The Standard Review

Destruction of Public Property

The social model of disability focuses on accommodations that promote inclusion for a broader group of people. Seeing disability in this way fosters an understanding of people having worth and therefore, human rights, which is not recognized in mainstream society.

Neurodiversity is an aspect of human rights, which defines neurology in a broader context so that more expressions which are often simply parallel to social norms and traditions are validated and the people who make them are treated more respectfully.

It's completely backwards to claim that the encouragement of human rights for diverse populations is extreme or purist. Broadening the understanding and therefore, the rights or populations who have traditionally not been included or accepted in society is the countering of a societal tradition being overly narrow and purist.

It would seem natural to me that any time a person or group is in a responsible position to influence the lives of others, the more assumptions they make about them will lead to more inappropriate treatment of them. Methods of education that assume fewer motives for the students would therefore, seem to be trying to contain them rather than empower them.

It would be nice to trust that the US government labels people as being disabled in order to include them more in society by providing more accommodations. Unfortunately, not only do I see them making unreasonable assumptions (and adopting public programs that do so) in order to show that accommodations can't be made for this group, I also see those assumptions leading to more prejudice and even more inappropriate stereotypes and therefore, abusive treatment by the rest of society.

In the United States, there are more people than ever before being seen as impaired in their thinking and behavior.Too often I think people claim that a healthy mistrust in government is believed to be a conspiracy theory rather than accepting that it is the government that has little trust (and therefore little encouragement) for us. We make up the majority and our independence and creativity must be very threatening to those who have learned to wield power only through the encouragement of bureaucracy and the submission of the public to industrial goals.

Our dependence on building a bigger government or supporting giant industries (which have similar if not the same goals) is essential for those who need to control and manipulate our behavior.It's important to them that we believe that nothing other than looking to these sources for answers will solve any problem.

Of course  a lot the power that captains of industry or government have is based on the capitol they raise from our choices as consumers and tax payers, so we as a combined force would have the most power if we were ever organized. It's important to them though that we stay confused. Otherwise the flaws in their designs would require them to give up part of their power in order to fix them.

Along with the recognition of autism that has grown in the last several years, there is a stronger push than ever for our government to compartmentalize people with atypical thinking traits so that society will better be able to manage what they have been able to label. This has also encouraged industries to find a way to profit from this particular herd once it's been established.

The United States is ruled by corporations. (Some describe the United States as more of a corporation itself then it is a nation.) Our education, medical treatment, and educational opportunities are all dependent on and influenced by the corporations who have the biggest financial investment in how we are treated in each of these areas of our life.

Whether impaired thinking and behavior are attributed to injury, hereditary, due to exposure of poisons in our environment, or societal influence, it has always typically been seen as a weakness or an inferior aspect of our species, which needs to be managed until it can be eliminated. While the methods for this range from life-threatening chemical restraints and institutionalization to eugenics, there is little if any acceptance that the people who are labeled as having these traits have anything to offer future generations.

While the medical establishment has an interest in cleansing the blood of autistic people ultimately and restraining us until we can be eliminated from the gene pool, the public educational department is now merging with political forces in order to contract the services of psychological engineers trained in the psychology of behaviorism.

These engineers are already using their acquired skills in other institutions such as hospitals, group homes, and residential treatment facilities on behaviorally disabled people and most recently their goal is to control them in schools this way as well. The state government is no longer seen as sufficient to control the behaviors in schools so the federal government is willing to "help out".

Sen. Dodd explains in this video that the problem is not due to teachers being unjustified in their handling of disobedient disabled students but that the problem is the lack of laws and trained professionals to deal with the inclusion of disabled students in the classroom. This of course protects and maintains old attitudes and traditions of our established government.

What is being suggested here is that the discipline of these students in public school classrooms be entrusted to more monitoring and control at the federal level by including the discipline and traditions of behavior modification. The program being proposed is Positive Behavioral Support based on the psychology know as behaviorism.

