Corporations are best understood as externalising machines that perpetuate a landscape of psychopathic institutions that are exclusively concerned with perception management. As life on this planet is being liquidated, more and more humans are engaging in collaborative niche construction, retreating into human scale cracks within the dying mono-cult.

Externalising machines

The 20 year old documentary The Corporation, based on first hand experience reports and interviews with corporate CEOs, investors, and bankers, provides an excellent overview into how the ideology of capital powers corporations, linking the core of the logic of capital to the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Corporations are best understood as externalising machines that perpetuate a landscape of psychopathic institutions in which humans are forced into abstract cookie cutter roles prescribed by the global mono-cult of neoliberal economics, and are no longer understood as collaborative biological living beings that form highly adaptive human scale cultural organisms that are integral parts of the planetary ecosystem.

The social ecology created by corporations shapes and influences the actions of 

• tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, 
• bankers, investors, 
• politicians, 
• employees, 
• and consumers.

The war against life

Cancerous growth of corporate externalising machines has been at the core of colonialism, and over the last century, has expanded into all corners of the living planet.

This is not about “climate change”; we agree with the judge on that. It is about murder. At scale. Forever. And that is a bad thing, a very bad thing, an evil thing. When the United Nations recently said we have two years to save the world, that they are not being “melodramatic,” that economies will be “devastated,” they mean it. Not in some distant future. In the next 10 to 20 years, that’s what 1,000 public statements have said. It’s what 10,000 peer-reviewed papers have said. It’s coming. It is what it is. At some point, you’ll be stepping over body parts on the way to work, going “well, you know.”

– Roger Hallam

Life on this planet is being liquidated. Corporations are engaged in a war against biological life.

In stark contrast to the narratives of all the corporate feel-good PR, the ecological destruction of externalisation machines is growing, rapidly, resulting in extinction rates that are several thousand times higher than the background extinction rate over the last several million years.

This state of affairs is not helped by governments that have not only bought into the mono-cult of neoliberal economics, but that also find themselves in an institutional landscape that completely lacks any concept of a scale aware precautionary principle, such that effective regulation is never able to catch up with the speed at which corporate externalisation machines are liquidating the living planet.

In industrialised societies governments find themselves in the role of pretending to be “in control”. The more stratified societies become, the more the state religion of the belief in the God of the Invisible Hand allows the desires of capital rather than the needs of communities to shape policies. The example below refers to the distribution of political party donations in Aotearoa.

Technology corporations and management consultants gladly assist governments in the pretend game of “managing the economy”. Since the Cold War empires have increasingly shifted their focus from overt conventional war to economic warfare and psychological warfare.

Cultural and ecological cracks in the dying mono-cult

On the margins of society, AutCollab participatory research is showing very high levels of cognitive dissonance.

The extent to which the toxic cultural environment of the global mono-cult has created a hypercompetitive atmosphere in which institutions are almost exclusively concerned with perception management, is revealed in the lived experiences of intersectionally marginalised people:

Are you able to identify the biggest source of cognitive dissonance in your life? If so, what is it?

Having to work for corporations when I hate everything about them.

The relative privileges i have compared to so many people, even just within the trans community (and among neurodivergent folks), which allow me to diminish the struggles i do face. The fact i just continue to keep going day by day, literally having to shove down how overwhelmingly sad i feel that so many people are in dire situations without their basic needs and exist in warzones and witness so much horror and we are all expected to be ‘business as usual’, the ‘world doesn’t stop’ just because of the genocide of groups of people. I extend that sadness to nonhuman animals as well, and the dissonance i have to erect as the signs of animals’ lives being diminished as insignificant are always present, as are visual reminders on a constant basis (ads, restaurant overflow) of the sheer amount of torture and death undergone to both humans and nonhuman animals every single day in order for ‘convenience’ and a semblance of ‘normalcy’ in operation. these signs, from fast food chains being everywhere, to billboards, streaming ads and even convenience store displays, makes an inescapable pit of mental anguish—we hide the human suffering of the society and world around us through propaganda campaigns and literally pushing those of us who suffer the most out of sight and punish them if they do exist so publicly. but the window-dressings of animal products merely hide the conditions of their existence—the sheer amount of death is not a concern… i do my best by being vegan and avoiding products that contribute to the horror of the industry, but… The former dissonance, the dissonance of the suffering of fellow humans across the world, is a concerted effort by power to set up the dissonance. The latter is one i have to self-erect or i will fall apart over time. So i gave it a bit more space to fill the air. Both are heavy burdens, and trying to discuss how heavy it all is is met with a level of hostility for caring too much, being too bleeding heart or being told i cannot possibly have the capacity to actually care about so many beings suffering in the world. So it has that as an added weight. I want to add: i am considered low support needed, tho i am in process for assessment for autism right now. I work a full time job and rent, i have a little cat, who i feed the best quality wet cat food (meat; cats are obligatory carnivores) i can so that the sacrifice for that meat lends to the best health. I can drive. otoh, i have not taken a proper shower since 2017 and sponge-bathe uncommonly; i do make sure my clothing is clean, which goes a long way. it is really hard for me to do basic tasks on routine. still, it is hard for me to be genuine and admit that i struggle, that i am disabled in some ways and that i need help in others. i think in part it is because of how much suffering we see around us and in media—almost as if by design, with an economic system that hinges upon ‘well, you’re ok, because at least you aren’t in that situation’ in the backs of everyone’s minds to keep people on the routine of ‘normal life’ as if everything is fine. And of course, making us compete with resources to seek aid and help. So we can all just contribute to and get chewed up and spat out of the machinery, while people across the world have their plights scapegoated to show how lucky we are despite complaining so much. (Free Palestine)

Planning for retirement and congratulating people for having kids and pretending the future is fine while the planet is quickly roasting to death.

I work as a professional staff member at a university and academic staff expect to be treated as gods, yet are blind to the caste system the work in. As well as that, their critical thinking skills are sadly lacking in areas that do not involve academic areas of research and yet they insist all decisions are made by academic staff. Universities are a remarkably dysfunctional kind of organisation.

Asking for help from strangers or authority figures.

Behaviourism.

The ethical quandary of empire and its pervasive programming and my conflicting need for others and need for solitude. 

Probably me and people with different political beliefs also within some of my relationships.

Since money is disconnected from the real value of many physical quantities and services, and this is deliberate, I should feel much richer than I am financially. But I don’t. Fortunately, I’ve been able to live on little money for part of my life and educate myself at the same time. However, both the competition for money and fame makes me sick. Plus, the domino effect of it all is that you have to prove you have enough knowledge to belong to this pyramid scam, by spending time and resources to get a higher level (a degree). If you learn outside the system, even if you excel, it doesn’t “count”.

Pressures of society, partner etc. To work and parent and be in control.

Everyone expecting you to be ok and cope when you are not ok and really struggling to cope with most aspects of life.

The biggest source of cognitive dissonance for me is valuing social justice, compassion and equality but being paralysed by my disabilities, anxiety and inability to help sufficiently that I end up not doing anything.

The disconnect between what people say and do: I don’t know if neurotypical people know how much their actions belie their words.

Living under capitalism and neo fascism as a queer, disabled, autistic person. I frequently have to weigh my own needs, desires, and abilities against the material realities of a society that doesn’t value me.

The fact that I’m supposed to be able to fake being happy or to be able to fake liking someone. Other people seem to consider this normal and easy. For me, it is impossible.

Healing from the religious trauma of the global mono-cult

More and more humans are engaging in collaborative niche construction to retreat into healthier human scale cultural and ecological cracks within the mono-cult.

Becoming conscious of human cognitive and emotional limits, and recognising that these limits are just as real, immutable, and relevant for our survival as the laws of physics may allow us to avoid the fate of earlier civilisations, and to embark on a path of radical energy descent.

The evolving web of relationships, mutual aid, and peer support initiatives on the margins of society is best understood in terms of emergent Ecologies of Care beyond the human. The journey towards a healthier relationship with the ecologies which we are part of starts with the most powerful tool at our disposal, the introduction and consistent use of new language and new semantics.

A production/consumption paradigm for what an economy is is a guarantee for ultimately destroying the planet and each other. Even when you talk about degrowth, if you’re working within that paradigm, you’re essentially doomed. We need to break away from that paradigm entirely. Care and freedom on the other hand are things you can increase as much as you like without damaging anything. So we need to think: what are ways that we need to care for each other that will make each other more free? And who’re the people who are providing that care? And how can they be compensated themselves with greater freedom? To do that we need to like, actually scrap almost all of the discipline of economics as it currently exists.

We’re actually just starting to think about this. Economics as it currently exists is based on assumptions of human nature that we now know to be wrong. There have been actual empirical tests of the basic sort of fundamental assumptions of the maximizing individual that economic theory is based on, and it turns out that they’re not true. It tells you something about the role of economics that this has had almost no effect on economic teaching whatsoever. They don’t really care that it’s not true.

But one of the things that we have discovered, which is quite interesting, is that human beings have a psychological need to be cared for, but they have an even greater psychological need to care for others, or to care for something. If you don’t have that you basically fall apart. It’s why old people get dogs. We don’t just care for each other because we need to maintain each other’s lives and freedoms, but our own psychological happiness is based on being able to care for something or someone. 

– David Graeber, From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes, 2019

Onwards! Join us!

More and more people are discovering the timeless wisdom curated by Laozi for survival within the mono-cult of busyness. The Chinese concept of Pu is a Daoist metaphor that points us towards earlier times, to the qualities of small scale societies that have survived on the margins of empires, in some cases for many millennia.

