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Autistic culture is a world of infinite diversity beyond the neuronormative imagination. Every Autistic relationship is unique, and many of us are traumatised. We need appropriate tools to invest in deeply understanding each other. Cultural metamorphosis requires radically reframing everything we understand about cultural adaptivity in terms of co-creating ecologies of care.

In the times we live in the demand for peer support and reliable emotional support routinely outstrips the available supply. This is reflected in overall mental health statistics, in the level of burnout, and we also see it in the quantitative and qualitative results of AutCollab Research. This article is motivated by the common reality of Autistic emotional exhaustion and lack of adequate peer support, as well as by the massive trust problems created by homo economicus.

My writing, trying to make sense of the cruel dystopian world we have been born into, and trying to articulate potential avenues that allow us collectively to jointly co-create ecologies of care, takes a lot of energy, in particular emotional energy. No one can do this alone. I certainly can’t and I don’t pretend I can. I need faith in humanity to write what I write, and this faith is based entirely on a small number of amazing Autistic human animals in my immediate ecology of care. For this I am immensely grateful every day.

The modern world needs more intersectional solidarity across all dimensions, more dialogues, more transparency, and more compassion. In short we need to invest in deeply understanding each other, and this is what we are increasingly seeing on the margins of society.

In the socially toxic world of homo economicus, many of the basic relationship building, maintenance, and repair skills have been lost or have become rare. To relearn these skills, we need an Autistic Relationship Manual (an ARM), connected to a helping hand and a compassionate heart, which can be only provided by our uniquely amazing Autistic peers. This article can be thought of as an ARM.

Cultural metamorphosis

Cultural metamorphosis is a radical form of collaborative niche construction that requires us to reframe everything we understand about the cultural adaptivity that is at our disposal at human scale. 

Homo economicus has pushed all life affirming human cultures beyond the cut-off points of the anthropocentric bell curve. The hump of the anthropocentric bell curve has become a hypernormative cultural dead zone paralysed by sanctified institutionalised BS.

Cultural healing requires the kind of deep and profound shift in trust from established institutions towards mutual aid and the community co-creation at human scale that indigenous Mexican scholar Yuria Celidwen talks about: 

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.

This shift in trust is already happening outside established institutions. It can only happen via self-selected and self-organising groups. I sense this is what we are already starting to experience on the intersectional margins of modern societies.

The objective of the Autistic Relationship Manual is to get people to start talking again, to catalyse further intersectional dialoges, and to let go of unwarranted fears and unwarranted shame, whether this is due to trauma or inhumane hypernormative culturally imposed expectations.

Metamorphosis back to human scale can be imagined as a cultural development stage for global intersectional and neurodivergent solidarity beyond the human, undoing some of the harm perpetuated in throughout the colonial and neocolonial era, at least for the generations alive today.

In the context of cultural metamorphosis, Autistic human animals are the imaginal cells within human scale cultural organisms. Globally, there are a few hundred million of us, spread across all continents and bioregional ecosystems, and this number does not even include the many hundred million of otherwise neurodivergent human animals. Autistic human animals tend to be highly concerned about social justice and tend to be the ones who point out toxic in-group competitive behaviours. We assist each other in co-creating unique Autistic relationships, households, and human scale cultural organisms. We co-create our unique families in our own space and time.

Yes, real change takes real courage. It shakes the very foundations of people’s understanding of the world. In difference to what Adam Curtis is hoping for, what we are seeing at the grassroots level are millions of beautifully diverse small green shoots at human scale. This is deep change, beyond any centralised powers of control.

In the context of healthy egalitarian human ecologies, Autistic human animals are best understood as the agents of a well functioning cultural immune system within society.

Autistic

The unusual heightened baseline sensitivity profiles of Autistic human animals means that they have a reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance.

Autistic human animals are unconstrained by culturally defined gender norms and have the capacity to relate deeply to other human and non-human living beings. Their sensitivity profiles limit their ability to think hierarchically and engage in transactional human busyness.