This website concerning the history of Behaviorism begins with this description:

Behaviorism is the philosophical position that says that psychology, to be a science, must focus its attentions on what is observable -- the environment and behavior -- rather than what is only available to the individual -- perceptions, thoughts, images, feelings....  The latter are subjective and immune to measurement, and therefore can never lead to an objective science.

The first behaviorists were Russian.  The very first was Ivan M. Sechenov (1829 to 1905).  He was a physiologist who had studied at the University of Berlin with famous people like Müller, DuBois-Reymond, and Helmholtz.  Devoted to a rigorous blend of associationism and materialism, he concluded that all behavior is caused by stimulation.

Dr. C. George Boeree also shows this about Skinner's views and ideals:

The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded.  The good do good because the good is rewarded.  There is no true freedom or dignity.  Right now, our reinforcers for good and bad behavior are chaotic and out of our control -- it’s a matter of having good or bad luck with your “choice” of parents, teachers, peers, and other influences.  Let’s instead take control, as a society, and design our culture in such a way that good gets rewarded and bad gets extinguished! With the right behavioral technology, we can design culture. 

In his biography of Skinner Dr. Boeree says this:

Behavior modification -- often referred to as b-mod -- is the therapy technique based on Skinner’s work. It is very straight-forward: Extinguish an undesirable behavior (by removing the reinforcer) and replace it with a desirable behavior by reinforcement. It has been used on all sorts of psychological problems -- addictions, neuroses, shyness, autism, even schizophrenia -- and works particularly well with children. There are examples of back-ward psychotics who haven’t communicated with others for years who have been conditioning to behave themselves in fairly normal ways, such as eating with a knife and fork, taking care of their own hygiene needs, dressing themselves, and so on. There is an offshoot of b-mod called the token economy. This is used primarily in institutions such as psychiatric hospitals, juvenile halls, and prisons. Certain rules are made explicit in the institution, and behaving yourself appropriately is rewarded with tokens -- poker chips, tickets, funny money, recorded notes, etc. Certain poor behavior is also often followed by a withdrawal of these tokens. The tokens can be traded in for desirable things such as candy, cigarettes, games, movies, time out of the institution, and so on. This has been found to be very effective in maintaining order in these often difficult institutions.

There is a drawback to token economy: When an “inmate” of one of these institutions leaves, they return to an environment that reinforces the kinds of behaviors that got them into the institution in the first place. The psychotic’s family may be thoroughly dysfunctional. The juvenile offender may go right back to “the ‘hood.” No one is giving them tokens for eating politely. The only reinforcements may be attention for “acting out,” or some gang glory for robbing a Seven-Eleven. In other words, the environment doesn’t travel well!

In this review of cognitive neuroscience, it says this about behaviorism:

The development of simple experimental methods for studying learning and memory—first in humans by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885 and a few years later in experimental animals by Ivan Pavlov and Edgar Thorndike— led to a rigorous empirical school of psychology called behaviorism. Behaviorists, notably James B. Watson and Burrhus F. Skinner, argued that behavior could be studied with the precision achieved in the physical sciences, but only if students of behavior abandoned speculation about what goes on in the mind (the brain) and focused instead on observable aspects of behavior. For behaviorists, unobservable mental processes, especially abstractions like perception, selective attention, and memory, were deemed inaccessible to scientific study.

Throughout the 20th century in the United States, our political systems and public policies have reflected and been mainly influenced by the intellectual notions that get tossed about in elitist universities. If universities were designed to teach the students how to encourage and empower the masses of people who will never attend them our industry and therefore, our economy would look very different than it does.

The ideals of inclusive education are not meant to empower more students but to contain them within a predictable environment in a way protects the interest of the elite. Psychology as an intellectual explanation of human behavior or an industry designed for public reform is not meant to empower the common man. Behaviorism is now being reintroduced into our culture as a kinder gentler way of providing a predictable environment where children will be better enabled to learn. However, very little has been shown to indicate that the goals of learning in a public educational environment are meant to empower the students rather than contain them. If the goal of education isn't to empower the students then giving more power to educators isn't a good idea.