The ideological prison of busyness

It is time for those who still consider themselves to be “culturally well adjusted” to modern industrialised society to realise that they are inmates of an ideological prison in their own minds, living in a cult that imprisons and dehumanises all those who dare to break out of the ideological prison.

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

…

Everyone knows how these stories end. Modern teenagers have been reacting to the toxic cult in the limited ways available to them for generations, and Daoist philosophers have been telling the world about these stories for 2,500 years.

The industrialised machine of neoliberalism in 1986:

I suspect many people in Westernised countries will relate to this story from a neurosurgeon in the US. Parts of this particular story remind me of how I dropped out of corporate employment 22 years ago. The difference is that back then I thought I had a plan, still believing that there were ways of addressing institutional and technological problems from the outside.

Over the course of twenty years, via my work, by collaborating in a worker co-op, and by distilling patterns from all the positive and negative experiences I had in the social world, more and more layers of the onion of the cultural disease of the modern industrialised way of life revealed themselves as being actively hostile to thriving life. Along the way, I incrementally shed these layers of the ideological onion, replacing cognitive dissonance with elements that have found their way into the Ecologies of Care support model, which combines lived experiences from the margins of society as part of a process of omni-directional learning at human scale, and which is informed by the results of AutCollab participatory research:

The living planet is crying out for global intersectional solidarity beyond the human, for gentler and more compassionate ways of being. 

Dao de Jing

The Dao de Jing reflects the human predicament that all empire building attempts are confronted with.

Chapter I (Embodying the Dao)

The Dao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Dao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name. (Conceived of as) having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth; (conceived of as) having a name, it is the Mother of all things.

Always without desire we must be found,
If its deep mystery we would sound;
But if desire always within us be,
Its outer fringe is all that we shall see.

Under these two aspects, it is really the same; but as development takes place, it receives the different names. Together we call them the Mystery. Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful.

Chapter II (The nourishment of the person)

All in the world know the beauty of the beautiful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what ugliness is; they all know the skill of the skilful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what the want of skill is. So it is that existence and non-existence give birth the one to (the idea of) the other; that difficulty and ease produce the one (the idea of) the other; that length and shortness fashion out the one the figure of the other; that (the ideas of) height and lowness arise from the contrast of the one with the other; that the musical notes and tones become harmonious through the relation of one with another; and that being before and behind give the idea of one following another. Therefore the sage manages affairs without doing anything, and conveys his instructions without the use of speech. All things spring up, and there is not one which declines to show itself; they grow, and there is no claim made for their ownership; they go through their processes, and there is no expectation (of a reward for the results). The work is accomplished, and there is no resting in it (as an achievement).

The work is done, but how no one can see;
‘Tis this that makes the power not cease to be.

Chapter X (Possibilities through the Dao)

When the intelligent and animal souls are held together in one embrace, they can be kept from separating. When one gives undivided attention to the (vital) breath, and brings it to the utmost degree of pliancy, he can become as a (tender) babe. When he has cleansed away the most mysterious sights (of his imagination), he can become without a flaw. In loving the people and ruling the state, cannot he proceed without any (purpose of) action? In the opening and shutting of his gates of heaven, cannot he do so as a female bird? While his intelligence reaches in every direction, cannot he (appear to) be without knowledge? (The Dao) produces (all things) and nourishes them; it produces them and does not claim them as its own; it does all, and yet does not boast of it; it presides over all, and yet does not control them. This is what is called ‘The mysterious Quality’ (of the Dao).

Chapter XV (The exhibition of the qualities of the Dao)

The skilful masters (of the Dao) in old times, with a subtle and exquisite penetration, comprehended its mysteries, and were deep (also) so as to elude men’s knowledge. As they were thus beyond men’s knowledge, I will make an effort to describe of what sort they appeared to be. Shrinking looked they like those who wade through a stream in winter; irresolute like those who are afraid of all around them; grave like a guest (in awe of his host); evanescent like ice that is melting away; unpretentious like wood that has not been fashioned into anything; vacant like a valley, and dull like muddy water. Who can (make) the muddy water (clear)? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear. Who can secure the condition of rest? Let movement go on, and the condition of rest will gradually arise. They who preserve this method of the Dao do not wish to be full (of themselves). It is through their not being full of themselves that they can afford to seem worn and not appear new and complete.

Chapter XVI (Returning to the root)

The (state of) vacancy should be brought to the utmost degree, and that of stillness guarded with unwearying vigour. All things alike go through their processes of activity, and (then) we see them return (to their original state). When things (in the vegetable world) have displayed their luxuriant growth, we see each of them return to its root. This returning to their root is what we call the state of stillness; and that stillness may be called a reporting that they have fulfilled their appointed end. The report of that fulfilment is the regular, unchanging rule. To know that unchanging rule is to be intelligent; not to know it leads to wild movements and evil issues. The knowledge of that unchanging rule produces a (grand) capacity and forbearance, and that capacity and forbearance lead to a community (of feeling with all things). From this community of feeling comes a kingliness of character; and he who is king-like goes on to be heaven-like. In that likeness to heaven he possesses the Dao. Possessed of the Dao, he endures long; and to the end of his bodily life, is exempt from all danger of decay.

Applying Daoist philosophy

The civilisation of modern empires is in an advanced stage of dying. The full implications still need to sink in. This will only be possible by understanding the history of all empires in terms of a history of cults, understanding social power hierarchies in terms of addictions, and extending compassion to the inmates.

The sensory overload produced by the continuous exposure to advertising and consumer culture is not to be underestimated. I remember an American friend in Wellington telling me more than 20 years ago that each time he returns to the US, his senses feel assaulted by the external pressure to consume. Today, via the Web and mobile connectivity, this pressure is everywhere. Addionally, the stress generated by hustle culture to make ends meet financially is toxic. We can reduce sensory overload from modern “civilisation” by limiting our exposure to the digital realm.

More and more people are discovering the timeless wisdom curated by Laozi for survival within the mono-cult of busyness.

As the financialised house of cards of capitalism comes crumbling down, which inevitably it will, all that remains are the ecological environments and trustworthy relationships we have co-created around us (or not!). 

De-powered human scale ecologies of care

The Chinese concept of Pu (“unworked wood; inherent quality; simple”) is a Daoist metaphor for the natural state of humanity. Pu points us towards earlier times in the more distant past, and to the qualities of small scale societies that have survived on the margins of empires, in some cases for many millennia.

The art of non-doing is not doing nothing, it is better understood in terms of active non-participation in empire building endeavors – deeply appreciating the beauty of a much more ecologically diverse, peaceful, and less stressful life at small human comprehensible scales.

The art of de-powered dialogue and deliberation in Open Space that enables omni-directional learning is beautifully illustrated in an excellent article titled The Ju/’hoansi protocol by anthropologist Vivek V Venkataraman, packed with important observations. I recommend reading all of it. If you are short of time, here is a slightly shorter extract:

For the vast majority of human history, people made group decisions through consensus. It is perhaps the most conspicuous feature of political life among recent hunter-gatherer societies, from the Ju/’hoansi to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia to the Indigenous societies of the early Americas.

Though the small-world life of hunter-gatherers may seem far removed from our own digitalised and global world, the problems of group life have remained fundamentally the same for hundreds of thousands of years. In the face of conflict and polarisation, ancient human groups needed processes that yielded good outcomes.

Human prehistory was littered with poor group decisions. Whether it was an ill-timed raid or the wrong choice of watering hole, some of our would-be hunter-gatherer ancestors vanished without a trace. We know this because, among hunter-gatherers today, group decisions are matters of existential importance.

The Ju/’hoansi are careful not to entrust key decisions to single individuals or small sub-groups. Leadership is temporary and knowledge-based, shifting even within a single conversation. Leaders refrain from stating their opinions early in the conversation, which could bias the opinions of others who have yet to speak. The role of a leader in group decisions is to guide deliberation, state the group’s mood, and help finalise a decision. Leaders are respected, but they cannot coerce others.

With the goal of consensus, the group itself is the decision-maker. Decisions typically start as grassroots affairs between neighbours and friends. Only later does the community gather together for a formal meeting. During deliberation, everyone – man or woman, old or young – is encouraged to state their opinion about important matters. In the egalitarian culture of the Ju/’hoansi, people do their own thing and therefore have their own unique experiences and ways of representing problems that may be relevant to a group decision.

The Ju/’hoansi are not culturally diverse, but their permissiveness of individual differences means their groups are functionally diverse. The social norm of widespread participation ensures the free and open exchange of information, reducing the likelihood of an information cascade. Biesele documented a principle that, if each person’s opinion was not heard, trouble would follow. Repressed opinions, it was said, could cause sickness.

‘It often happens that the suggestion finally adopted is one which was initially voiced by somebody who has taken no further part in the proceedings, leaving it to others to take up, and “push” his or her proposal.’

Deliberation also means disagreement. Claims are sceptically evaluated based on evidence, according to the anthropologists Melvin Konner and Nicholas Blurton Jones, who investigated Ju/’hoansi knowledge of animal behaviour in the 1970s. The Ju/’hoansi are careful to distinguish between first-hand knowledge and hearsay or speculation. There was a norm that discouraged rampant speculation: when someone said that children could be killed by fires, an old man said that people should only speak when they have seen things happen. One man was laughed at for his gullibility when he said that he had heard that elephants would bury their babies up to their necks.

