarchy is identity politics. Confining neurodiversity, autism rights movement, etc. to being a movement of nothing more than identity politics is sentencing some people to be excluded and abused.

Here is a link to a page that I believe explains the problems with identity politics very well.:

Note: Also, here's a link for further reading on the problems of identity politics in an interview with Cornell West.

This is a link to what I discussing in this post:  Maintaining the Borders: identity & politics

Jamie Heckert

30 October 2002



Here is some of what it says which I feel is very important:

(The parts of this article are written in green)

"Identity is the process of creating and maintaining borders, creating different kinds of people. This keeps the world packaged in tidy little boxes. These boxes, in turn, are necessary for the violence and domination of hierarchical societies. There cannot be masters or slaves, bosses or workers, men or women, whites or blacks, leaders or followers, heterosexuals or queers, without identity

 Identity separates people. It encourages us to believe that 'we' are different from 'others'. Identity can also encourage conformity. How else do I show that I am one of us other than conforming to the accepted codes prescribed to that identity? This construction of similarity and difference exists whether we are talking about traditional identity politics groups like 'disabled people' or political identities like 'environmentalists'. This separation of us from them has serious consequences for political movement.

 

Identity encourages isolation. Political ghettos cannot exist without political identity; and their existence reinforces it. Not only are the 'activists' separated from the 'non-activists', but within a broad political ghetto, anarchists, feminists, and environmentalists (amongst others) often see themselves as involved in separate struggles. People who consider themselves politically active are separated both from each other and from others who do not share an 'activist' identity. Effective movement for radical social change cannot be based on such divisions.

 

Identity reduces social phenomena to individuals. Concepts like anarchism and racism are social. They are not embodied by individuals as terms like 'anarchist' and 'racist' suggest. Rather, they exist as ideas, practices and relationships. In most societies, racism is inherent in our institutionalised relationships and ways of thinking. We can and should be critical of racism, but to attack people as 'racists' can only further alienate them from our efforts.[iii] Besides, it is a dangerous fantasy to believe that 'racists' can be separated from those of us who are non-racist. Likewise, anarchism exists throughout every society. Every time people co-operate without coercion to achieve shared goals, that is anarchy. Every time someone thinks that people should be able to get along with each other without domination, that is anarchism. If we only see racism in 'racists', we will never effectively challenge racism. If we only see anarchism in 'anarchists', we will miss out on so many desperately needed sources of inspiration.

 

Identity encourages purity. If we believe that concepts like feminism can be embodied in individuals, then some people can be more feminist than others. This leads to debates about ‘real feminists’ and how feminists should act (e.g. debates regarding feminism and heterosexuality). Feminist purity allows for hierarchy (e.g. more or less and thus better or worse feminists) and encourages guilt (e.g. asking yourself 'should real feminists think/act like this?').

 

Political identity simplifies personal identity. A related problem for feminist identity, for example, is that it demands we focus on one aspects of our complex lives. Feminist movement has often been dominated by white middle-class women who have a particular perspective on what is a 'women's issue'. Many women have had to choose between involvement in a woman's movement that fails to recognise ethnicity and class issues, or in black or working class politics that did not acknowledge gender. But, the alternative of specialised identity politics could get very silly (e.g. a group for disabled, transgender, lesbian, working-class women of colour). Likewise, if I describe myself as a feminist, an anarchist, and a sex radical, I am suddenly three different people. However, if I say I advocate feminism, anarchism and radical sexual politics I am one person with a variety of beliefs.[iv]

 

Identity often imagines easily defined interests. Feminism is often presented as for women only; men are perceived to entirely benefit from the gender system. Many men do clearly benefit from the gender system in terms of institutionalised domination. If we perceive interests as inherently stemming from current systems, we fail to recognise how people would benefit from alternative systems. If we want to encourage and inspire people to create a very different form of society, we should share with each other what we see as beneficial. We must recognise that different value systems (e.g. domination versus compassion) result in very different interests.

 

Identity discourages participation. If people are worried that they might be excluded through labelling (e.g. racist or homophobic), they won't feel welcomed and won't get involved. Likewise, people do not get involved if they believe that it is not in their interests. If we pepetuate the idea that feminism is for women, men will never see how it could also be in their interests to support feminism. Or they might support feminism, but feel guilty for their male privilege. Either way, men are not encouraged to be active in feminist movements. Radical social change requires mass social movement. Identity politics, by definition, can never achieve this. Political identities, like ‘environmentalist’, can likewise become a basis for minority politics.

 

Identity creates opposition. By dividing the world up into opposing pairs (e.g. men/women, heterosexuals/queers, ruling class/working-class, whites/blacks), identity creates opposite types of people who perceive themselves as having opposing interests. This opposition means that people fail to recognise their common interests as human beings. The opposition of two forces pushing against each other means that very little changes.