Because "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."(Audre Lorde)our choices for better education and training cannot come from inside the corrupt system. There is no way to reform the educational system because it is functioning successfully in what it was designed to do. The reformation needs to come in how we view ourselves and our neighbors, so we can have the clearest view of our government, and what we do and don't need from them.

Controlling State Owned Human Warehouses

In posting this video, I'm encouraging people to consider the effects of a statewide behavioral program such as Positive Behavioral Support being used in all public school systems. As I wrote in my last post "Improper Use of Restraints" about the new legislation concerning child abuse in the school system, the new legislation to correct this problem is designed to make teachers more prepared to combat the disobedience of students labeled with behavioral disabilities (which is what behaviorists consider autism) by using their training in Applied Behavioral Analysis. Expanding the control of state institutions in this way is what I see as the biggest threat to neurodiversity.

This video deals with the concept of "colonizing the mind" and what has mainly influenced the school system we now have in the United States.

John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness

Competence Means Conformity

Money and political power must remain the determining factors for a person's acceptance into society in order for those who have the most to continue to dominate. Competence outside of what the people who have these decide is a threat to their security. The public security is designed to depend on their leaders ability to make decisions for them so alternative thinking and diverse thinkers must be discouraged to keep things in order.

Enough money will turn the political winds of change so that anyone or any marginalized group can then be validated. The reason political power is allowed to be bought is because people don't feel empowered enough to exercise the freedoms they have in order to protect them. Anything that discourages that empowerment will help to prevent the changes that are needed.

The few people who are now controlling the currency exchange, the food industry, the industry that provides mind altering drugs, and even the judicial system that determines who will be institutionalized are using this control to design people and encourage a set of values.

Claiming that political policies won't teach people to be respectful are responding to a question that is misleading. The political policies are designed to show the public who should not be respected. Once everyone is included into a marginalized group the policies are tools to demand conformity. ( I wrote about that here in my post about identity politics)

Each marginalized group demanding that they are treated worse than another or encouraging the multi-labeled and severity-is-more-deserving-of-aid approaches to gaining security keeps everyone fighting and secures the well-established power structure.

Unregulated industry has allowed greedy people to desensitize and ultimately dehumanize the public. For an industry to be successful they will often stress the importance of uniformity in their product even more than the quality of their product. Once they have established a market for their product and a method for production, so they can demand a narrow uniform type of behavior for their employees to follow, the employees are as disposable as the inanimate object they are producing.

Unfortunately, this industrial thinking is encouraged in the industry of psychology and psychological labels are used to show how nonconformist are less worthy of dignity and respect. Psychological labels are too often the product that encourages those who received the labels to also be nothing more than products.

The more production oriented the thinking of consumers of products and producers of products becomes the more creative thinking is discouraged and people who are prone to think in diverse ways are declared incompetent.If neurodiversity isn't challenging the way that conformity is shown to be competence and the lack of this competence is made to be a disability then it is just a meaningless word.

This meaningless word is then used to encourage the presence of an ideological agenda that serves only a few select autistics and their families. Not only will this not provide more support for the autistic population but advocating for it in this way will support the ideals of the larger political agenda that is preventing us from being heard and our needs from being met.

If autism is going to be seen as a diversity in thinking rather how the medical industry presents autism with their medical model, we will need to show the contrast between the two.

As Kowalski has shown very well in this post some blogs that show how autistics are denied the advantages of unbiased scientific research are encouraging how that research remains biased. The bias is based on how autistics and other diverse thinkers are judged by narrow typical standards and demeaned for our nonconformity.The conforming nature of slurs against intellectual disability is contradictory to empowering people who are marginalized and discriminated against because they are different.

In order to truly encourage the rights for diverse thinkers and other marginalized categories of people, it's important to keep the broader picture in mind of what types of standardized judgments we've been taught that cause the oppression to begin with.