‘Trackers’ conversations are fully cooperative and open to both new ideas and to corrections by other trackers, specifically to ensure the best-reasoned outcomes. So democracy and science are closely allied in the people’s minds, and closely govern how decisions are made.’

The Ju/’hoansi keep their cool, recognising that anger and heated feelings can lead to impulsive decisions and misunderstandings. According to Silberbauer, ‘the band is reluctant to come to decision under the sway of strong feelings: if discussion becomes too angry or excited, debate is temporarily adjourned by the withdrawal of the attention to the calmer participants until things cool down.’ Confrontation is avoided through a variety of subtle stratagems: pretending to cook, or urgently attending to a thorn in one’s foot. When things get too heated, people disengage, signalling a lack of sympathy for the outburst. The fate of the Ju/’hoansi contrarian is neither exile nor execution. It is to be ignored.

This isn’t to say that debate never occurs. Silberbauer observed ‘a bit of cut and thrust between orators’, however he found that point-scoring ultimately played little role in the ultimate decision. In a highly interdependent band, this makes sense because one’s fate is largely tied to that of other bandmates. As a result, unlike in modern politics, group decisions are not something to be won or lost. Attentive of this, the Ju/’hoansi avoid the mistake of equating rhetorical flourish with truth. The idea of sparring orators dealing knockout blows would be anathema to the Ju/’hoansi. A knockout blow is self-defeating, like punching oneself in the face.

When it comes to finalising a course of action, the Ju/’hoansi are sceptical of voting. In small groups, Biesele has found, the Ju/’hoansi see the act of voting as polarising.

Instead, discussion continues until a consensus is reached. Everyone has to agree on the course of action because it legitimates the decision as belonging to the group. It is not merely the actual result of the decision that counts, but the process itself. Everyone must attend to what Silberbauer calls the social balance-sheet. The social balance-sheet is no less than the promise of future cooperation, perhaps the most important thing in the life of a hunter-gatherer.

Consensus is also about the creation of shared meaning. The Ju/’hoansi, according to Silberbauer, are not only exchanging facts about reality but also values, objectives and ‘logical and causal relationships between items of information’. To decide well, the band must think together.

Perhaps the best illustration of this process of cognitive convergence comes from Kenneth Liberman, who worked among Aboriginal populations of the western Australian desert. Each day starts with the Morning Discourse, in which people take turns voicing concerns, thoughts, ideas. Each comment builds on the previous. The state of affairs of the group becomes publicly available. Nothing is directed toward individuals, only the group. ‘The favoured strategy here is to depersonalise one’s remarks and tone of voice as much as possible,’ wrote Liberman in 1985. ‘The effect is something like acting as if someone else is doing the talking.’ Rather than each person expressing views as an individual, it is almost as if the group is talking through each individual. The Morning Discourse shapes the consensus, when ‘all think in the same way with the same head, not in different ways.’ Sometimes hunter-gatherers don’t even bother to articulate the decision, so clear is the consensus and the subsequent course of action.

Understanding the Ju/’hoansi mode of communication from a modern perspective requires investigating the nature of dialogue. The word ‘dialogue’ is derived from the Greek ‘dia’ (through) and ‘logos’ (word or meaning), and is often translated as ‘a flow of meaning’. According to William Isaacs, who teaches workshops on dialogue-based approaches to communication, dialogue is ‘a shared inquiry, a way of thinking and reflecting together. It is not something you do to another person. It is something you do with people … Dialogue is a living experience of inquiry within and between people.’ Contrast this with debate, the root of which comes from the Old French word debatre – ‘to fight’.

Taken together, there is robust evidence that the Ju/’hoansi are able to avoid levels of polarisation like we see in our current political moment. This is achieved not necessarily through individual virtue but rather with cultural guardrails and prolonged deliberation. The Ju/’hoansi are well aware that their social norms around deliberation improve the quality of their decisions.

Many anthropologists and archaeologists believe that humans lived in nomadic egalitarian bands for much of our species’ history. If this is true, then the Ju/’hoansi and other hunter-gatherers tell us something important about what politics in the Palaeolithic might have looked like. Amid the crackle and pop of a Pleistocene campfire, under the anonymity of darkness, our ancestors began to think as one. In that moment, we became political animals, the first and only species in the history of the world to grasp how its own collective intelligence could be made and unmade.

Just like any hunter-gatherer today, our ancestors would have been self-conscious political actors. They would have realised the importance of the process to the result. And they would have actively maintained political structures that maximised their collective intelligence. Groups that failed to do so would have perished.

All of this calls into question our own preoccupation with debate as a form of truth-seeking. In the sphere of communication, prominent book titles include Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking (2023), Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard (2022), How to Argue and Win Every Time (1995), and The Art of Being Right (1831).

Debate is a tool designed to convince, not to solve collective problems.

If we focus on communal health and wellbeing, if we appreciate the limits of human scale, and if we interpret cognitive dissonance as a guide for (as needed radical) environmental reengineering, then we’re doing everything we can, and we can be grateful for the gift of life.

Life is not about winning and losing!

Humans have always known this – until powered-up empires emerged.

Some minds are not capable of sustaining the cognitive dissonance of deceptive social power games that plaque all empires.

Such minds are not broken, rather they are an essential part of the cultural immune system of human societies, which provides exit paths for the inmates of empires, allowing the human species to survive and recover from the tyranny of empires.

We need commitment, we need community. We need to create spaces of trust. But for that, there’s tremendous work that we need to be doing. But I don’t think that any of that work will be possible, should we not have that commitment–that commitment that no matter how challenging and tremendously difficult it will be to reckon with these narratives and to dismantle these narratives. Because seeing the horror in the eye of all these narratives that we live by comes with tremendous understanding. It will leave us very fragile, very vulnerable, and most, of course, are not willing to do that, because we don’t feel safe. But if we are able to stand the heat and create these spaces, if we commit to do this kind of work for the benefit of the planet, then we may be able to learn that we can fly.

– Yuria Celidwen

Regular immersion in Open Space is a medicine that can help transform self-doubt and despair into purposeful collective action. When everyone knows that everyone knows that … – then the illusion of progress and the illusion of powered-up institutions “being in control” is exposed and weakened. The more often this happens, the more the social license of powered-up institutions is eroded. 

Join us! The invitation to Open Space is an invitation to possibilities that exist beyond the anthropocentric cutoff points of the bell curve. 

Autistic ways of being are part of a culture that deserves the same respect as any other culture. Over the course of months and years, de-powered dialogue and omni-directional learning amongst Autistic, Artistic and otherwise Neurodivergent people results in trustworthy relationships, and in a diverse network of evolving intersectional ecologies of care.

This is a really important message for medical professionals who have been trained to look at humans as individuals, at best within a context of an atomised family, but not as precious human beings within an ecological context.

The numbers and experience reports from Dr. B. Educated participatory research highlight deficits in the education of medical doctors related to understanding the human condition and human ecologies.

Our education team is keen to work with medical colleges and medical schools to expand the sphere of discourse to ecological diseases and disorders, and to shift away from pathologising individual ways of being. All assistance in this space is appreciated. We are learning every day. 

The interactive Dr. B. Educated professional education courses are an avenue for disseminating essential knowledge and for nurturing greater levels of shared understanding, but we are also interested in public education beyond the medical professions.

Last year, thanks to Hans Georg Moeller’s work, I discovered Daoist philosophy, which has opened a whole treasure trove of wisdom. Daoist philosophy feels familiar, it reflects the culture that is emerging within Autistic communities, the timeless wisdom people in healthy ecological contexts have known for thousands of years.

The 57th chapter of the Dao De Ching is a good starting point:

A state may be ruled by (measures of) correction; 
weapons of war may be used with crafty dexterity; 
(but) the kingdom is made one’s own (only) by freedom from action and purpose.

How do I know that it is so? By these facts:
In the kingdom the multiplication of prohibitive enactments increases the poverty of the people; 
the more implements to add to their profit that the people have, 
the greater disorder is there in the state and clan; 
the more acts of crafty dexterity that men possess, 
the more do strange contrivances appear; 
the more display there is of legislation, 
the more thieves and robbers there are. 

Therefore a sage has said, 
‘I will do nothing (of purpose), 
and the people will be transformed of themselves; 
I will be fond of keeping still, 
and the people will of themselves become correct. 
I will take no trouble about it, 
and the people will of themselves become rich; 
I will manifest no ambition, 
and the people will of themselves attain to the primitive simplicity.’

The psychology of human scale ecologies beyond the human

The online blog format is a great way for catalysing de-powered dialogue and omni-directional learning, one or two steps away from corporate controlled social media environments. However, the blog format, just like all other short-form writing, has limitations.

The wonderful de-powered dialogues generated only partially take place within the blog format, they also take place via various other channels. This is not a limitation that needs to be fixed, it is simply an acknowledgement that there is a much bigger sphere of discourse and relational context that can’t be compressed into linear language or even into any other short-form multi-media artefact.

Over the course of months and years, de-powered dialogue and omni-directional learning amongst Autistic, Artistic and otherwise Neurodivergent people results in trustworthy relationships, and in a diverse network of evolving intersectional ecologies of care.

Furthermore, conceptually, each blog post is like one thread woven into a fabric of hundreds and thousands of other threads via hyperlinks. On the one hand this allows for much needed additional context, but on the other hand, similar to the limitations of academic style articles, it makes the content less self-contained and less accessible to those who are not already familiar with the wider context.