 

Identity freezes the fluid. Neither individual identity (the 'who am I?' kind) nor social organisation are fixed, but are in constant motion. Political identities require that these fluid processes are frozen realities with particular characteristics and inherent interests. In failing to recognise the nature of both identity and society, political identity can only inhibit radical social change.

 

 




The mentality of identity politics (since it falls into to place with all other politics) silences people who are (by that mentality) unimportant. Identity politics is comparison politics. It is impractical and stirs superfluous debate. If we concentrated on getting those people involved who aren't we would have the right ideas to come up with the political changes that are needed. Too often we serve the system that is already in place by committing to the oppressive old methods of government.

You can't get an acceptance for neurodiversity without challenging the current system which needs to (by the very nature of what it is) not accept it.

"It may not be perfect, but can't it still be a useful strategy?

 

It is a very good strategy if you don't want to change things very much. Identity politics fits in nicely within the dominant neo-liberal ideology. Groups created around oppressed identities can lobby the state for civil rights. This idea of trying to protect individuals without changing relationships or systems of organisation is compatible with the individualistic basis of capitalism and representative 'democracy'.

 

I would never argue that a strategy has to be 'perfect' to be useful, but it must be consistent with its aims. Ends and means can only be separated in our minds. If the aim is to reduce or eliminate hierarchical social divisions (e.g. gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, class), a strategy which depends upon those very divisions can never be successful."

One of the reasons people won't let go of identity politics may be due to how doing that would make them less identified as being important if their cause was diluted by too many other people with independent views. (especially uneducated views....which means most people since most people are uneducated)

"If political identity is such a poor strategy, why is it so common?

 

On a personal level, political identity makes us feel part of something larger at the same time that it makes us feel special were different. In the short-term, this can be very successful defence mechanism. For example, I'm sure I would have been a lot more damaged by the sexist and homophobic environment in which I grew up if I had not been able to convert stigma into pride. However, feeling yourself to be different and separate from other people is not a successful long-term strategy, either psychologically or politically.

 

What's the alternative to political identity?

 

If borders are the problem, then we must support and encourage each other to tear down the fences. Two crucial tools for dismantling borders are systematic analyses and compassionate strategies.

 

We should recognise oppression is not simply a practice of individuals who have power over those who do not. Instead, we could see how forms of organisation (including institutions and relationships) systematically produce hierarchies and borders. People will only see an interest in getting more involved if they realise that their individual problems – anxiety, depression, exhaustion, anger, poverty, meaningless work,unsatisfying sex lives, etc – are not unique, but are systematically produced. Furthermore, their action will only be effective if they work to reduce all forms of hierarchy and domination. Constructs including gender, sexuality, capitalism, race and the nation state are interdependent systems. Each system of domination serves to reinforce the others. This doesn't mean we have to solve every problem instantly, but we must recognise that all issues are human issues. At the same time, we must not imagine that a particular system of domination (not even capitalism!) is the source of all others.

 

Radical politics is rarely appealing because it focuses on the evils of the world. This offers little that is hopeful or constructive in people's daily lives. If we want to see widespread social movement for radical change, we have to offer people something they value. Listening to people's concerns, caring about their problems and encouraging and supporting them to develop systemic solutions requires compassion. Offer people a better quality of life instead of focusing so much on depressing aspects of our current society.

 

We should also recognise that people positioned in more privileged categories may in some ways suffer. At the very least, people who feel a strong need to dominate and control must suffer deep insecurities, the results of competition and hierarchy. Insecurity, domination and control are not conducive to fulfilling and meaningful relationships with other people. Attacking people in 'privileged' positions does little to dismantle these systems. It also gives entirely too much credit to people in those positions – they are both products and producers of systems, just like the rest of us.

 

To radically reorganise our society, we should aim to both diminish systematic domination and suffering and encourage systematic compassion. Just as apparently disconnected and often incoherent forms of domination can reinforce and maintaining each other, so too can a compassionate organisation of society become systematic and self-sustaining.

 

Encouraging people to be more comfortable with sexuality in general has been a key focus of my own political efforts[v]. But, sexuality is only one area in which a compassionate and systematic approach has much more radical potential than politicising identity.

 

Find sources of suffering, whatever they are, and support and encourage people to find ways of relating to themselves and others that reduce that suffering. Help build compassionate, co-operative institutions (e.g. social centres, support/discussion groups, mediation services, childcare support, food not bombs). Tell people when you admire or appreciate their efforts. Support people trying to change their environments (e.g. workplace resistance). Offer alternatives to people who are involved in or considering authoritarian positions (e.g. military, police, business management).

 

Demonstrating the pleasures and benefits of co-operative, compassionate organisation offers a strong threat to the world of borders and guards. I suspect that fragmented groups, anti-whatever demonstrations, unfriendly, exclusive meetings and utopian 'after the revolution' lectures will never be quite as enticing to people outside the activist ghetto."