Fitting Behavior for Autistics

In our modern sophisticated world learning a lot about how people think in different ways and why they do is seen as impractical and not cost-effective. It makes more economic sense to demand conformity rather than understand and accommodate diversity. This mind-set encourages the practice of treating people who do think differently with very little unbiased exploration into the reasons for it.

When people look for the answers as to why some people act in different ways they too often set a standard which makes one type of behavior better than another by simply making the other look worse. This is ultimately impractical and self-defeating because this motivation will cause the boundaries to shift when ever the observer begins to look too much like the one that is being observed.

Of course people learn to behave based on what they see in their environment. This is taught in formal education as the study of sociology. Of course people adapt in ineffective ways to their environment, which can also be defined as morally wrong in order to preserve a peaceful culture. This is taught formally as the study of psychology.

It is often also ignored how our aspirations for certain types of behavior are defined and promoted in ways that serve commercial products.

There are no treatments that I know of which are described as treatments that have an understanding of autism beyond what is described with the medical model of autism. This means that an autistic person who needs any type of help from a public program (or most any other program, for that matter) must begin by having the way they are seen be based on all the misunderstood views and the ugly stereotypes which accompany the medical model of autism.

These options provided for autistic people to get any type of aid will continue to be limited by the medical community until people promoting the social model are willing to be more bold in broadening the understanding of autism, encouraging autistics to have more say about who they are, and what they do, and not allowing autistic people to be pawns in the commercial and political games marketing agents play.

In order to market a product in a commercially driven society that need for the product being seen is essential before the aid will appear to have value. I don't see any way to promote a product otherwise. Marketing a particular formal conforming behavior does more borrow on society's conformist attitudes to sell a particular brand. It often also further advances the view that conformity is essential to survival. 

What this means for marketing psychological answers is that a paradigm must be encouraged where something or someone looks good at the expense of something or someone else looking bad. A social model of autism that doesn't take into account that this is the part of the medical model that we have to contend with is doomed to make no positive changes at all.

Encouraging education and helping people to become productive is sold with a punishment vs. reward view of behavior and the most efficient way to sell punishment is by teaching people that the behavior which needs treatment is morally bad. Being ineffective does not create the emotion with which people have learned to base their buying habits. Emotion comes from seeing something as bad and something else as good.

There isn't a lot of reasoning used in evaluating treatments for autistics because reasoning doesn't create the emotion for people to buy something.

The problem is that with such emotion and allowing marketing campaigns to create and dictate that emotion to their potential customers will not allow them to do much reasoning outside of what becomes an emotional trap. The emotion causes chaos for parents of autistic people, autistic people themselves, and people who treat autistics. Ultimately, this encourages chaos in the environment where autistic people are treated.

Behavioral interventions for autistics like ABA and ABA/PBS depend on chaos for the emotional environment that aids in their marketing efforts. This environment not only allows for assumptions, but it depends on the assumptions which are necessary to encourage the product they offer.

Identity politics teaches us that we need to fight for our rights based on the category we identify with. Being identified like this also then allows for a marketing campaign to target people with this identification. Marketing campaigns are likely to use an unethical means for promoting their product and are likely to create tension, lack of trust, and fighting among autistics who have trouble seeing their worth or others apart from the standards we have been shown.

This environment teaches us that there is high functioning autistics versus low functioning autistics in such a way so that the most profits can be made for treatment companies. It teaches us how to look at autistics as poor unfortunates who need pity and salvation (which also leads some people to believe that we need to be eradicated).

Behavior models are very similar when treating people in public institutions such as school, mental institutions and group homes, as well as jails. Promoting these programs will make our behavior (which is described by the program as inappropriate) seem more similar to amoral and unethical behavior so that ultimately autistics will be treated more like criminals.

Unless advocates are very clear in describing how the social model is not like the medical model, the medical model (along with all the commercial and political demands which that model creates) will define too much of our future and dictate how we are all seen. How we are evaluated as behaving will too often be based on the relationship we have to the standard that has shown our behavior to be invalid if not reprehensible.