In the hypernormative culture that dominates the modern world, it is hard to explain to non-Autistic people what the immersion in healthy Autistic culture feels like and what the development of healthy sacred lifetime relationships between Autistic people feels like. In mainstream society people don’t understand how Autistic human animals support each other, love each other, and care for each other in ways that go far beyond the culturally impaired neuronormative imagination.

Human

It should not require mentioning, but in the hyper-normative modern social world, it must be stated and emphasised that Autistic human animals are fully human.

As humans we share an evolved capacity for developing and maintaining cultures and languages. These capacities allow humans to collaborate in flexible and complex ways based on shared intentions, a shared understanding of each other, and a shared understanding of our ecological context.

Our capacities for culture and language allow us to establish and maintain commitments to each other and commitments across human scale groups. Such verbal or written commitments constitute an effective human scale cultural framework for coordinating human social affairs.

Breaking our commitments makes us physically, mentally, and spiritually sick. Humans evolved this way. This is how we have become cultural organisms. Fully acknowledging this evolutionary heritage we must conclude:

Every relationship is sacred. No one should ever be discarded. This also extends to non-human living beings. No life should ever be discarded. We honour Gaia by appreciating all the living food she provides us with by committing to nurturing and helping all those living beings that sustain us.

Beyond our capacity for culture and language humans have an evolved capacity for pair bonding within the context of human scale groups, which can be understood as networks of sacred relationships, each of which encapsulates unique shared experiences.

Animals

In the anthropocentric modern social world, it must be reiterated that all human are animals.

Just like all other animals, humans engage in sexual activities, and we do so in very diverse ways. As human animals, our capacities for culture and language have greatly increased the complexity of our sexual imagination, and this plays out in the infinite complexity in sexual behaviour and rituals that are found in different cultures.

Please note that Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures have not “cornered the market” of cultural gender identities and sexual preferences. Attempting to impose WEIRD cultural norms on other groups is a form of neocolonialism.

Similar comments apply to the cultures of all super-human scale groups such as modern nation states and corporations. Such modern legal fictions are incompatible with our human evolutionary history, and “universally applicable” social norms defined by such entities are causing untold harm on a daily basis.

Acknowledging that humans are animals includes acknowledging the absolute cognitive and emotional limits shared by all humans. In terms of our cognitive and emotional capacities and limitations, we are all much closer to each other than most of us are ever ready to admit.

Being conscious animals helps us regain some urgently needed humility, and should encourage all of us to honour Gaia on a daily basis.

Relational building blocks

Every relationship between humans is sacred, and every relationship is unique. There are no cookie cutters that work for everyone. However there are relational building blocks that can be used to articulate the unique commitments, preferences, and needs that define a relationship.

The ability to extend trust

The ability to extend trust is defined by the health of the ecology of care we are embedded in. Autistic human animals who are embedded in Autistic culture and a reasonably healthy ecology of care tend to extend deep trust, especially to other Autistic human animals.

In our times this is an increasingly rare sacred gift, which is easily exploited in unsafe environments dominated by internalised ableism. Carefully nurturing and protecting these gifts is a collective responsibility within Autistic cultural organisms. There is beautiful work for us to do.

Too many Autists end up isolated, in particular those who have a calling to be activists, who are so sensitive that they can not bear all the suffering in the world. No one chooses to be highly sensitive. No one chooses a calling. We are born this way. And we are fully human animals, with human needs. We are Autistic. We are not broken. To thrive we need to be embedded in a healthy ecology of care.

Too many of us die completely misunderstood. Many of us remember dear friends who are no longer amongst us. 

Deep mutual trust is a priceless collective asset that is increasingly providing healthy Autistic cultural organisms with a unique collaborative advantage over traditional family systems and organisational forms.