Based on everything that I have learned, experienced, and written about over the last three years, including the way in which my own small ecology of care beyond the human has evolved in ways that I could never have imagined, it is time to embark on another book curation and distillation project. All the ingredients are already there, within the fabric of AutCollab articles, and within corresponding mental models within my ecology of care.

The overarching theme could be described as ‘The psychology of human scale ecologies beyond the human’, but I also want to highlight the key element that holds together all the threads, which has been systematically eroded in Westernised societies: the notion of trust, including the role of trustworthy, sacred relationships within the context of human scale ecologies of care beyond the human, resulting in the working title ‘Trust in Human Scale : Ecologies of care beyond the human’.

The book will build on the foundations laid in the book on the beauty of collaboration at human scale that I collated in 2021. Based on what I am currently learning, and as far as I can see, ‘Ecologies of care beyond the human’ will emerge as the enduring overarching theme for Autistic / A♾tistic / Artistic Collaboration going forward.

In a toxic hypercompetitive world many Autistic people have suffered some form of abuse throughout their childhood, often from their caregivers.

Broken trust is at the core of Autistic trauma. We are not equipped for life in industrialised societies that are all about deceptive perception management, where even “education” of small children in primary school is focused on “persuasive” writing and “winning” debates –
appealing to the majority;
demonising the “inappropriate” ways of being of all “insignificant” minorities.

What is completely lacking in the mordern hypernormative social world around us is a culture that appreciates the open dialogues necessary to nurture and deepen shared understanding, and to discover and openly acknowledge the boundaries of shared understanding at each stage of the journey.

Most of what Autistic people struggle with can be traced to trauma. The following observation is from our database of Autistic experiences in healthcare settings:

Not being believed or given the benefit of the doubt can be worse than the experience itself

The way this is obscured and muddled up in the Devil’s Sadistic Manual and then packaged in pathologising labels that make people look for faults in themselves and others is only making things worse.

As I was looking through materials on nurturing mutual trust and the erosion of trustworthy relationships in Westernised societies, I came across a mashup presentation on the topic of trust in the economic sphere that I had put together back in 2017 , the year of the first AutCollab blog post:

Since the time of this presentation, I am afraid the notion of trust has further eroded across all spheres of life in the global mono-cult, but at the same time, on the margins of society, we have experienced a heartwarming increase in intersectional solidarity and we are seeing emerging ecologies of mutual trust and care.

Undoubtedly the book on trust will benefit from further Autistic dialogues in the coming months, and from the database of Dr. B. Educated participatory research, i.e. from your lived experiences.

With a bit of luck the book ‘Trust in Human Scale’ will be published by the end of 2024. In the meantime, all your input on this topic is much appreciated, especially pointers to related earlier work, and of course your experiences from all spheres of life.

If you would like to assist as a reviewer of a draft of the book later this year, please let me know!

The beauty of collaboration at human scale

So far the book on collaboration at human scale has been available in electronic formats. As part of the efforts of the AutCollab Education Team to connect with schools and to educate teachers, we realised that it might be good idea to produce a printed edition, and then to approach libraries and school libraries to buy copies.

The thought of publishing via Amazon was not appealing at all. With a bit of digging around, and remembering that we live in a world of on-demand book printing services, we came across lulu.com, which advertises itself as “a Certified B Corporation, Lulu is committed to balancing purpose and profit. We prioritize sustainability and strive for the highest standards of social and environmental performance.” and operates printers across the Anglosphere. We figured this is probably a better option.

You can now purchase a truly beautiful A4 size textbook edition of The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale at lulu.com.

Or even better, save trees by downloading an electronic version and ask your local library and your local school libraries to purchase copies of the book, perhaps together with other books by Autistic Rights and Neurodiversity Activists!

The quality of the binding, the paper, and the print is great, exceeding my expectations, including the quality of the large easily legible diagrams. If you prefer paper books, if you enjoy annotating books, and especially if your eyesight is poor and you prefer a larger font size, I can recommend the lulu.com print edition.

Together with an Autistic friend in Colombia I am collaborating on a hand-crafted translation into Spanish. As part of the process I am hoping to learn some Spanish. More omni-directional learning.

‘The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale‘ explains how losing track of our evolutionary heritage, and ignoring the limitations of human scale, has allowed a small minority of power addicted primates to infect human societies with a life denying and life destroying cultural disease. Today evolutionary forces far beyond human control are pushing us back towards the rediscovery of the limits of human scale.

The evolution of ecosystems is best understood in terms of collaborative niche construction over periods of many generations. In this context evolutionary “success” of a species is neither the result of fierce head to head competition within species, nor the result of ubiquitous competition with other species. In healthy ecosystems, collaboration within and between species is ubiquitous, it is an energy saving strategy. For any species, competition within and between species is energy intensive. Any species that relies on competition as the default strategy, especially within a species, rapidly goes extinct.

The evolutionary context of trust

Humans have only survived in the face of much stronger top predators in various ecosystems by being able to collaborate, and use symbolic language to better understand each other’s intentions and to coordinate our actions.

The biological evolutionary heritage of our capacity for culture and symbolic thought and language is directly linked to – and dependent – on our ability to fully trust each other in life and death situations.

Yes, eventually we displaced the top predators in all ecosystems, and we became the most prolific primate on the planet. But this would have been completely impossible if symbolic language had evolved primarily to allow us to engage in fierce competition with each other, and to deceive each other. Generalising to an ecological context beyond the human, Janine Benyus summarises the evolutionary process of life as follows:

Life creates conditions conducive to life.

When competition and deceptive communication takes over within the ecosystems that we refer to as multi-celled life forms, we refer to it as a cancerous disease. And yet, we currently live in a global mono-cult that pathologises those who have an unusually strong innate predisposition to extend trust and be trustworthy, and a strong innate aversion to deception:

Children with autism, when studied under experimental conditions, have been shown to have difficulties both in the production of deception and in understanding when someone else is deceiving them. … a deficit can be revealed even in the highest functioning individuals with an autism-spectrum condition in whom general comprehension problems can be ruled out.

– From ‘Theory of mind and autism: A review’, from the International Review of Research in Mental Retardation, Volume 23, 2000, Pages 169-184

That something like this passes as “science” should make every human stop in their tracks. If, as a species, we have one responsibility within the planetary ecosystem, it is to recognise that it is time to set the record straight on the toxicity of a culture that normalises and even celebrates competitive and deceptive behaviour.

As part of the oneness of life, we can only resolve the cognitive dissonance that is killing us all by fully appreciating human biodiversity, by realigning our many cultures with the local foundations of life, and by committing to minimise the human and non-human suffering that lies ahead for many generations to come.

While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is “The Middle Way” and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics (1966), therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

Whether A♾tistic dreamers are able to establish alternative ecologies of care beyond the human is no longer up for debate. We have nothing to lose. We deeply appreciate the wonder of life, and we can clearly see the global mono-cult for what it is.

We are A♾tistic. We are fully human. We are alive.

Somehow the wonder of life prevails

A♾tistic people support each other, love each other, and care for each other in ways that go far beyond the culturally impaired hypernormative imagination. 

Onwards!

The normalisation of social power gradients and powered-up relationships is the terminal disease that plagues all empires. Since we live in the context of the convulsions of dying empires, it is important to understand the cultural dynamics that are unfolding.

Joseph Tainter’s analysis of complex societies shows that collapse of hierarchical complexity “is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity”.

This article offers a curated list of valuable public learning resources for our current times, to help us acknowledge our cognitive and emotional limits, and slow down to the relational speed life at human scale. There is a logical sequence to the referenced educational videos. Together they form a crash course for understanding the toxic effects of all forms of social power.

The timeless art of de-powering and maintaining trustworthy de-powered relationships was well understood by Daoist scholars. I consider it to be the forgotten signature trait of our species, predating the emergence of powered-up empires by several hundred thousand years.

Onwards!

The sickness of powered-up relationships & societies

Cult of the self

In WEIRD performance oriented cultures powered-up relationships are normalised at all levels of scale, resulting in a toxic culture of fear and a collective learning disability.

Maintaining the illusion of control

As long as an organisation describes itself with a pyramidal organisational chart it projects a not-very-subtle-at-all signal that management by fear is to be tolerated by and is expected of anyone who joins. Ultimately all forms of “management by fear” amount to bullying, and Autistic people are highly sensitive to such attempts of manipulation.

Dehumanisation

“Conversion therapies” such as Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) are pseudoscientific practices of trying to change an individual’s behaviour to conform to the social expectations of a particular culture using psychological and physical interventions.

Recognising the sick logic of power

The logic of power in religion

You can listen to the following educational video on toxic dogmatic religions and replace religion with capitalism to begin to understand how deeply embedded and normalised the coercive power of capital is in Westernised cultures.

The logic of power at work

Here is the above story transposed onto the capitalist work ethic, which systematically sanctifies capital. What is the sacred work of God in dogmatic religions is replaced by the sacred work of Capital.

The resultant logic of fear

The commonality across all cults and powered-up empires is ubiquitous fear. To create conditions of ubiquitous fear, dogmatic religions and capitalism install the toxic belief that humans are fundamentally bad and lazy by nature, and therefore need to be controlled and disciplined.

Advice for the inmates of dying empires

De-legitimising the language of power

The common theme across the global mono-cult of capitalism is the willingness to exploit other people for personal gain, including the audacity to take personal credit for the results of others or for the results achieved as part of a team. And as importantly, neither economics nor the Internet draw directly on an evidence based understanding of physics, biology, and human behaviour.