In as much as there is an autism community it is now following the medical model of autism in that it too often is exclusive and discourages ideas and thoughts that go beyond political pragmatism. That's not practical and if not corrected it (as a movement) will dissolve into the sea of business as usual politics, there will be no expanding of class or the low classes, and negative stereotypes that accompany being something other than neuro typical will continue and become even more common.

Medicine for Social Anxiety

In order to market a product a desire for the product needs to be developed. Business today is much more about either establishing that desire or following the already established trend. Marketing practical products by appealing to people's need to have basic security is more difficult and less profitable.

The market driven unhealthy competition encouraged in most social situations creates anxiety that can be very advantageous to the industry that provides the products to help with that anxiety but most people are ultimately hurt by these enterprises. Their welfare is of little concern to these businesses because they worry about money now rather than long term security. What they have now gives them leverage for creating a future and marketing trends are difficult to anticipate.

A commercial on television for psychiatric drugs so clearly describes to me the creation of social anxiety, which then provides the product for the relief. The commercial targets people who are alone and yet not wanting to be by showing the pleasant social interaction in contrast. The voice at some point during the advertisement becomes more monotone as they describe the side effects of these drugs. They of course say nothing about the population of people using the drugs having a 25 year less life expectancy, the lack of research and efforts to make the drugs safer, nor do they mention how the drugs are tested first on the people who are least able afford them.

Using drugs, which lighten the physical and mental distress of social situations that are not directly controlled the FDA are considered by psychologists to be self-medicating drugs. Psychology is an industry who works together with the pharmaceutical industry to define normal vs. abnormal and then treats the deficits they define.

The drug industry, however, is showing no responsibility in association with this control.

This is a very interesting article: The Truth About the Drug Companies

Concerning US health care it says:

Drugs are the fastest-growing part of the health care bill—which itself is rising at an alarming rate. The increase in drug spending reflects, in almost equal parts, the facts that people are taking a lot more drugs than they used to, that those drugs are more likely to be expensive new ones instead of older, cheaper ones, and that the prices of the most heavily prescribed drugs are routinely jacked up, sometimes several times a year.

AND later it says this:


Furthermore, in one of the more perverse of the pharmaceutical industry's practices, prices are much higher for precisely the people who most need the drugs and can least afford them. The industry charges Medicare recipients without supplementary insurance much more than it does favored customers, such as large HMOs or the Veterans Affairs (VA) system. Because the latter buy in bulk, they can bargain for steep discounts or rebates. People without insurance have no bargaining power; and so they pay the highest prices.

AND:

But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies—dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits. In fact, year after year, for over two decades, this industry has been far and away the most profitable in the United States. (In 2003, for the first time, the industry lost its first-place position, coming in third, behind "mining, crude oil production," and "commercial banks.") The prices drug companies charge have little relationship to the costs of making the drugs and could be cut dramatically without coming anywhere close to threatening R&D.

Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The great majority of "new" drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called "me-too" drugs. The idea is to grab a share of an established, lucrative market by producing something very similar to a top-selling drug. For instance, we now have six statins (Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol, and the newest, Crestor) on the market to lower cholesterol, all variants of the first. As Dr. Sharon Levine, associate executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, put it,

   


             "If I'm a manufacturer and I can change one molecule and get           another twenty years of patent rights, and convince physicians to prescribe and consumers to demand the next form of Prilosec, or weekly Prozac instead of daily Prozac, just as my patent expires, then why would I be spending money on a lot less certain endeavor, which is looking for brand-new drugs?[4] "





The me-too market would collapse virtually overnight if the FDA made approval of new drugs contingent on their being better in some important way than older drugs already on the market. Probably very few new drugs could meet that test. By default, then, drug companies would have to concentrate on finding truly innovative drugs, and we would finally find out whether this much-vaunted industry is turning out better drugs. A welcome by-product of this reform is that it would also reduce the incessant and enormously expensive marketing necessary to jockey for position in the me-too market. Genuinely important new drugs do not need much promotion (imagine having to advertise a cure for cancer).

A second important reform would be to require drug companies to open their books. Drug companies reveal very little about the most crucial aspects of their business. We know next to nothing about how much they spend to bring each drug to market or what they spend it on. (We know that it is not $802 million, as some industry apologists have recently claimed.) Nor do we know what their gigantic "marketing and administration" budgets cover. We don't even know the prices they charge their various customers. Perhaps most important, we do not know the results of the clinical trials they sponsor—only those they choose to make public, which tend to be the most favorable findings. (The FDA is not allowed to reveal the results it has.) The industry claims all of this is "proprietary" information. Yet, unlike other businesses, drug companies are dependent on the public for a host of special favors—including the rights to NIH-funded research, long periods of market monopoly, and multiple tax breaks that almost guarantee a profit. Because of these special favors and the importance of its products to public health, as well as the fact that the government is a major purchaser of its products, the pharmaceutical industry should be regarded much as a public utility.