Autistic Assessments (Trust is Therapeutic)

When people trust in a product, a person, a service, or a stock, they generally feel encouraged to invest money, time and energy. Feeling better about themselves and being more confident about their ability to make wise decisions will help them to see and understand value.

What the concept of neurodiversity has to offer is allowing a broader spectrum of people the opportunity of being worthy of investment and also ultimately becoming wise investors.

How you invest in people teaches them about their worth. If the way you invest in your relationship with a person is with your efforts to fix them so that then they are seen as worthy or become that way to you, you are not only teaching them a way to judge the value of people, but you are also teaching them what value they have according to that scale.

If someone doesn't feel that others see their worth, they are less likely to invest in themselves. What's even worse is the fact that they are likely to seek others who are less worthy by the judgment standards they have been taught and find ways to make themselves look more worthy than them. Achieving the status then becomes worth more to them than any other accomplishments. If this accomplishment is the top priority, all the rest of their accomplishments will have their worth judged in relation to how this goal is served.

If our political, medical, and legal systems are all geared toward unattainable and commercial expectations then survival and the ways to attain that will not only be secondary but again will be judged by these unattainable and commercial expectations.

The psychology industry thrives on these expectations as well as needing for most people to fail at attaining what they claim to be encouraging.

Unattainable goals which are based on commercial expectations must remain unattainable in order to encourage people to continue striving for them. When most people can't achieve standards for inclusion then the standards are instead being designed to create exclusion.

An economy that thrives on competition must be unreasonable. It must create illusions and cause people to be delusional. Men, women, and children must all be taught to be hunters who strive for something that few people can achieve. When people are trying to achieve what they can't, their only natural conclusion is that someone else must look worse for them to look good.

This is how the DSM-IV is geared to help the economy. Self worth must not be something that people are born with, it must be something that they can only attain by achieving the goals that the market driven society creates for them.

The pharmaceutical industry must not only work together with psychological standards to teach people how they need their products in order to be worthy of societies respect and dignity, but they must also use their product to further control their customers. In the same way that buying a product can only allow you to come only so close to accomplishing the goal they have set for you in their advertising, pharmaceutical medicine does not produce a state that can be attained naturally. This dependence is vital to the survival of the industry. If people are able to find out what is truly normal the achievement of normality will no longer be sought. The fact that these medicines subdue those who take them and are disabling is simply a bonus for the industry.

When a charity shows itself to be focused on commercial investments and using commercial tactics to encourage the investment in their cause, they are working together with the broader system which provides them an already established customer base. Of course Autism Speaks will always be good at what they do. However, other people can't counter what they do or encourage something better, unless it's different. If the goals look similar, the public who is educated in consumerism will simply choose the best within that category which are competing with each other.

Consumerism and commercialism do not teach respect. Instead it teaches expedience and convenience. While people may buy those things based on the appetite which has been created, they won't be encouraged to respect those who are advertising a product which does nothing more than fulfill the appetite which they know is delusional.

When respect is the product the only way for someone or some group to efficiently sell the product is to advertise it as being in a different category which makes it worthy based on a different set of standards.

When people are involved in encouraging respect for autistics in the realm of politics, medicine, and the legal system, they must understand that the people whom they are targeting are too savvy to buy a product based on anything other than how it relates to another product in terms of commercial worth. Unless respect is shown by a different set of standards you will be judged by the standards that people already know and are accustomed to.

We can't show that one group of autistics is better than another or that autistics deserve more respect than any other group who has been oppressed for the same reason and by this same oppressive standard.

Autistic people like any other members of an oppressed group was not born believing they had less value than other people. This had to be taught. There is nothing inherent that makes one person more worthy than another. Once someone has been taught that they are less worthy, they have not only learned to see that the world as unreasonably judgmental, but their inherent trust has been severely damaged.

There is no way to use that standard for teaching people to trust in their inherent worth, unless you show them a different system for judging what determines worth. Once they understand that they will be able to judge others in that way and treat them with respect in the same way they have experienced it.