Shared understanding

Some level of shared understanding is a prerequisite for any relationship to even get started. For example in this context it helps to know if the person you would like to form a relationship with is an Autistic human animal, as this can greatly reduce the effort and energy needed for communication.

Shared value priorities

Most humans, even across cultures, share many similarities in values. What really matters for relational health is transparency and clarity about the relative priorities of the values that matter most to us.

Shared interests

Shared interests are part of the bedrock of relationships between Autistic human animals, much more so than between non-Autistic human animals, who tend to have much broader interests in topics shaped by the surrounding culture, and a less deep interest or understanding of the topics they are happy to engage in.

When multiple interests are shared between Autistic human animals, it can result in unique friendships and romantic partnerships that go far beyond the limited neuronormative imagination of what is possible.

Complementary interests

Complementary interests are an optional part of the bedrock of relationships between Autistic human animals, more so than between non-Autistic human animals. Mutual respect and curiosity about complementary interests predisposes Autistic human animals towards collaborative niche construction and the formation of unique human scale cultural organisms.

Sexual preferences

Sexual preferences are an essential building block for all romantic partnerships.

Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures have not “cornered the market” of sexual preferences. Attempting to impose WEIRD cultural norms on other groups is a form of neocolonialism.

Relax! When two Autistic animals meet, be prepared to be surprised and delighted!

Gender preferences

Gender preferences are an optional building block for romantic partnerships with Autistic human animals.

Hardly anything in the biosphere is binary. Yet the entire global digital edifice is built from zeros and ones. What could possibly go wrong? A substantial number of Autistic human animals identify as non-binary and have difficulty comprehending the concept of culturally defined gender norms for ways of pair bonding.

Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) cultures have not “cornered the market” of cultural gender identities. Attempting to impose WEIRD cultural norms on other groups is a form of neocolonialism.

In wider society gender expectations represent a minefield for Autistic human animals. A substantial number of Autistic human animals are equally uncomfortable with the both binary genders and corresponding cultural behavioural expectations. I have no idea of what others expect from me or what to expect from them if they identify as one of the two default binary genders. Every relationship is unique, and develops in a unique way. Cookie cutters don’t make sense to me.

Relax! When two Autistic animals meet, conformance with any WEIRD gender norms are often one of the least relevant aspects of the relationship.

Relational health

Every relationship between humans is sacred, and every relationship is unique.

The health of a relationship can be defined as the absence of cognitive dissonance in relating to the relationship from the perspectives of both parties to the relationship. It is sufficient for one person in a relationship to experience cognitive dissonance for the relationship to become strained.

The WEIRD modern social world many people were born into today has destroyed the collective ability for deliberation at human scale. As a result modern life is experienced as incoherent from the individual perspective, which is subconsciously attempting to generate coherence at human scale. When that process fails, nothing seems to make sense anymore. 

The modern social world we live in can only be understood from the margins, because the very notion of sense making has been confused. This is no surprise, because our capacity for sense making operates at human scale.

Essential sacred commitments

There are no cookie cutters that work for everyone. However there are essential commitments that are part or the foundation of all healthy relationships.

1. Availability – both parties are committed to a comparable level of their availability to the relationship, which is determined by level of intensity of the relationship, which in turn is shaped by agreed mutual commitments.
2. Full transparency – both parties need are committed to full transparency across all aspects of the relationship, which are determined by level of intimacy of the relationship, which in turn is shaped by agreed mutual commitments. Of course full transparency means that some things may become impossible, and then one or more relationships in an ecology of care may need to evolve, including shifts in the circles of intimacy as needed. There is no need to discard any relationship. A binary all or nothing approach is a symptom of living in a toxic transactional culture.
3. Compassion – both parties are committed to mutual compassion across all aspects of the relationship to an extent that reflects the level of intimacy of the relationship, which in turn is shaped by agreed mutual commitments.
4. Fairness – both parties are committed to egalitarian norms of fairness across all aspects of the relationship.
5. Conflict prevention & resolution – both parties are committed to promptly sharing and addressing cognitive dissonance when it occurs in any aspect of the relationship.