Autism Speaks is an excellent example of how industry is making decisions about autistics without autistics. The charity Autism Speak's demands are consistent with how the drug industry creates profits. However, with what I am reminded of in this article, the drug industry that is tied to psychology industry is not only deciding who we are and how we should act (along with how we are acting wrong), but they are designing what and how we think in ways that serve the industry's welfare.

Of course allowing industry to design and implement a behavioral modification program such as ABA/PBS in public schools and other institutions where people have been diagnosed as behaviorally unfit would give a great deal of authority to that industry. People need to be very careful before allowing that industry to assume such authority.

We all aren't going to be politicians and political policy is decided by industry profits in ways that will lesson our rights. Autistic people aren't being heard and our exclusion is based on the same standards that have always excluded us. It's impossible to judge each other by mainstream standards that ultimately exclude us and rise above those standards at the same time. Either we change the standards, or we won't fit. The compromises aren't practical.

Determining the Future of Aspergers and Attacking Character

This is the link to a story about the future of Aspergers.

The industry of psychology has been encouraged by parents seeking learning accommodations for their children and adults searching for answers to why people behave improperly.

Society can't be very accommodating when industry and the politics that support it are dependent on showing the worth of products and people at the expense of defining products and people that are worthless.

These comparisons are often justified by claiming that this is instead a competition to find what is best and what is true. Unfortunately, that alone wouldn't stimulate the economy. Therefore, comparisons are made without the necessity for any of them being ethical or good. It is only important that something or someone is described as bad so that something or someone else appears better and can therefore, be marketed.

Thinking as it relates to either pathology, mental illness, learning disability, or neurological impairment has always been described by the degree of impairment as it relates to the fleeting, unrealistic, and unattainable definition of normal and is supposedly used to define whether someone needs nothing but care or is in need of (or able to receive) some type of therapy.

Due to the market driven mentality that creates these comparisons based on nothing more than popularity, different degrees of impaired thinking can only be given so much aid. If the solution to the problem ever becomes too attainable people will see the true goals of the industry and their stock will plummet.

In whatever way that Aspergers is now used to define a higher functioning level of autism a similar word or diagnoses will ultimately replace that word if it's taken away. We who are attempting to better define a social model for autism are fighting against an industry and a mindset that the industry uses to create profits. Politics is an extension of industry so the same exclusionary and discriminatory methods are used there as well.

In order to create a product/person that people will buy a determination must be made of what people don't want and how to get people to invest in preventing or fixing what is considered to be the problem. In psychology this product is basically defined as abnormal.

The two leading industries who make decisions about autism are the must-be-cured/must-be-fixed disease model and the behavioral deficit model defined by ABA/PBS etc. Most of the decisions I see being made in politics will create profits for one of those industries.

Like all other definitions of thinking impairments, it will not be profitable to encourage "treatment"to this population based on their impaired skills. People don't typically buy based on practicality but rather on emotion and impulse. Peoples character needs to be suspected for people to get emotional enough so they will buy something. If people believed that people were being mistreated based on their level of skill, they would see the injustice more clearly and work to end it. Therefore, the marketing campaigns are designed to describe the spectrum of skills as a spectrum of moral character as it can be associated with appropriate behavior.

Claiming that people are diseased and can't help what they're doing, people are misbehaving and need to have that misbehavior treated, and people are too lacking in self-awareness and empathy to be given respect, makes up a lot of how people are characterized and dishonored by the psychology industry, and it provides the justification for the neglect and abuse.

The most important way I can think of to encourage the respect of autistic people is to expose how the industry's are profiting by using the most convenient and effective way they know to assign what they claim is our deficit of skills an association between that and ugly stereotypes about our character.

In order for people to encourage autistic people they/we need to get away from the unfair commercially driven standards which are used as reasons for treating this population so badly.

Don't the Privileged Deserve Privileges Too?

There seems to be a theme in many of what are considered life's most important questions. The discussions and debates which focus on those questions seem to be whether or not we are striving for perfection and sophistication at the expense of our humanity.

What doesn't seem to be discussed enough is who is benefiting most from our desire to become better and more sophisticated and in what ways is the general public manipulated into chasing an ideal in a way that will ultimately lead to our demise.

There is no longer any way to track what is considered knowledge about most subjects and what isn't by anything other than popularity. Popular opinion is what gets written about most and therefore, the exposure defines its validity. The subjects that matter to the people with the most power are what gets written about. However, what this population is concerned with is mainly privilege and therefore, basic human rights are ignored by default.

The best way to protect this privilege and keep the focus on privilege rather than what will best provide basic human rights for everyone is for privileged people to use their resources to persuade the belief in whatever they claim is true and to get people to strive for the unattainable in a way that they exclude and even abuse the basic human rights of their neighbor. Once a standard is set that the majority of people don't have the resources to achieve the people with the resources to manipulate the standards can manipulate and enslave this population.