Superior Thinking Traps

Achievement of authority and/or class is how someone's sanity is decided and authority is achieved by following a narrow set of standards that serve the small group of people who decide those standards. The standards are learned in formal educational settings. Planning a strategy in competition in this way is a method of creating an offense. Offense in a game with such few boundaries (and boundaries which must remain fleeting and unattainable by most people) is the best, if not the only, defense.

Academics participate in exclusive debates not only to sharpen their knowledge and skills but also to sustain the exclusive ways they are revered in society. Once it becomes a competition like any other, the merit of the idea is based solely on someone's ability to sell it in the same way all commercial products establish their worth.

Because academics decide what is true based on what serves them as a commercial entity more than any type of objective investigation into the truth it can be used in many types of manipulation on the masses of people who don't have any opportunity to get this education. The current educational system both prevent most people from getting an education and labels them as thinking in inferior ways when they don't get the education they have prevented. This is how commercialism is maintained.

Claiming that education is a way to liberate the masses in a place like the United States where most people don't have an opportunity for an education becomes a tool of oppression instead.

In the United States, the class system is still more important in determining a person's value than anything else. The way that groups of people are discriminated against does make it more difficult for those within that group to achieve a higher class, but it is the class itself that ultimately defines their worth rather than the discrimination against a group they belong to.

The current educational system was created to serve industry. In the same way, the industry survives based on a hierarchy of what particular jobs are worth, the educational system must do the same to serve and preserve the industry of education.

Disability rehab in US was originally geared toward helping soldiers injured in the war. Mental disability was aided by a psychological process for those recovering psychologically from the horrors of war. As different types of thinking are seen as a threat to both industry and military (especially in the US where the military is one of the largest most important industries) the culture is gravitating toward putting all types of thinking that have been labeled inferior (such as learning disabilities, psychological maladjustment, and neurological impairment) into the same category of inferiority for the sake of convenience.

To maintain the security of such an environment, thinking must be structured and the only ones who need to be encouraged to think are people who have achieved acceptance into a particular class based on their education. Again that education must also be seen as the only way that truth can be established or understood.

Nothing is more vulnerable than how a person thinks and nothing provides more opportunity for oppression. Public education has no future where the price of education and the determination of educations worth is based on whatever the market will bear.

Whether it should be or not, autism is still a part of a category of mental illness, which includes all types of inferior thinking. To understand what that means politically you can see how a group like NAMI (who began being described as grassroots advocacy) is now receiving 75% of its funding from pharmaceutical companies. The therapy for inferior thinking ( a therapy which ultimately hinders more peoples thinking ability than it helps) has become the method of advocacy for people who are labeled as having inferior thinking. This provides a very narrow context for how inferior thinking is thought of and demands that inferior thinking never include any type of diversity.

Autism Speaks is certainly the best example for showing how autism needs to be seen by our culture, which depends on commercialism, industry, and a narrow set of standards, which secure those things. These ideals supported and maintained by formal education.

However, there are many other types of similar petty differences, which are supported by other political groups so that such oppression can continue. The political compromises which people make for what seems to be their own immediate benefit ultimately isn't beneficial to them at all.

Small groups and the compromises they make are often disguised as being encouraging of solidarity for a larger goal when actually it's a very small goal and benefits the smallest number of people. This is what creates fighting and needless bickering, which is the very thing they claim to be trying to avoid. This is extremely shallow, impractical, short sighted, and oppressive.

Our culture can't afford this and most people are being held captive, by the way our decision makers are encouraging us to think we can. There is too much at stake to keep sacrificing our neighbor's survival in order to protect our own luxuries. It's too late to see this as "The rest will get their aid after I get mine and can change things for them."

We've been taught for too long that the neighbors we are hurting live far away when actually they have just been conveniently hidden. The problem is now become bad enough so the person who's getting hurt by our convenience and expedience is living right next door. It's time we met our neighbors and stopped ignoring how what we do affects them.

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 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.