Both the Internet and economic theories are best understood as prescriptive rather than as observational tools, as language systems that are based on specific European and North American cultural conventions that are assumed as ‘sensible’ (common sense) or ‘obvious’ (self-evident).

With these language systems in place we can measure data flows and economic performance, but only in terms of the scope and the preconceived categories afforded by the formal protocols and languages.

The tools of civilisation, including money, have undermined our appreciation of interdependence, and within the Western world have culminated in a toxic cult of competitive individualism, which amongst the non-autistic population ironically leads to extreme levels of groupthink.

It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
– Audrey Lorde, Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet

Do you really want change?

Fundamental change in the cultural environment of a hypernormative cult-like society requires changes in how we relate to other people and non-human living beings. By definition it is not something that anyone can do in isolation, it requires collective action. How do we bootstrap a safe environment of trustworthy de-powered relationships when we have grown up and are surrounded by powered-up relationships at home, at work, and in wider society? And how do we avoid re-creating yet another system of powered-up relationships?

Becoming conscious of human cognitive and emotional limits, and recognising that these limits are just as real, immutable, and relevant for our survival as the laws of physics may allow us to avoid the fate of earlier civilisations, and to embark on a path of radical energy descent.

We can tap into many years of experience with egalitarian worker co-ops, with practicing de-powered dialogue, and with consistently using an advice process before arriving at decisions that may affect others in major ways, as well as many centuries of lived experience within indigenous societies.

Best practices for social collapse

An ideological bias towards market based “solutions” obscures institutional problems. 250 years of industrialised civilisation have impaired our ability to understand and navigate the world in terms of trusted relationships. The fiction of homo economicus manifests itself in the belief in the need for external incentives and coercion.

The climate of fear in an atomised society has shrunk the sphere of discourse to the point where the existence of most institutions is no longer questioned. All potential institutional problems are assumed to be addressable by adding further complexity to established institutions or by complementing established institutions with further institutions.

Living fearlessly

The Autistic Collaboration community grows organically, at human scale, at a human pace, one trusted relationship at a time, as part of a process of collaborative niche construction, contributing to the wellbeing of Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent and intersectionally marginalised people.

The evolving web of relationships, mutual aid, and peer support initiatives is best understood in terms of emergent Ecologies of Care beyond the human, and is informed by our collective lived experience and by the results of our ongoing participatory research.

A beautiful quote from an article written by Pip Carroll (2020), in the lead up to the prolonged but ultimately very successful lock-down in Melbourne:

A caring society does not value the individual for their ability to return economic value, but simply for existing as their own imperfect self. We can’t choose to be cared for any more than we can choose to win the lottery. We can only hope to develop the quality in others by offering care ourselves. Trusting that care, once given is ordained to return to another in need.

A shift from a global monoculture to ecosystems of human scale groups reduces the spurious complexity needed to support a monoculture, and it retains and even grows adaptive cultural complexity, i.e. the diversity that emerges when the human ecological footprint is aligned with bioregional ecosystem functions. Spurious complexity wastes energy – is the result of humans working against biological evolution, whereas adaptive complexity saves energy – it is the result of humans engaging in collaborative niche construction as a part of biological ecosystems.

You can join us in Open Space via the quarterly NeurodiVerse Days of Solidarity. 

Below are useful tools for living fearlessly.

Appreciating autonomy and ecologies of care at human scale

Daoist philosophy

Liberation of the marginalised

Ecoversities

An Autistic Guide to Healthy Relationships

Co-creating conditions conducive to life

Self-Directed Education

AutCollab Education invites you to participate in Neurodiversity Celebration Week and to learn directly from the neurodiversity and disability rights movement via paradigm shifting professional education courses.

The objectives of the neurodiversity and disability rights movements overlap significantly with the struggles of indigenous peoples. All people are fully human.

Neurodiversity Celebration Week is not only about neurodivergent students, it is also about the many neurodivergent teachers, parents, artists, and professionals and entrepreneurs in all sectors of our economy – who are unable to act as role models for neurodivergent students when having to remain undercover, to avoid bullying, ruthless exploitation, and systematic discrimination in their workplaces. It will not come as a surprise that most neurodivergent students and educators have negative school experiences.

Our education team is working with neurodivergent teachers globally to facilitate sector wide education in the neurodiversity paradigm, the neurodiversity movement, and related cultural change.

We are your partners, lovers, friends, carers, nurses, clinicians, teachers, parents, children, and colleagues. Yet, we live in a world that is not safe for us.

Our ability to fulfil our potential is being threatened by the stigma associated with having been labelled with a “disorder” or a “special” educational need, and by the misconceptions many people still have about Autistic people and people with learning differences. In a hypernormative society that pathologises human diversity we are more vulnerable and at risk of being mistreated.

Neurodiversity is part of the biodiversity of all animals with nervous systems. It is not limited to humans, and it is part of the biological diversity that enables species to survive, adapt, evolve, and thrive, even in changing environmental conditions.

AutCollab Education is assisting schools and universities with unique interactive education courses to create a more inclusive educational landscape that prepares students and teachers for life in a time of ecological overshoot, frequent extreme weather events, and unavoidable rapid social change in the coming decades.

Our comprehensive professional education offering is based on ongoing participatory research. All our courses are delivered by intersectionally diverse educators with decades of lived experience. We are curating timeless concepts for nurturing and describing inclusive ecologies of care.

AutCollab Education is very different from education about neurodiversity in the language of the pathology paradigm, which frames neurodivergent people in terms of deficits relative to the current neuronormative culture, perhaps with a few special splinter skills thrown in for Feel Good Effect.

The course Introduction to the Neurodiversity Paradigm and Intersectionality is an interactive “deep dive” into neurodiversity and autistic culture. It is creative, collaborative, and goes beyond the usual medical and workplace neurodiversity ideas. Very refreshing to take part in CPD catering to different learning and communication styles. It was the most fun I’ve had in CPD this year! The course book is beautiful.
– Dr Sarah Bernard FRACP, Australia

Surviving on the edges of modern society is an art. The arts and regular immersion in genuinely safe Open Spaces help us imagine and co-create ecologies of care in which care and mutual aid are the primary values. Within the context of the polycrisis that shapes the modern human predicament, the urgency of cultural evolution can not be addressed from within the paradigm of an education system from the early industrial era. Healthy Artistic and Autistic life paths by necessity differ from “normality”.

Autists in particular learn and play differently, because our senses work differently, and because we make sense of the world in different ways. Our sensory profiles don’t allow us to push cognitive dissonance out of conscious awareness. We feel and know that a way of life that traumatises large segments of the population and the non-human world does not make any sense. We need to slow down, to the relational speed of life.

In order to bring about this change, we need your help:

Neurodiversity Celebration Week

Your school can participate in Neurodiversity Celebration Week, 18th – 24th March 2024.

We recommend the following short explanatory videos for introducing students to the neurodiversity movement and the neurodiversity paradigm:

1. Biodiversity and neurodiversity
2. The challenges faced by indigenous, Autistic, and other marginalised people
3. The birth of Autistic community

Learn from the Neurodiversity & Disability Rights Movement

You can deepen your understanding and educational toolkit by learning directly from the neurodiversity and disability rights movement via our paradigm shifting professional education courses.

Onwards!

The AutCollab Education Team

Our partners and allies

Regular Open Space with members of the neurodiversity and disability rights movement is a tool for jointly embarking on a unique journey of omni-directional learning and intersectional community co-creation that leaves no one behind.

Life is a highly dynamic system. Reflecting deeply on the relational nature of life allows us to become reacquainted with human emotional limits. Powered-up relationships are inherently incompatible with healthy ways of being human. Along the way we also begin to re-appreciate the limits of human comprehensibility and sense making.

Evolution of humans

Gene-culture co-evolution

Humans only became established and started to thrive across all terrestrial ecosystems once our cultural, cognitive, and emotional capabilities enabled us to comprehend that primate dominance hierarchies limit collective survival and adaptiveness.

We did not end up outnumbering other primates via the energy intensive route of head to head competition, we saved precious energy by out-collaborating them over the course of hundreds and thousands of generations.

Part of the evolution of life involved the development of advanced and highly reliable patterns of communication, including but not limited to the development of what we refer to as human language. Human language evolved as a way of enhancing our ability to understand each other, as a way of sharing our internal mental models and emotional states in honest de-powered dialogue.

The human capacity for language would not have given us any adaptive ecological advantage if it did not primarily serve the purpose of improving our ability to understand, trust, and rely on each other, and thereby to enable us to engage in collaborative niche construction at human scale – such that every human in a cultural organism to some extent contributes unique capabilities and lived experiences to the cultural organism.

All of this is compatible with what we know about the innate collaborative inclinations of human babies to assist other humans who seem to be struggling – including strangers who are not familiar care givers. It also points to an innate predisposition towards highly egalitarian cultures, which counteracts the latent capacity for establishing dominance hierarchies that we share with other primates. There is a substantial body of anthropological evidence for this claim, which stands in obvious opposition to the dominant modern economic doctrine, i.e. the religion of the invisible hand.

In fact the religion of the invisible hand is so dominant that some anthropologists have felt compelled to look for a more “balanced” perspective, as alluded to in the above presentation and critique of David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s work. The critique correctly points out that in The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow focus very much on the last 30,000 years of human cultural evolution, i.e. the period that included and immediately preceded the development of complex large scale societies. Both authors therefore largely avoid the question of how humans and human cultures evolved alongside other primates over the course of the last two million years.

