Some people think and act in ways that are just different.
In order to promote fairness, standard evaluations and treatments need continual exploration and modification to meet our growing awareness of diverse individuals and diverse populations. This is a team blog. Authors posting are; Ed and Wayward.
The public education system in the US was designed to create dependence on the system as being the ultimate authority. It is therefore, not necessary to have everyone be educated in the belief system they designed for it to be secured as a powerful tool. It is only necessary that those who are educated in this way to be the best able to dominate those who aren't.
Once the tools of manipulation and domination are created compliance to a set of nationalistic goals is much easier to demand. Nationalism encourages laws that are void of reason. Nationalism is dependent on militarism so militarist virtues are what a nation with empirical aspirations will encourage the public to learn. Building an empire depends upon aggression so those who are deemed to be the most successful in a culture with these goals will be the ones who are best able to intimidate and/or manipulate the most people.
Many academics absolutely believe that they do and should own, regulate, and police the Internet and any other method the public may use to communicate. The purpose for understanding and helping others to understand has been completely obstructed by academic debates where the winner of the competition that academics design and regulate can reinforce their illusion of superiority.
Many of the so-called skeptics within the autism wars I find on the Internet seem to reinforce an ablest value system. Many are constantly using names to insult people's intelligence and attempting to show how autistic people already have superior intelligence based on typical standards. This is self-defeating and contrary to the goals of neurodiversity.
Insults that describe selfishness, ignorance, self-serving attitudes,etc., are also meaning stupid, dumb and retarded. These insults are typically used to describe someone who is thinking independently from the established norm. Therefore, using such insults in this way support the established norm, which ultimately restricts diversity and independent criticism so all the problems with the established norm are not only not solved but the evolution of intelligence is stifled.
As I said in my previous post Mindectomy, the control of the condescending and manipulative discipline known as behaviorism fits very well into further establishing the US public school systems as a military training ground. Using such a value system to train public students will further normalize or otherwise exclude any diverse and/or independent thinkers.
All the social programs that have been described as progressive in the public school systems have claimed to encourage inclusion. However, this inclusion is meant to promote socialization by way of either normalizing or excluding the students. This ideal is not contradictory to the encouragement of further institutionalizing dissidents and social outcast that could not otherwise be controlled.
The failure of our other forms of institutionalization are now encouraging a firmer control by the federal government on the behavior of school children so the children are taught early how to be obedient to the state.
As terrible as I'm sure the Judge Rotenberg Center is, it is not operating independently from how behaviorism is being practiced in other institutions. Using words of propaganda such as "positive" and "support"does not in any way show how the form of Applied Behavioral Analysis known as Positive Behavioral Support will use restraint and seclusion in any safer or more humane way.
Industry depends on repeat business and government contracts ensure industries the ultimate authority to create and demand the only rules that govern them.
In the same way that John D. Rockefeller created a monopoly of Standard Oil by controlling every stage of the production and distribution of its products the US government understands very well the importance of controlling every aspect of the industry of public education.
Science and mathematics are languages, which are created to understand the nature of our relationship to the environment. Since very few people are given an opportunity to understand these languages and therefore contribute to the expansion and depth of understanding these languages are claiming to promote, everyone's understanding of that nature is severely limited.
In the same way that industry in the United States has promoted institutionalization, behavior modification works as well at promoting consumerism as it does in neutralizing the progress of our educational system and making it more exclusive. Unless we want our nation to be nothing but an empire protected by a strong military, we need to consider other ways to engage people in learning that are less manipulative and domineering.If freedom and democracy are the goals then intimidation will not serve as an effective tool for accomplishing our goals.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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 standardizedjudgments we've been taught that cause the oppression to begin with.
The most important thing to know about autism is what autistic people need, and I don't see that being discussed often enough. Many autistics aren't diagnosed and are even treated bad by other autistics. People often focus on unproductive or even counter-productive things when considering how to support each other and how to obtain support for all autistics. Sarah at Cat in a Dog's World has written an important post here about how self diagnosed autistics are mistreated. (I highly recommend reading it along with the discussion that follows.)
So many people whom I have encountered aren't being factored into the discussions about autism that I see. This has led me to explore the reasons that so much misinformation are allowed and even encouraged. People believing that autism is such a mystery seems to be what allows for so much ambiguity about what autistic people need. The ambiguity serves as a gateway to allow cultural bias to influence much of what is believed about autism.
The industry that provides commercial treatments for autism also depends on the financial gains that come from being able to define what autism is. If the public does too much exploration into who autistic people are, and what we need, the industry that provides treatment will have to make adjustments. This industry has shown that they see these adjustments as being too expensive to make.
I originally remember the word high functioning referring to someone who was mentally retarded. This meant they were mildly retarded rather than severely. Unfortunately, the term high functioning being applied to any category of people is a way of telling the public that they have some type of socially unacceptable defect but yet deserve more respect and dignity than those in the same category who are seen as lower functioning. This social mindset is applied to autistics.
Competence is judged by someone's ability to fit into a box that the public has agreed deserves support. The more autism a person is seen to have the less support they are seen to be deserving. People who are considered "higher functioning" are seen to deserve more. The less that is required to mainstream someone the more likely they are to become an important person.
The public support for anyone who is considered to have these deficits must be based on how close the individual appears to be able to conform. The goal must be for them to be neurotypical. How the ideal appears to the public must be controlled by those who offer the support.
Neurodiversity and the social model of autism is a threat to public systems and private therapies that depend on people's worth being based on the narrow and typical social hierarchy of performance.
Claiming that worse symptoms qualify a person for more aid creates many misconceptions about what autism is. It helps those providing the support for others to believe this will help them but ultimately all they will do is give that person more charity or demand more normality from them in unreasonable ways.The industry depends on this.
Autistics fighting among ourselves and evaluating each other in the same ways that these public systems and private commercial treatments evaluate us is serving the commercial agenda of keeping things the same which ultimately hurts us all.
The medical model of autism depends on autistics being seen as having a deficit in the way that we think. Deficits in a way that a person thinks means that the person is either unintelligent or mentally ill. Since sanity is thought to be acquired through narrow brand of formal education, mental illness is seen as a lack of intelligence.
Intelligence provides a person with sex appeal and shows them as deserving of respect and dignity. It shows the person as a provider to others rather than a burden to society. The money being spent on curing autism tells society how to view our worth. It shows society that we are a burden rather than being providers.
Our culture teaches people to take advantage of anyone they can so being vulnerable is being unprepared for "real life" and therefore, not worthy of respect or honor. The most vulnerable people are considered unintelligent. The bottom of this spectrum is the lowest of the food chain and therefore, seen as by many of the decision-makers and the propaganda spreaders as the ugliest, meanest, and the part of the population that must be disposed of for the profit of good productive smart citizens.
We as a society also place much importance on an ambiguous notion of maturity in similar ways that authority is often demanded rather than earned. Being mature is a way that people are respected more. Maturity is based on age specific criteria which thereby automatically define people with a developmental disability as immature and therefore, less worthy of respect and dignity.
How autism is seen means everything. Encouraging dangerous autism therapies and encouraging the cure autism mentality is not done without a price. I hope more advocates will look at the effect this is having on autistic people and adjust their efforts accordingly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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