The way to create discourse among these people is to teach them that privilege is just normal (which means they are abnormal) and to focus their attention on the claim that society is overly concerned with providing for the poor and disadvantaged who are unworthy due to their bad character. As long as people believe the advantages are earned those who have them are enabled to believe in and abuse their authority over those who don't.

I often hear from people who won't acknowledge what I write, unless I validate it in their eyes by borrowing credibility from someone who has written the same thing. Thinking is considered mysterious and dangerous to many people. This is how many serious issues concerning human rights are treated as nothing more than a superfluous game.

Unfortunately, due to people with the experiences I write about being so discouraged from feeling that they will have any impact on changing things and due to them not having the knowledge of how to speak in a way that people are accustomed to hearing so-called credible people talk/write, they are silenced. The association of people with these experiences creates a force that society can easily be attacked and broken.

This means that no culture can be established, no pride in that culture empowers them, and ultimately no progress is made in establishing the respect that people look for when determining who has rights.

Education is not only a privilege, but it is the privilege of knowing how to sell particular knowledge so that you and the people you learned it from are accredited and revered for salesmanship skills. The freedom of information has been hijacked by people who decide what is and isn't information.

Although most educational pursuits may have been liberating to others in the past it is now too often nothing more than an industry (as well as a part of and beholden to many other industries) who use their product as a means of oppression.

Many types of intellectual disability as well as other labels that describe how people are excluded from education are associated with ugly stereotypes and this population is silenced in a multitude of ways.

Neurodiversity as a movement cannot build and sustain momentum by showing how some autistics are able to achieve an education thereby separating themselves from the plight of the intellectually disabled. People showing how they can meet standards that are exclusionary is fine for individuals but true liberation of a group cannot come at the expense of other groups.

Education is also not just a road to academic pursuits. Many other vocations and achievements that socially validate people are based on the same exclusionary standards.

Too many subcultures are describing their oppression based on specific means that target their specific groups rather than accepting a broader systematized attitude and by doing so they often unknowingly adopt the same attitude. Of course people can change and of course humans are very resilient and able to overcome great obstacles. However, if the standards don't change for how standards are arbitrarily made and changed due to privileged whims  then whether or not any of us are liberated will be decided by the view of those with the resources who do not need to be concerned with our welfare.

Conflict of Interest

One myth that causes a lot of confusion and upset is that people are either competitive or lazy, or they are instead being passive/aggressive. Such motivations can only be attributed to people based on their behaviors and behaviors are too often narrowly judged by too few comparisons.

Once these judgments have been made in error they are too often accompanied by undue punishment. This is one reason that behavioral therapy can be so destructive even when it is described as constructive.

Due to the way that society is taught to chase trends based on emotion and impulse, independent thinking and the liberation it encourages is greatly discouraged. The ways we are taught to be consumers is heavily influenced by behavior modification methods.


Once people who for whatever reason are otherwise unable to determine their circumstances has their motivation judged by a narrow set of standards the ways they can be controlled and manipulated have few limitations.

It is very inconvenient to not be chasing what someone else claims that the majority wants (which is typically motivated by commercialism) or to want something so extravagant as safety and individual expression. It is typically fine for people to join in and advocate with others to attain something so that everyone can be judged by the same standard but to individually express what no one else seems to be in control of, even an expression that is an essential need such as safety or human rights, it is seen as aberrant and dangerous.

At the same time, evidence is growing to show the mental health industry as serving as the protectors of the public rather than wanting to provide therapy and rehabilitation to the population they label. The education that psychology provides is also meant to provide a standard of normal behavior that they know will exclude many people who society wants to dispose of. What are described as learning disorders can exclude people for racing thoughts, attention deficit, being overly excitable, and for generally not being able follow directions.

Thinking in specific ways and the ability to chase trends is very important in today's society. It not only determines what we buy and when we buy it, but it also impacts what products are chosen for international trade, what employers are looking for, and therefore, how we judge intelligence and even character.

The combination of quick prejudicial and unreasonable judgments about what people think along with a growing demand for a mainstream consciousness allows autistic people to be very vulnerable to abuse and neglect along with warehousing for the disenfranchised or for when all else seems to fail.

The best way I know for including more people and changing the thinking that leads to so much oppression is encouraging people to think independently and express independent thoughts. The narrower our judgments become about what people want and what their motivations are the more dependent we are on people who can make our decisions for us. Including more people who think different things or think in different ways is an important part of what will turn that around.

Chasing Validity

Chasing the valid opinion or trying to determine how others will decide what is the most popular opinion is such an exercise in futility. As long as the unreasonably justified methods of such determinations are not honestly evaluated and a fairer and more honest system of equal justice is demanded so much of what we do becomes useless.

Relativity is usually just an excuse for drama and games of better than less than. It needs to be understood by more people that being in the right place at the right time and absorbing the most popular view typically creates nothing more than delusions of grandeur.