Cultural evolution

The unique contribution and value of David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s work is better understood in their emphasis of the diversity of cultural possibilities that are available to anatomically modern humans, ranging from highly egalitarian cultures to highly stratified hierarchical cultures, including examples of co-existence of egalitarian and authoritarian cultures in close proximity, and the possibility of shifts from egalitarianism towards authoritarianism and vice versa.

Once we acknowledge that innate human cognitive abilities and emotional limits have not evolved significantly over the last 300,000 years, and once we acknowledge the cultural dynamism that The Dawn of Everything points towards over the course of the last 30,000 years, we can no longer dismiss egalitarianism as a “primitive” form of social organisation that has incrementally given way to more “advanced” forms of social organisation.

From a cultural evolutionary perspective the operation of primate dominance hierarchies is best understood as a collective learning disability.

Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.
– David Sloan Wilson and Edward O Wilson (2007)

Increasing population density probably was one of the factors that triggered a shift towards agriculture and permanent settlements:

1. Productivity enabled by agriculture catalysed specialisation of roles and division of labour, and enabled the population to grow further.
2. Population pressure in a context of permanent settlements increased the frequency of inter-group conflicts and facilitated the emergence of hierarchical systems of power.
3. The emergence of empires : The inventions of linear written language and debt based abstract currencies allowed rigid hierarchical systems of power to be strengthened, normalised, and expanded across time and space. As a result, all of written human history is framed in terms of social power politics.

As social power gradients and anthropocentric world views became normalised, traumatising social norms have led to distorted perspectives on human diversity, human health, and human natures.

It is non-sensical to attempt to define human wellbeing or even human health at the level of individuals or at the level of super-human scale, i.e. incomprehensibly complex and large groups and institutions. It is time to acknowledge the cultural bias in the DSM, and the extent to which the various “pathologies” are responses to a traumatising cultural environment. The categories in the DSM are cultural rather than scientific artefacts.

The Western disciplines of psychiatry and psychology, in their desire to assist individuals with specific tools, have a tendency to categorise and oversimplify the complexity and uniqueness of individual experiences.

In contrast, the disciplines of sociology and anthropology are more open to the complexities and nuances of human social contexts that come into play, and less inclined to offer ready made tools to individuals.

Yes, there are therapies that can help in some contexts to a greater or lesser extent. But across the board, simply taking people and their unique lived experience seriously, and showing genuine compassion, are possibly the most effective ingredients in any therapy, and much of the rest may be explained by the placebo effect.

As Robert Chapman points out in A Critique of Critical Psychiatry, consistent with what we are learning from participatory research into healthcare services, the whole scientific Western approach to human health and wellbeing is not free of cultural bias.

We have become scale blind, unable to acknowledge human cognitive and emotional limits. We have lost the visceral lived experience of safety that is needed to nurture healthy relationships.

Modern society is caught in a chicken and egg causality dilemma. Safety is generated by healthy relationships, yet healthy relationships can only emerge in a safe environment. Within socially stratified “civilisations” Autistic and Artistic people tend to be highly concerned about social justice and tend to be the ones who point out toxic in-group competitive behaviours.

Highly sensitive Autistic people are best understood as the agents of a well functioning cultural immune system within human society. This would have been obvious in egalitarian human scale societies, but it has become non-obvious in socially powered-up empires.

Ubiquitous global peer to peer communication

Social power gradients universally lead to distress, conflict, and to simplistic life denying and life destroying social norms (cultural diseases). Even more so than earlier cultures of all powered-up empires, the modern global mono-cult preaches there is no limit to our ability to make sense of the world, and beyond that, it confuses technologies guided by the unquestionable God-like power of “the invisible hand” with the adaptive capabilities of living systems.

Over the course of the last century, the advent of mass media, followed by the more recent rise of corporate controlled digital social media, catalysed the consolidation of the social powers of abstract super-human scale institutions, and has incrementally eroded collective agency and ecological awareness at human scale, replacing it with WEIRD forms of ego-driven individualism.

As a result individuals feel completely overwhelmed, disoriented, and trapped in an incomprehensible social world far beyond human scale. However, the emergence of quasi ubiquitous access to peer-to-peer communication beyond corporate controlled digital social media has enabled people to compare notes across cultural boundaries. This new emergent factor in human cultural evolution, which may turn out to be as profound as the invention of agriculture, is allowing a growing minority to rediscover the biological fact that powered-up relationships are inherently incompatible with healthy ways of being human.

Modern addictions

By framing the harm and the trauma responses caused by the life destroying global mono-cult in terms of addictions, we can begin to comprehend the magnitude of the wound that modernity has inflicted on the living planet.

The delusion of technological progress is feeding the addiction to various forms of convenience and consumption – this keeps us perpetually busy and it distracts us from our human natures.

The delusion of the self is feeding the addiction to various forms of social power – this “normalises” carelessness and deceptive forms of communication, and it allows our latent capacity for establishing dominance hierarchies to override our innate human collaborative tendencies towards mutual aid.

Convenience

The modern addiction to convenience and consumption comes in many different flavours. More is always better. Quantity is what counts. Quantity can be commoditised. Quantity can be sold as progress. Quality is systematically discounted by the religion of the invisible hand. Enough is no longer part of the WEIRD vocabulary. The most obvious candidates for commodification and addiction:

• Material consumption
• Work
• Substances and foods
• Sex
• Gambling
• Entertainment, including “news”

The not-so-invisible hand is explicitly involved in ensuring that all these aspects of modern life are packaged in formats that maximise addictive potential.

Social power

The religion of the invisible hand explicitly endorses and rewards addiction to social power and pyramidal empire building endeavours. The WEIRD education system relies on the myth of meritocracy to normalise the use of coercive techniques of various forms to enforce power gradients, causing untold harm.

71.1. To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest (attainment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a disease.
71.2. It is simply by being pained at (the thought of) having this disease that we are preserved from it. The sage has not the disease. He knows the pain that would be inseparable from it, and therefore he does not have it.
– From the Dao De Jing

Much wisdom in the use of crossbows and arrows, traps and nets, plots and schemes, throws the birds of the sky into disorder. Much wisdom in the use of hooks, bait, nets, poles, and lures throws the fish of the waters into disorder. Much wisdom in the use of traps, nets, snares, and lattices throws the beast of the woodlands into disorder. The wiles of wisdom become like a kind of gradual poisoning, rigidifying and unmooring “hard” and “white,” disjoining and muddying “sameness” and “difference,” and end up casting the people into a muddle of disputation. Thus it is that each and every great disorder of the world is caused by the love of wisdom. Everyone in the world knows enough to find out about what they don’t know, but none knows enough to find out about what they already know. Everyone knows enough to disapprove of what they consider bad, but none knows enough to disapprove of what they have come to consider good. This is the reason for the great disorder, which violates the brightness of the sun and moon above and melts away the kernel of vitality within the mountains and rivers below, toppling the ordered succession of the four seasons in between. All creatures, down to the smallest wriggling and fluttering insects, have thus lost touch with their inborn natures—that is how profoundly the love of wisdom disrupts the world! Abandoning all the many types of generative impulse within them, they instead insist on laborious subservience. Letting go of the peaceful blandness of non-doing, they instead delight in ideas and plans full of tsk-tsk jibber-jabber. And it is this tsk-tsk jibber-jabber that has thrown the world into its present disorder!
– From Zhuangzi

The entire planet, and ultimately the entire universe is there to be commoditised and liquidated. The most obvious flavours of addictive social power games:

• Pyramid schemes (corporations, big government institutions, financialised investments)
• Powered-up family/household relationships
• Powered-up romantic partnerships

Employees are sold on career paths, investors insist on returns, irrespective of the “externalities”, parents demand obedience and project their own ambitions and insecurities onto children, and in the absence of any experience in de-powered dialogue and honest communication, even romantic partnerships easily deteriorate into more or less subtle social power games.

In the kingdom the multiplication of prohibitive enactments increases the poverty of the people; the more implements to add to their profit that the people have, the greater disorder is there in the state and clan; the more acts of crafty dexterity that men possess, the more do strange contrivances appear; the more display there is of legislation, the more thieves and robbers there are.
– From the Dao De Jing

“What benefit does all this meticulous scheming really bring to the world? Elevating the worthy only makes the people compete with each other. Putting the understanding in charge just makes the people loot one another. Such things can do nothing to enhance the lives of the people. Once they become diligent about their own advantage, the sons will end up killing their fathers and the ministers their rulers, burrowing through walls to rob each other in broad daylight. Mark my words, the root of the truly great disorder lies in people like Yao and Shun, and its branches reach down for a thousand generations. A thousand generations of this and I guarantee it will end up with human beings eating one another for dinner!” Nanrong Chu straightened up on his mat with a jolt, saying, “What then can someone like me, advanced in age, do to live up to what you are saying?” Gengsang Chu said, “Keep your body whole, hold fast to the life in you, don’t let your thoughts get lost in busy calculations, and in three years you will have lived up to it.”
– From Zhuangzi

Survival tools

Many modern humans resort to self-isolation to minimise exposure to a hostile, life denying social environment. Further essential survival tools:

1. Rediscovery of the relational language of life
2. Framing the evolution of living systems in terms of collaborative niche construction
3. Appreciating Daoist philosophy as a non-pathologising therapeutic framework for coping with the social pressure of living in the hypernormative state of (post) industrialised civilisation

Helen Mirra has published a wonderful small booklet buena nada, tracing back Autistic sensory experience to earlier eras:

“These fragments from a wordless autistic not-sutra were scattered intact into the earliest Buddhist texts. Splinters from a reed raft. Here they appear like flocking birds. They describe conscious and conscientious perceptive experience which I recognize as consonant with a relative boundlessness of sensing, especially mirror-touch synesthesia, and seem to be traces of thoughts that would have been cognized by peace-oriented humans long before writing, and maybe before speech.”

