How we value the completion of particular tasks determines which abilities we favor and encourage. Marketing campaigns from the largest and most powerful industries influence our values in the way that serves them best. The tasks we complete which they value most is purchasing their product or service.
Unfortunately, this value system has also become how we the consuming public treat our relationships with other people in our lives. How capable our friends and family are of fulfilling the expectations that industries have taught us to believe are the signs of being a valuable person too often determines whether we see them as worthy of love, respect and happiness.
The world's economy depends on disposable products and technology that quickly become obsolete. As humans are evaluated as the sum of their total parts and the sum of their abilities(each being ranked according to what industries teach us is normal, mainstream, and therefore, valuable) a larger portion of our population is seen as disposable and/or obsolete.
An educational or training facility will tell you that they are only provided the public funds to accommodate a particular part of the population. I've heard this referred to as a gate and that by widening the gate of opportunity for people with diverse abilities (or uncommon disabilities, which are more difficult to accommodate or treat ) would prevent them from meeting their budget as well as over extend their focus.
In the United States most people are uneducated and unemployed and there is a very small part of that population that seeks any accommodation in order for that to change. The main reason for people's lack of interest in finding the best ways they learn and what abilities they do have are due to the attitude that is encouraged in accommodation programs.
It would be nice if accommodation programs didn't begin by assigning value judgements of the worth of a person's combined assets and deficits by using such strict labels as able versus disabled. It would be even better if they didn't evaluate a person's character based on their ability to fit into one of the boxes they were funded to accommodate. When someone has a difficulty with the provisions they are given in an accommodation program, they get labeled as lazy, unwilling to try, and sometimes even as someone who is intentionally presenting a problem to sabotage the agency's efforts.
The attitude displayed by lawyers and highly paid competitive executives ultimately influences the accommodations that are provided for the disenfranchised. It is the same industries that set the standards which influence their behavior that fund and therefore, design the attitude that is encouraged in an accommodation program.
All we hear and see from marketing campaigns teach us to be unsatisfied with who we are. We learn that the way to increase our social status and therefore, our worthiness to be happy and loved is to possess more than the other people around us. This keeps us from trusting each other and teaches us to be dependent on the industries to tell us who we are, and what we are worth.
Creating dependence has become very sophisticated. Once a group of people put their resources together to develop a product or service, they then design an advertising campaign that will teach people that using what they have to offer will give them a reason for being proud of themselves. However, encouraging positive emotions is just the beginning of their campaign. Today industries often attempt to hijack our emotions and teach us to feel ashamed of ourselves if we don't either use what they offer or fit into the category of normal/typical/mainstream people who need it.
We are taught that the way to be proud of ourselves and to avoid shame is by using the same technique as the advertising agencies to encourage shame in other people in our environment who are less typical consumers than ourselves.
Eventually, everyone has an invested interest in the success of the product or service and needs it to be important in the same way that the company does.
As the church of psychology continues to add more ways that our behavior is inadequate and substandard by adding to the number of diagnosis in the DSM, what we accept about ourselves and what ultimately becomes what we demand from ourselves becomes a narrower, stricter, and a more unachievable set of goals. Then we shame and pressure others around us who are in any way not fitting, in as well. This temporarily provides the illusion that we are not disenfranchised from the respected part of the population.
More pills for more people at earlier ages and stricter behavioral therapies not only encourages the psychology market but every other industry work in cooperation with these exclusionary standards and modification techniques. This helps them to streamline and mass-produce their products and services as well.
People are in a very big hurry right now to decide just exactly what autism is so that every autistic can be described in the same way and prescribed the same treatment. The low functioning autism label will be used to show how anyone who is mistakenly born with such a terrible affliction is in desperate need of the one-size-fits-all autism fix. All others will be described as having high functioning autism, which means that they didn't receive early intervention, chelation, or ABA at a young enough age and are therefore, a disgraceful burdensome group beyond being helped in any way.
Autistics and our families are intimidated and shamed into believing that the producers of public accommodation programs have complete authority over designing what types of accommodations will be available to autistics. Unfortunately, too many of us also believe that we have no power in regulating these services or in redesigning them.
The main thing for people to remember is that very few (hardly any) people ever express dissatisfaction or report abuse about the services that are provided. Understanding that and changing it may do a lot to make things better, but we won't know until enough people get involved.
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