Unique sacred commitments

Beyond the five essential commitments, the foundation of every relationships is defined by further bespoke sacred commitments that reflect the uniqueness and the level of intimacy and maturity of the relationship.

Jointly developing and evolving sacred commitment is an important part of collaborative niche construction that requires us to

1. Communicate our needs and preference unambiguously
2. Learn to respect the unique needs and preference of others
3. Use dialogue to arrive at a point of shared understanding that eliminates cognitive dissonance for all parties involved

If cognitive dissonance remains in a relationship, it indicates a difference in sensitivity profiles. Reflect on whether it is conceivable that preferences converge over time or whether the cognitive dissonance is sustainable on an ongoing basis – it likely isn’t.

Therefore resolve cognitive dissonance by increasing your shared understanding, and rely on genuine compassion to adapt your preferences. The result is a unique relationship, defined by a unique set of mutual commitments and mutual respect.

Communication skills

Once relational health is understood in terms of absence of cognitive dissonance in a relationship, it becomes clear that all relationship problems can be analysed and understood in terms of communication failures.

Such failures need to be addressed by mastering and applying the essential communication skills needed to co-create, nurture, and as needed repair relational health.

1. De-powered dialogue – is the skill to engage in dialogue that remains free of social power dynamics, i.e. both parties actively avoid unilaterally imposing arbitrary demands or making use of coercive techniques. This skill can also be understood as the commitment to non-violent communication. Continuous dialogue in combination with commitments to transparency and compassion for each other allows almost all relationship problems to be worked out.
2. Consultation – involves the practice of always asking the other party for advice before making any decision that may affect the other party or the scope of the relationship in a significant way. The practice of consultation does not imply an expectation that all advice received must be followed, it is best understood as a commitment to mutual learning and as a tool for activating the compassion needed to maintain the relationship.
3. Conflict resolution – involves the consistent application of the conflict resolution strategies and tools that have been agreed in mutual commitments. In the case of reoccurring conflicts, it may be necessary to revisit and as needed update mutual commitments to avoid cognitive dissonance from becoming established.
4. Open Space facilitation – is an essential skill when embarking on economic partnerships. Deliberation in open space is the foundation for omnidirectional learning, for arriving at consensus based decisions without generating cognitive dissonance, and it allows groups to address potentially wicked problems.
5. Care circle facilitation – is an essential skill for the activation of compassion and related skills for reducing cognitive dissonance and restoring emotional energy levels.

The social motivation of Autistic human animals is deeply rooted in the desire to share knowledge and in the desire to learn, and this has big implications for the communication protocols that are used in Autistic culture. Very similar to hunter-gatherer societies, egalitarian Autistic cultural organisms are highly expert in group deliberation and decision-making which respects both difference and unity.

The topic of communication problems and failures in the context or relationships is broad and deep. It is complicated by internalised ableism, i.e. the communication habits for “success” mandated by homo economicus.

Hyper-competitive cultures value abstract social status symbols more than developing a shared understanding. This leads to entirely predictable yet unavoidable communication challenges that define Autistic social experiences. Ambiguity and plausible deniability is essential to “win” in social games. The objective of clear communication and the desire to be understood gets replaced by a desire to be perceived in a certain way, and a desire to “influence” people in certain ways for personal advantage.

When modern humans spend 8 to 16 hours per day in hyper-competitive work places and in consumer oriented digital spaces, ambiguous and deceptive forms of communication start to bleed into all aspects of life, resulting in a form of spiritual bankruptcy in which human spirits have been fused to the misguided fiction of homo economicus, resulting in chronic “normalised” cognitive dissonance.

Energy management

Our cognitive and emotional limits and reserves can be understood, quantified, and communicated in terms of energy spoons, for example by agreeing that 1 spoon = 1 hour of dedicated time.