The path towards sobriety

Acknowledging all our fears, facing the pain, and turning fears into courage:

1. Fully letting go of the WEIRD delusion of the self – exiting the cult of the self. This includes letting go of all the internalised ableism that permeates WEIRD social norms, and weaning ourselves off all of the addictions that stand in the way of committing to sacred relationships.
2. Fully letting go of the WEIRD delusion of technological progress – exiting the cult of busyness. This includes incrementally weaning ourselves off all the conveniences afforded by the availability of fossil fuels.

Most importantly, we must acknowledge that we can not regain sobriety alone, in self-isolation, and we can only relearn to be fully human at a scale that is compatible with our biological cognitive and emotional limits, neither at smaller scales, nor at larger scales.

Healthy cultural organisms do not consist of:

• Isolated individuals
• Atomised nuclear families
• Incomprehensibly complex groups and institutions

In fact, the relational nature of the big cycle of life is obscured as long as long as we attempt to define cultural organisms as groups of people or even groups of living beings beyond the human. The very notion of groups of living beings makes no sense.

Humans and all other conscious beings make sense of the world in entirely relational terms. The so-called self is the entirety of all the relationships with living beings that we are consciously aware of.

If we care to pay attention, we even relate to the food we eat and to many things that in the WEIRD world are not considered to be alive. The extent to which we feel healthy, well, and alive is a direct reflection of the health and aliveness in all our relationships, and the extent to which we are able to minimise cognitive dissonance across all our relationships.

Reflecting deeply on the relational nature of life allows us to become reacquainted with the lower and upper limits of human scale. Along the way we also begin to re-appreciate the limits of human comprehensibility and sense making.

Life is a highly dynamic system of collaborative niche construction. At most times a few of our relationships may not be in the most healthy state – but being alive is all about recognising the sanctity of life, the sanctity of all our relationships, and a deep commitment to caring about and attending to the health of our relationships.

We are currently co-creating a comprehensive support model for Autists and otherwise neurodivergent and intersectionally marginalised people that is grounded in our collective lived experience, informed by what we are learning from the results of our ongoing participatory research. 

It is impossible to recover from Autistic burnout within the established institutional landscape. The emergence of ecologies of care is the emergence of a beautiful diversity of human scale cultural species and organisms in the cultural compost heap of the industrialised mono-cult.

The year
is new
the plague
is old
…
Plague Poems – The Hundred-and-Ninety-Ninth Week

Indrajit Samarajiva has the kind of gallows humour that feels appropriate in these times, in the WEIRD cultural compost heap. The doors are falling off late-stage capitalism, quite literally:

… They just rebrand, reboot, and loot the corpse of the 20th century until it’s unrecognizable. The Boeing 737 is a 50-year-old airframe that some marketing idiot just slapped the word MAX on, like it’s a flavor of Mountain Dew. They might as well call it the 737 EXTREME, which is the experience of riding one. The thing has crashed itself, blown out doors midair, and the engine can melt itself if the pilot isn’t careful. These are not isolated problems, they are simply the downstream effects of having stupid fucking ideas in the first place...

The invitation to Open Space

From a number of conversations that I have had with independent tradespeople and others who are not directly embedded in big corporate and government power dynamics, it is clear that many people understand perfectly well that we live in a global mono-cult of abstract life destroying institutions.

What is still unusual is for people to openly share their experiences with late-stage capitalism beyond their most intimate circle. In fact, without actively being encouraged, in a safe environment, many don’t even share their experiences and observations with anyone, and may be plagued by self-doubt, or may have resigned to a state of deep despair, following pushback from those who (a) are still in a state of complete denial, and/or (b) have fallen for one of the many simplistic conspiracy theories, to avoid having to question fundamental assumptions about the WEIRD way of life. 

Regular immersion in Open Space is a medicine that can help transform self-doubt and despair into purposeful collective action. When everyone knows that everyone knows that … – then the illusion of progress and the illusion of powered-up institutions “being in control” is exposed and weakened. The more often this happens, the more the social license of powered-up institutions is eroded.

Regular Open Space can be a tool to pick people up from where they are now, to jointly embark on a journey of omni-directional learning and intersectional community co-creation that leaves no one behind.

The effect of Open Space is comparable to the wave action on a sandy beach – sand castles in the tidal zone don’t last long. I recommend to listen to the full version of an interview with Harrison Owen on the significance of Open Space from 2002, which has aged well.

The invitation to Open Space experiences is everywhere, it is the space beyond the anthropocentric cutoff points of the bell curve. The complement to the set of Open Space experiences is the set of Closed Space experiences – the so-called Overton Window. Human wellbeing is unattainable in cultures that practice industrialised farming of humans.

Autistic burnout

It is impossible to recover from Autistic burnout within “the system”, i.e. within the established institutional landscape. At best peer support can assist us in continuing in survival mode.

Examples of the lived experience of Autistic burnout from the NeurodiVerse Days of Solidarity:

Yesssss! It can’t be “recovery” because we were actually never okay! (And neither are the systems that led us here.)

For me burnout was a big full stop. The only way I was able to get through it at all was because of my privilege (husband, self-employment, the ability to have zero demands for months). What if it’s not a temporary stop on the path of ‘normal’ but more of a breaking point, an end? Imagine if we saw burnout as a kind of “level up” – reaching the point where you cannot exist in the current systems. Ready to start from scratch.

Burnout for me was life-changing and I could see it being helpful to view it almost as an indication of being ready to start over, but this time with purpose. Burnout helped me to realise not only that I needed to “slow down” but also learn how to reevaluate my needs (not simply adhering to what society made me think I needed/wanted) and re-build my life accordingly.

While it was most certainly the most difficult time of my life involving grief and trauma, I am thankful to have reached this point because it has helped put my life into perspective and start over. I too, was only able to experience this process as personal growth after spending months engaging in nothing other than activities that made me feel good about myself, also involving the support of my partner, self-employment opportunities, and the privilege to spend consecutive months with minimal demands.

My life looks very different now, purposefully so. I am a lot happier since prioritising my interests and needs. Even still, I find myself in a perpetual fight for homeostasis, constantly drifting between inertia and propelled to respond to the demands of existing within a society that doesn’t make it easy for me to respect my own needs.

A state of burnout can be reached via many unsustainable paths. My experience of burnout is directly related to Autistic perseverance. In many domains of life our perseverance serves us extremely well and we are energised by the results. However in the social realm, due to the double empathy problem, our perseverance easily becomes counterproductive – we try much too hard for much too long. We will never meet the social expectations of a sick society, and it is a bad idea to try to “accommodate” these expectations into our lives.

Hence my key message to Autists, and especially to all those who have only recently become aware of their Autistic way of being, is to slow down, to stop trying harder, and to not be so hard on ourselves. I have reached a state of burnout multiple times, and each time the only way forward was to completely abandon a particular path in the social sphere, and to walk back until we reach a point from which a new terrain and new destinations  become accessible.

When we burn out, we have literally reached the end of the road. There can be no recovery in the sense of being able to continue to what we were attempting leading up to the burnout. 

I am in the process of recognizing the degree to which I am currently in burnout and I am really struggling. Thank you for your thoughts above. These will continue to help ground me as I navigate next steps.

To explain our tendency towards burnout,  I sometimes use an analogy:

Autistic people are like racing cars with a high performance engine, but with a braking system that is inadequate for the social terrain in a hypernormative society. The best way to compensate for our cognitive and emotional limits within this society is to share the burden of interfacing with the external social world – we need Autistic co-pilots who act as braking assistants to help us navigate the social terrain without crashing and burning out.

Beyond WEIRD industrialised farming of humans

The article Self-Identification is the Future of Autism Assessment by Dr Devon Price is an excellent resource for educating health professionals, to motivate them to shift towards the communal definition of Autistic ways of being and to seriously consider neurodivergent theories of human diversity instead of the pathologising DSM model.

The medical model is a continuous source of trauma, as it puts up a huge barrier to openly talking about and tackling all the many things that are deeply wrong in modern industrialised societies.

The living planet is a beautifully diverse relational world, a fractal composition of relational ecologies of care. In times when social paradigms become toxic, when more and more people subconsciously suffer from cognitive dissonance, Autists and the arts play an essential role in allowing cognitive dissonance to surface, and be shared in explicit form, in ways that transcend words, simplistic linear narratives, and established paradigms.

At human scale:

Every long-term relationship, whether lovers or friends, becomes its own two-person subculture, with its own dialect, myths, rituals, ethics, and aesthetics. The better matched the people, the weirder that subculture ends up looking to everyone else. 
– Geoffrey Miller

There is a lot to be said for a thinking of a pair as a group, complete with its own culture. 
– David Sloan Wilson

This appreciation of diversity and collaborative niche construction has been engineered out of the WEIRD mono-cult. If sensitive Autistic and Artistic people express cognitive dissonance in non-violent ways, we end up rediscovering the art of depowered dialogue. 

Autistic joy

To recover from burnout, we need to the ability to (re)experience Autistic joy:

Sooo much of autistic joy (for me), comes either with blending senses and/or a feeling of losing time. Like disappearing into writing words that just ‘click’ into place, or watching water flow so smoothly it looks solid. Just this extended sense of now. Ooh, and things lined up in rainbow order gives me the most shivery sense of tranquility and happiness. I feel sorry for typical-brained folk, they miss out on so much magic! 