The Paper Factory

Originally posted on Eds autism page May 19, 2008

Sometimes agencies are developed and maintained for no other reason than to allow a certain part of the population or advocacy groups that represent that population to feel secure that what they are seeking help with is being worked on.

I have heard these agencies referred to as paper factories. The idea is that as long as they produce enough paper that contains the right words they can postpone (too often what seems like forever) doing anything about what they were assigned to do.

In order for a paper factory to really work some people's needs must be met. Politicians and political groups that create these paper factories try to appease a part of the population that will provide them with support and they in turn will assure them that some parts of their population that the agency is supposed to serve (and by that I mean the most visible and loudest part of that population) are given all they need and sometimes all they want as well.

This creates security for not only the politicians who create these agencies, but also for the agencies themselves to survive as an agency. Then the "one hand washing the other" and "political backscratching" creates a situation where the majority of unwashed hands and unscratched backs are ignored, blamed, and sometimes descibed as the casuties of a necessary evil.

I remember hearing Bill Clinton speak extensively about how many student loans go unclaimed every year. By saying that, the point that he was trying to get across was that the government was doing their part but that people were not making the effort to get these loans. What he failed to explain was how many other reasons there were for these loans and even similar grants not being applied for. The reasons are many and there are many barriers that the US government knowingly creates to prevent these kinds of programs from being accessed by the majority of the population. As is the case with agencies, the way to secure the false claims of unlimited access to these programs is by parading the few who have been successful at using these programs in front of everyone else and have those people tell everyone else how great these programs are and how anyone can access them the way they did.

The way such things work (or rather don't work) for those claiming to be promoting education are very similar to the ways things are tried with in these agencies or paper factories that I'm describing. Unfortunately they have been successful at preventing real progress by promoting the illusion of success for too long.

This illusion is also very prevalent in how many public agencies are claiming to attempt to serve the disabled. Acknowledging neurological difference is one of the biggest threats to hiding the failures of agencies claiming to serve the disability community in the United States and hiding how the old system that has not worked for so many for so long.

If the US government truly accepted that disability was, in most (if not all) cases, an issue based on a lack of an appropriate job being offered to a person who is capable in ways that were not being acknowledged by the government and the public at large, they would need to change the core of their belief system and how they do things.

I don't believe that the US government is organized enough to create the massive conspiracies that many people claim. I do however think that it is safe to say that somebody somewhere who is making major decisions about government policy knows that such things such as glamorizing mood disorders and blaming hyperactive kids while feeding them amphetamines will reduce the population of those they see as unwanted without being blamed for it.

But how can autistics who are known to have a neurological difference be contained and maintained by the old-fashioned governmental paper shuffling rules and rulers? There will need to be a strategy to train the next generation of autistics to accept what the rulers (so to speak) describe as being their defects before the older autistics get the word out and spread their ideals that describe an "autistic culture".

Of course behaviors have to be given pathological reasons and treated with behavioral therapies. Some of those therapies will be brutal but can be justified by claiming that they prevent self injury if enough influencial people describe them that way.

The claims of outside sources such as vaccinations and inappropriate foods causing autism will allow for the growth of the industry described as "therapies" along with marketing more of the lethargy and confusion causing toxic drugs that promote the pharmaceutical industry.

The one thing that will make traditional methods of isolation and exclusion look bad and ultimately less effective is allowing people to believe that differences can actually be accommodated. Tradition is protected by describing things as dis ease so that ease can be marketed based on the claim that this ease (or answer to the dis ease) will come in the form of fixing, curing, and possibly eliminating differences that we find it to be uncomfortable and/or inconvenient to support or encourage.

The accommodations that have been provided for people with all types of disabilities within the United States to be more productive has increased in an alarming slow rate in comparison to the rate of expansion and development of the products and services that we as a nation offers. Our traditional paper shuffling and ignoring people who are seen as inconvenient has created nothing but an enormous debt and a larger part of the population than ever who is seen as unproductive. While it may be difficult for some people to recognize, these kinds of inappropriate and irresponsible management practices have a way of catching up with everyone.

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.