Having what you say be seen as valid often has very little to do with being right or saying what is true. It's usually more of a political game or an arbitrary declaration of what events are historical and what is judged as hearsay due to not enough important people declaring it worthy of their attention. The objective of these games is for enough people to join the group for whatever reason in order to overpower the another group they oppose. Once the total focus of a group is to discount what another group says or even one person whose focus is to discount what another person says often the other views that need to be discussed are similarly discounted due to the blindness which comes from seeking the thrill of victory at all costs. Within such an environment, all variations of opinion along with all efforts dissolve into the wave of the mainstream consciousness.

This mainstream consciousness is encouraged by ugly stereotypes that polarize people's opinions
 so that the standards and the people who are already in positions of power as a result of those standards doesn't change. This begins by people being defined as either for or against something or someone. The fate of an idea or even the person who brings up the idea is validated based on the personality of the presenter. To whatever degree this is inappropriate and harmful to other groups having to fight for their civil rights, it is crucially detrimental to autistics who have to do so.

What is unpopular and uncomfortable about autistic people did not only come from the label itself. Instead it is how the characteristics themselves have traditionally made people uncomfortable that created societies need to create a label in the first place. Trying to give credit to the functioning levels of autistic people will continue to isolate and hurt rather than help everyone's cause as long as functioning remains an arbitrary value judgment attributed to the people themselves.

When people try hard to not qualify their statements in an effort to allow an idea to either be seen as valid or invalid based on nothing more than the merit of the idea itself, often people are prone to not be able to suspend their typical and unfair methods of judgment.

An experience demands ownership. There are as many different ways of describing the very same experience as there are people who have the experience. Because no two people can have the same experience the experience itself becomes relative. The trouble is therefore, in the judgment of how others determine the validity of the experience. Because societal rules demand certain types of evaluations of a person's validity based on the unreasonable and unfair classifications and assumptions, fighting against those rules is really the only way to liberate an otherwise marginalized group of people. Attempting to do that by any other means is just a part of the same typical cycle of oppression, which unfairly gives more to those who already have power at the continued expense of those who don't.

However the societal rules that are now in place came into existence it was not done fairly.  It was also not done without giving power to people due to nothing more than their name, social status, or how their particular set of skills (often a matter of personable and personality skill) were arbitrarily given status that would be undue to them in another place and time.

Autistics are an oppressed group. Not just because some are less capable than others or just because some can pass societal standards when others can't. It's also not necessarily because some are employed and others are described as dependents. The main reason is that what autism represents is something that makes people uncomfortable. It doesn't need to make people uncomfortable and all that would be needed to overcome this discomfort is by the same means of understanding and liberating any oppressed group.

This understanding comes from evaluating why the discomfort and therefore, the disrespect exists. It is because people don't ask why certain aspects of people make them uncomfortable that people are marginalized and disrespected due to unrealistic assumptions. That is where opinions are truly made valid or invalid because taking on honest inventory of those discomforts and adjusting ourselves accordingly is what makes people whole and makes us a whole society rather than fragmented by unrealistic and unfair judgments. With fair unprejudiced evaluations, people would naturally be accommodated without all the unfair treatment that typically goes along with that.

The way the United States has traditionally learned to expediently and conveniently deal with unwanted populations is by a method of warehousing. Warehousing (or institutionalizing) provides a way of categorizing people similar to the franchising principles of McDonald's, the auto industry in the way that Henry Ford designed, or the construction practices of the Hoover dam, the interstates, the railroads, and some of our largest bridges. Much of the surviving population who was on this land before the European invasion is today warehoused on land that is sometimes glamorously referred to as "reservations". Many of the surviving populations who were enslaved are warehoused in what are glamorously referred to as ghettos and housing projects. If you look at the way the residents of New Orleans were treated by what was glamorously described as a natural disaster, you will further see an example of the methods the United States uses to herd its most unwelcome citizens.

Every time a decision is made in the United States that does not factor in the well-being of everyone who is affected by that decision, the warehousing principles are again reinforced as to how we do things. I can't think of a phrase that I find more offensive than "that's just the way things are". Every bit of the way things are would change tomorrow if everyone were given a vote. The problem is that this opportunity at this point can only come with encouragement. Without this it is no opportunity at all.

If all opinions were judged equally based on their own merit with personalities not be the deciding factor we would have freedom of thought. Until that happens, we don't have the right to free thinking.

The part of the autism community who is judging expressions based on how they assess which is the most important expression are the ones who are ultimately creating more marginalization, more institutionalizing, and more oppression of autistic people.

When people claim that we as the autistic community should try harder to get along, they often reinforce the validity of the already bad typical standards which create the biggest division of all. The attitude expressed in this validation is ablism. Ablism is the pathway to warehousing. Warehousing for autistics will come in the form of mental institutions and the public programs (including behavioral programs) designed for people who have supposedly been "freed" from institutional living. These opinions are as oppressive as the forces that result from them. Encouraging those opinions is how people have been oppressed all along.

