Love on the Spectrum (LotS), while it is still manipulated like all reality-TV, has helped me developed some major insight. I was watching the show, and after a few episodes, I said, “Finally, a show about normal people being normal.” Then, I started thinking that if the whole premise of the show is that it’s about not-normal people, what am I thinking? I had to think about it for a few days until I reached my conclusion.
My whole life, I thought that fiction and reality-TV and movies (known as TV for the rest of this post) were so weird. I would call it propaganda and population control. To me, it was a way to get the masses to all behave a certain way. It was never anything like what people are normally like. TV characters try to be cool, play social games with each other, be mean to the weak to appear strong, conform to trends, try their hardest to assimilate a prescribed standard of beauty, etc. There were good messages too, like be nice to each other, don’t overtly lie, have morals, here’s how you resolve disputes in a healthy mutual manner, etc. Still, it was not real-life. It was not how people naturally behaved. When I would interact with people and they started acting like people on TV, I would tell them that they are acting too much like the people on TV and could probably benefit from watching TV less. When asked by someone if I think that other people will like what they are planning on wearing, I have seriously responded with, “What…are you competing in a popularity contest like on TV? Who cares what other people think? Wear what you like.” People would be upset about this, but I was proud that I “helped them see that they were being inauthentic/brainwashed”. Despite my views of TV though, I still enjoyed it for its entertainment value, but I naturally gravitated towards science shows and documentaries.
What LotS helped me realize is that…No! TV is really how “normal” people are. NTs really behave like the shows on TV. Maybe they’re not exactly like TV depicts, but they are very similar. They have their hierarchies, manipulative games, implicit/indirect communication, popularity contests, confusions, morals, small talk…all that. In my example above, the person deciding on what to wear was in a popularity contest like on TV! I made the NT-cultural mistake of explicitly pointing it out, which they understandably considered rude. Overall though, through internal and external selection biases, my life was inadvertently designed to include autistic-friendly people, which behave differently from people on TV. Either my friends were autistic or behaved with me in an autistic-friendly manner. In my personal life, I saw that non-TV-people didn’t act like those on TV, so when someone would act like TV, I thought they were brainwashed rather than NT. The whole time, I was the “weird” one insisting that the world itself was “weird”. OMG. I’m cracking up! 😆
Like all of life’s lessons, I’m still building on this, so I would appreciate any input or additions. Am I wrong? Did I make an illogical connections? Am I missing anything?
Also, has anyone else been through something similar?
I do this all the time. I think our fundamental understanding of the world is what is different. For example, it’s not like I have never cared what people thought about what I was wearing. Of course I’ve asked for that same support. However, if they asked me if I was in a popularity contest like on TV, I’d respond with something like, “Yeah, I want them to like me so they’re nice to me,” or, “No, but I want to make sure I don’t stick out or piss someone off. What if there’s some rule about wearing a shirt with text on it, I don’t know about it, then everyone treats me like I’m some asshole that purposefully has no regard for standards to piss everyone off? It’s happened before.”
I think this is what they call cognitive empathy: having an idea of being in the situation. This is not to be confused with emotional empathy, which is feeling what someone else is feeling.
I seriously told a racist white person once, “Okay. Imagine a white person, but with black skin…or say you woke up tomorrow with black skin. Nothing about you has changed at all, except now you have black skin.” I could tell that got to their core.
That’s almost certainly true, and it’s worth considering—given how much social strife there is, I’m not sure if the NT mind is actually more socially apt. In some sense, I imagine the biggest actual problem of neurodivergence is NTs being assholes about it, and really, how much social aptitude does that demonstrate?
But the thing I was trying to convey about NTs is that we tend to take all this for granted, that for most interactions we don’t have to think about it or plan it out. If thinking does happen, it’s usually after the fact—what did this person really mean when they said that? We tend to get too caught up in the moment to introspect about social interactions as they’re happening, so instinct takes over. What I was talking about, with the half-assed role-switching, is what I believe to be going on with those instincts.
It may well have, but for the most part what’s cognitively going on here is horribly inadequate. There is no “me but for being a woman,” because being a man has contextualized my whole life up to this point. Every experience I’ve ever had has been influenced by my gender.
This tends to become more obvious with contrast, which is why people who easily blend into their community—be it the straight white Christian rural republican or the straight white spiritual-but-not-religious urban democrat—tend not to notice. Most people I’ve known tend to believe that most everyone else has mostly similar experiences to their own, hence their incredible myopia about the fact that other people can have very different ways of understanding the world, and have come to very different conclusions about it.
Point being, “me but for being a woman” would be a totally different person in basically every way, so it’s a pointless thing to think about, and not a very good way of getting at the social intentions of others.
The big wrinkle in all this is, there are absolutely people out there who will lie to you and try to cheat you. Because of this, you can’t just take people at face value; social judgments are necessary. On the other hand, given the prevalence of lying and cheating, NT people aren’t very good at that either.