I recently came across something on ‘Autistic Glimmers’, and so my Autistic teachers and I will often share these with each other. For me, these are:

• Dancing/rhythm/drumming
• Connecting with animals 
• Capturing an image of nature via photography or art (usually involving reflections, light, contrasting colours and patterns or some sort) 
• Observing Favourite things in nature:  the smell of lichen, the details of moss, the intricate diversity of mushrooms 
• Floating in water

I notice a significant difference in my health when I am in nature for even a few minutes but immersing myself by living in a forest (as we transition to our ‘cottage’) has the potential to be transformative.

For me Autistic & Artistic collaborations, and being continuously immersed in nature, in a non-urban environment, and as often as possible in the ocean, close to wild animals, and exposed to the physical sensations in the aquatic realm, are inseparable. All of the above form the relationships that constitute my natural habitat, the tangible experience of being part of the big cycle of life. This year I have discovered how much my natural habitat is further enhanced by physical exercise in the garden, with manual tools, growing a food forest, and connecting with all the life in the local soil.

Emergence of ecologies of care

The double empathy problem means that well intentioned advice from culturally well adjusted people is dangerous and mostly counterproductive. Without a safe and supportive Autistic ecology of care, we are unable to fully comprehend the extent of internalised ableism that we are being subjected to.

The emergence of ecologies of care is the emergence of a beautiful diversity of human scale cultural species and organisms in the cultural compost heap of the industrialised mono-cult.

Always assume competence. Neurodivergent people, including Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent children, need to be listened to and be taken seriously. Recognise the extent to which many Autists have been traumatised, often by those who are closest to them – often unintentionally, because parents, educators, and health professionals don’t know any different. They themselves are products of the WEIRD system of education/indoctrination.

The ones who need to learn are not those who think and live outside the box of “normality”, but those who are “well adjusted”, and those who don’t yet see the internalised ableism they have absorbed. As Nora Bateson reiterates, ecologies of care are complex living systems that transcend our individual and capabilities and limitations. The collective path that humanity finds itself on is a transdisciplinary, tanscontextual journey of omni-directional learning. We are (re)discovering and (re)learning the sacred language of life.

In terms of transformative mental health support, especially for traumatised people, regardless of age, beyond peer support, there is a lot to be said for selecting a radical therapist, highlighting the importance of having access to first-hand lived experience. At the level of individuals, on the journey from a sick society towards ecologies of care, David Mackler has a number of observations that align well with the neurodiversity movement, including:

• The Future Era of Mass Grieving
• Our Options for Old Age: Wisdom or Decrepitude

The WEIRD obsession with measuring

I am fermenting thoughts about the quality of the bridges needed to cross the three time horizons of suviving, de-powering, and thriving. Since publishing the book on human scale collaboration and human limitations in 2021 I am noticing how human scale cognitive and emotional limits continue to be ignored by academics and even more so by “social” entrepreneurs. 

The effective altruism movement is a good example:

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry and others have warned about the “measurement problem”,[75][77] with issues such as medical research or government reform worked on “one grinding step at a time”, and results being hard to measure with controlled experiments. Gobry also argues that such interventions risk being undervalued by the effective altruism movement.[77] As effective altruism emphasizes a data-centric approach, critics say principles which do not lend themselves to quantification—justice, fairness, equality—get left in the sidelines.[5][23] …

Mathew Snow in Jacobin wrote that effective altruism “implores individuals to use their money to procure necessities for those who desperately need them, but says nothing about the system that determines how those necessities are produced and distributed in the first place”.[134] …

Judith Lichtenberg in The New Republic said that effective altruists “neglect the kind of structural and political change that is ultimately necessary”.[136] An article in The Ecologist published in 2016 argued that effective altruism is an apolitical attempt to solve political problems, describing the concept as “pseudo-scientific”.[137] The Ethiopian-American AI scientist Timnit Gebru has condemned effective altruists “for acting as though their concerns are above structural issues as racism and colonialism”, as Gideon Lewis-Kraus summarized her views in 2022.[5] …

Similar to the above quoted critics, I am concerned about the the obsession with attempting to measure everything, and to “make” decisions, often including decisions with super-human scale impact, rather than to commit to collectively arriving at choices in Open Space deliberation and de-powered dialogue. This concern relates to the quality of the bridge we need between the survival and de-powering time frames.

Perhaps, the biological metaphor of semi-permeable membranes is more appropriate than the anthropocentric bridge metaphor.

We need to think about how to connect between:

(a) the abstract transactional logic that dominates at our interface with society in survival mode, and

(b) the non-measurable mutual aid that characterise peer support in survival mode in here and now, as well as the community co-creation and the sacred non-fungible relationships that are nurtured in the de-powering time horizon.

Our semi-permeable membrane needs the ability to extract energy from the dying system, in analogy to new life growing in a compost heap, without the new emerging life being infected by the cultural pathogens that survive in the effective altruism movement.

I very much respect the work of Agustín Fuentes. The well laid out article Human niche, human behaviour, human nature goes a long way towards highlighting the ecological complexity within and around the human species across the space and time dimensions of evolutionary processes, pointing towards the limits of quantitative research, and the need for qualitative research. 

Still, academic articles are framed by the scientific method, and the desire to understand. I fully agree with Yuria Celidwen’s observation that scientific understanding needs to serve as the floor, and not as the ceiling of our ecological understanding of the world. Much of the deep collective ecological wisdom and the sacred relationships that we can develop at human scale transcend the explanatory powers of the narrow silos of modern scientific disciplines.

There is nothing wrong with striving to understand, but it only makes sense to pursue it when facing human cognitive and emotional limits with open eyes, recognising that there are limits to which we can understand a human and non-human world that far exceeds what our cognitive and emotional limits can deal with. 

Autistic research

Ongoing AutCollab participatory research is delivering valuable results and lived experience reports. We welcome assistance in extending the reach of our research, especially our Dr. B. Educated research.

Important insights and consensus is emerging from the quarterly NeurodiVerse Days of Solidarity:

We should start looking at developing citizen research capabilities to build teams of people with similar interests. Academic researchers could join teams too, so long as they are neurodivergent or proven neurodiversity champions. Autcollab has raw data about our own neurodiverse community that we might be able to use to start the process. 

An important aspect is to have the Autistic community involved as custodians of the data, so that we have control over the kind of research agendas that are being pursued. There are a whole number of topics that do not require any further research, i.e. topics that currently provide an endless “opportunity” for “professional autism researchers” as part of the Autism Industrial Complex:

Through the pathologising lens of the medical model, Autistic people are perceived as defective individuals, as lacking in essential human qualities. They are not fully human. The “usefulness” of Autistic people is ranked in terms of “functioning levels”. Those who openly identify as Autistic experience the Autistic discount factor. Whatever an Autist says is being discounted – it needs to be be independently verified, ideally by a scientific experiment, before it can be believed. Scientists have to “prove” that Autistic people are capable of empathy. Many immigration laws discriminate against Autistic people, in several countries Autistic people are disallowed from being sperm donors, in at least one country Autistic people now require a certificate from a GP to attest that they are capable of safely driving a car etc. These are just a few examples of how modern “civilised” societies treat Autistic people.

– From Intersectional solidarity and ecological wisdom

We, as a community, are now at a point where we need to strongly push back on so-called “research” that is designed to slow down social progress, and in doing so, provides further opportunities for commercial co-opting of the neurodiversity movement by the interests of the established institutional landscape. The following applies:

Conceptualising social power as an addiction provides the majority of the human population with a highly effective bullshit detection tool, capable of eroding the social licence of the toxic institutions and social paradigms that are holding entire societies hostage to decisions made by power drunk addicts.

Meaningful education in the era of the sixth mass extinction event has to focus on the majority of the human population that is not addicted to social power, and on the humane treatment of those who are ready to confront their addiction to social power head-on.

– From Nurturing ecologies of care, healing, and wellbeing

The AutCollab Education and Research teams are in favour of establishing a lean global membership organisation as an umbrella of Autistic organisations, i.e. organisations of Autists, from which we can source Autistic ethics review boards for research related to Autistic ways of being.

Those who got involved in GATFAR are a good starting point for such an umbrella organisation, but we may need to cast the net wider, as so many of our volunteer run organisations are short of spoons and funding. 

We need genuine allies

Very few (if any) Autists have the WEIRD culturally expected capacity to continuously self-promote and advertise. Instead, we have the Autistic capability for de-powered honest dialogue.

The “normalisation” of the former capacity is at the core of neocolonialism, it fuels the addiction to social power, and it is what has led to the pathologisation of Autistic people. The latter Autistic capability for de-powered honest dialogue is not appreciated, it is seen as a threat by powered-up institutions, even though the inmates of these institutions would greatly benefit from de-powered honest dialogue.

We need genuine allies – we badly need them, but not to run our organisations or to mentor us on how to run organisations. We need allies who work alongside us as partners. Collectively and individually, we have decades of experience in operating Autistic organisations and peer support groups, and in conducting Autistic research – all on the smell of an oily rag, usually self-funded, without any external funding support.

Allies can greatly extend our reach and impact by helping us engage with those who are ready to learn. We need genuine allies to:

• Secure government and other funding for independent Autistic research. 
• Get the education and intersectional community co-creation services, and the peer support available from AutCollab and other Autistic organisations into the right places.
• Secure funding to expand our capacity for volunteer operated peer support.