Ghosts Matter; Autistic Inclusion

There are many reasons that so many people in our society are silent or are hidden. As I have written about in previous posts one of the reasons for this is that forms of media, which are considered mainstream encourage a narrow set of unattainable elite standards, which encourages people to want to achieve what they can't and are reminded of how they are seen as unimportant until they do. However, the main reason for this group's exclusion (which most other reasons can be attributed to) is the lack of encouragement.

It's not just that this population is fed a constant stream of images, which reminds them of what it takes to be considered important but everyone else in their environment is fed the same. This is how people draw conclusions about themselves as well as how they judge and often discount others. Oppression is most easily achieved when the oppressed accept standards that can be used to discount each other.

I'm glad that something I say on the internet sometimes seems to be important to others. If I was required to say these things by being directly in front of someone rather than writing them (even if I could string words together) many things about my appearance and my presentation would remind people of how unimportant my thoughts were. I have found though that there is enough lacking in how I present myself on the Internet also which reinforces the same standards.

I have heard that even the Internet may become much more exclusive soon. It seems to me that it would of course become that way. This means that more of a financial investment would be required to have a website that the general public can access. This means that this medium (the Internet) will become more exclusive, more commercial, and the commercial interests of those who run the websites will demand the same typical unattainable and exclusionary standards of those who present their message.

I don't believe that anyone ever thought that the Internet would be used much as a tool for liberating oppressed minorities. To whatever degree it has been used in this way I imagine this window of opportunity is quite limited by time.

I'm very appreciative of others who have spoken up on the internet before me about the things that I feel are important and those who continue to do so. I especially appreciate when they've done so in an environment where it wasn't popular.

What is considered truth and even the so-called facts that we use to determine what is logical are tainted by a set of values, which excludes the worth of most people.

At times when I was hospitalized, I would see someone who was being treated badly by a staff member fighting back in a quite unfashionable manner. I look back at that now, and I consider that to be advocacy. The only place that advocacy may have really changed things is in the mind and heart of the person who is being abused by helping them to realize that they didn't deserve to be treated that way. However, now for those who read what I write I can tell you that you also benefit from what those patients did because what I saw ultimately affects what I write. It also affects why I write.

Too often I hear people speaking of solutions to oppression by means, which are less-than-radical when they aren't considering how unreasonable that it is to expect in some places and by some people based on how they have been treated, and what they have been taught about their personal worth. If we wait until everyone meets the typical standards for expressing themselves before they are listened to those standards will continue to become narrower as will our version of the truth.

Whatever I have felt I needed to do to get heard is something that I hope others won't need to do. All the abilities I have, which are the result of extreme pressure and abuse (which pretty much includes all of them) are worth very little to me except for how I'm able to protect myself and others.

I appreciate hearing comments on blogs from people who are speaking up and speaking out more than I do from what is otherwise considered a formally educated opinion.

The autistic people that aren't being heard right now are most likely not formally educated nor do they most likely appear fashionable. Sometimes they are people who have put up the worst shit and told more often and more strongly than anyone, of how they are viewed by society as worthless. Typical standards are not likely to encourage these people and adhering to those standards is not likely to encourage them to begin to feel empowered and to speak out.

Without what I am suggesting autistic people will have a few (or only one) political groups with very narrow views who speak on our behalf and those groups will not be required to accept much if any alternative opinions.  Like most political groups the objective will be pragmatic and momentum will be protected at any costs to the population being advocated for. Autistic people will continue to be divided between the high functioning token performers and the low functioning who are considered to deserve pity and treatment by whatever means necessary.We will have one monopolizing commercial method of control used by schools (sometimes referred to as  educational supports) and all other public institutions which will define us as behaviorally challenged and will set and change the rules at will by which we are restrained and punished.  We will need to qualify our every statement and refer to how it qualifies as valid based on the statements of celebrities whose accomplishments set the standards by which we are judged.

This is the future I want to avoid. Autistics just like all minorities need to speak out with whatever means they have available. Even more importantly I hope those who can see how these voices have been suppressed will be encouraged to find more ways to include them. The standards and values we show appreciation for are what will determine our future and the typical standards we have now were not created with these voices in mind.Our inclusion won't be created without work, and if we want a society that includes more people we need to include those who are now excluded in the decision of what the society we hope for will look like.

Convenience and Expediency Rarely Promote Human Rights

Too often when people speak about human rights they are speaking of them as if the words were a brand name rather than what the words really mean. People do that sort of thing when they speak of Kleenex and mean facial tissue or Band-Aid and mean adhesive bandage.

It is all too common that we speak for people when making political decisions rather than speaking with them. In the United States, this is the result not only of the fewest people being the ones that vote, but it is also a result which comes from the extremes of capitalism and the unregulated and therefore often unethical hierarchical standards which extreme capitalism has been shown to promote.

I have heard it said that people who aren't in step with the ideals of pragmatic politics and the "reality"which people who operate within this realm demand are egotistical, and what they say is nothing more than a superfluous distraction to people who are "really" trying to get something done.

The problem with this is that what gets done claims to be for many people who have no say in the matter whatsoever.

I was recently reminded of this when I read about the protest from the disability advocates who are part of the group ADAPT. I strongly believe that many things that this group has accomplished would not have been accomplished without the organization and diligence of ADAPT. That is not at all the same though as this group or any other political group doing their best to make the changes that are needed.

In discussing the recent health care system in the US, I have heard some suggest that an unregulated market would ultimately create an ethical system. The problem I see with that is that there are no allowances for the fact that most people in the United States do not speak up and much about the current system and our culture strongly discourages them from doing so. A truly free system would make changes based also on what these people have to say and would therefore, not be an exclusionary system (as it is now) regulated in a way that was even harder to define and therefore, harder to combat.

I think this is very important to realize also when discussing disability rights. It's not just a problem due to those who are most capable of being involved being the ones who get involved and change things, but this problem is also the result of how our hierarchical system of doing things promotes its own brand of exclusion within even the disability rights' community.

Most all of what I write about on this blog is based on the fact that most people are excluded from having any say in the standards and laws that affect them and the reason for the majority of this is not due to physical limitations or even what is claimed is their legal right to vote and have a say in these matters. The reason is that the culture itself strongly discourages them from doing so even to the point that I would say the culture prohibits them from doing so.

This is very important to remember when considering disability rights and when considering what laws are being challenged by disability rights advocates. ADAPT is now challenging the state of Georgia's refusal to close their institutions. Institutionalization is a major problem in the US and the attitude behind the problem is what needs to change.

Institutions have always included autistic people.There are many reasons why autistic people have some of the worst civil rights violations in such places. Generally, everyone from the broader group of people who are most affected by the problems that occur in these human warehouses (not just autistics) have always been the least heard of any group when these problems are politically addressed. Having more of these people speak out in a way that they can better determine their own fate is the most pressing issue regarding these problems. Solidarity just for the sake of closing the institutions continues to discourage the more in depth look that is vitally needed.

The political pragmatism of groups claiming to aid with these problems contribute most to this population's silence. In cases where institutions have been closed down for dehumanizing conditions and treatments some of the patients (or who would better be defined as inmates) have been sent into other horrifying situations due to the attitudes that were present in those institutions not being addressed along with not addressing how they would be expressed in places that were considered alternatives.

I believe based on the unwillingness political groups to listen to alternative views (mine and others, which are unpopular) that don't fit into their political agenda that most people who are most affected by the political decisions regarding institutionalization would not be listened to by them either. The restraints this type of political pragmatism has caused has really hurt this population for a long time, and I find it quite disturbing that their voice is not respected.

There is a reason that people do not hear from this oppressed group and that is the what I have always felt was most important to address on this blog. In a similar way, those who are most affected by ABA programs (including ones such as PBS) are the least listened to regarding decisions affecting their lives. It is not good enough to say that these people don't have an opinion or to accept that a broader set of societal ills is the reason that oppressed groups don't feel empowered enough to speak up. In order to make a real difference, we need to place the majority of our efforts on empowering these people and hearing what they have to say rather than simply accepting that the oppression caused by societal ills must be pragmatically accepted in political matters.

VERY IMPORTANT:It also needs to be understood at this point that the way people among this group  may originally respond when being asked will not be nearly as polite and refined as typical standards demand of those who are allowed to voice their opinions.

The institutions must be shut down. Those walls have created and continue to sustain a very ugly culture of abuse and shame.There would be more than enough power to also change the prevailing bad attitudes that will be present in what are considered alternatives if more people who are directly affected are empowered to speak up and get involved.

The attitude behind political pragmatism has prevented the acknowledgment of the voices of people who are most affected by the decisions these groups make, and they aren't encouraging these people to speak up.

This is the same attitude which promotes the myth that adding people to a spectrum of people (as some have claimed is the case with the autism spectrum) who need aid will allow people who CAN speak to do so for those who CAN"T. Actually, can and can't have never been the problem. The real problem is how standards discourage these people from participating. I recently addressed that problem here in my post about a Rethinking Autism video.

For example, people advocating for disability won't do anything to help change Autism Speaks by getting them to hear from autistics who are the most capable of sounding good by typical standards. The only way we can really help is by showing them how many voices are being ignored because they aren't being acknowledged due to the problems that result from typical standards. Otherwise the standards won't change and all liberating efforts will be useless.

To further promote the ideal of "nothing about us without us" I would hope that ASAN also (now speaking politically on behalf of the Neurodiversity movement) will be more willing to listen to a broader diversity of people so that their claims of supporting ideals of inclusion and neurodiversity will not be regarded as hypocritical.

Exclusion is a movement. Able-ism is systematic exclusion. People fighting for civil rights cannot afford to allow these bad set of values to determine our direction. If we do it will produce the same bad result as it has in the very society that we want to change.