Human minds are the tools that connect the physical dimension of our existence to other living creatures, and to a rich internal spiritual world, which integrates our own perceptions into a seemingly coherent representation of the external world around us. Human minds can develop amazing capabilities, but at the same time, our cognitive and emotional capacities are limited.

All our activities affect the levels of three complementary energy reservoirs:

1. Our reservoir of emotional (relational) spoons
2. Our reservoir of creative (internal) spoons
3. Our reservoir of labour (physical) spoons

The above diagram illustrates how these energy reservoirs are connected to dialogues, communication in open space, and routines in the physical environment to regulate emotions and stress.

1. We recharge our creative and emotional (relational) batteries by exhausting our physical batteries
2. We recharge our creative and physical batteries by exhausting our emotional (relational) batteries
3. We recharge our emotional (relational) and physical batteries by exhausting our creative batteries
4. Additionally Our emotional (relational) batteries can also be recharged when all participants contribute comparable numbers of emotional spoons to a dialogue or a dedicated circle of care

Sacred relationships

You have a full relationship driver’s license when you have established one or more lifetime friendships, partnerships, or romantic partnerships.

Sacred relationships are the fundamental building blocks of life. This extends to all living beings that are part of Gaia. When it comes to relationships between humans, there are three different categories of relationships that we can trace back to our evolutionary heritage.

1. Romantic partnerships are the pair bonds that originally served the purpose of sexual reproduction.
2. Partnerships are the pair bonds that originally served the purpose of egalitarian resource sharing within the context of human scale bands of hunter gatherers.
3. Friendships are the pair bonds that originally served the purpose of omnidirectional learning and mutual aid between human scale bands of hunter gatherers.

Note that these categories intentionally avoid the arbitrary distinction between “work” and the rest of life, which has only been invented to make the inhumane fiction of homo economicus tolerable for large parts of our lives. The resulting alienation and required split in our daily modus operandi of social affairs is a major contributor to the so-called mental health crisis, alongside the human created metacrisis that now has become and existential threat for our species and for many other species.

In this Autistic Relationship Manual (ARM) we define relationship driver’s license levels that can help us to incrementally relearn basic relationship building, maintenance, and repair skills and minimise human and non-human suffering during the unique cultural metamorphosis that is unfolding.

Since all human relationships involve two people, certification at any level is incredibly straight forward, a particular level is reached if the two humans that constitute the relationship certify the level to each other.

Certification of a learner license is a simple commitment to each other to learn from and with each other on the journey towards a full license.

Certification of a full license is the set of all the commitments to each other that are reached after seven years on a learner license.

Lived experience shows that any relationship that is still intact after 7 years is a lifetime relationship or has the potential to be a lifetime relationship. This holds for romantic partnerships as well as economic partnerships and friendships.

The guidelines articulated in this article are based on more than five decades of lived experience, including the development of an organically growing number of lifetime friendships, a long term romantic partnership that got reconfigured into a local economic partnership, and over 12 years of nurturing and operating a cosmolocal egalitarian human scale worker coop, i.e. the collective experience of a lifetime economic partnership between close friends.

The key to relational health is mastery of the relationship repair and reconfiguration skills needed to reduce and eliminate cognitive dissonance experienced by one or both humans in the relationship. Cognitive dissonance manifests in emotional pain. If allowed to persist it can become a chronic disease and a silent killer of a relationship.

The three categories of scared relationships usually build on each other, i.e. a friendship can evolve into an economic partnership, which in turn can evolve into a romantic partnership. Evolution is ongoing, and transitions between categories can occur on both a learner license or on a full license, and in both directions, depending on whether the level of intimacy and depth of collaboration is going up or down.

Across the board, along the journey so far, all relationships that completely expired and discontinued were relationships with institutions and humans trapped in the hypernormative world of homo economicus, i.e examples that illustrate the transactional and ultimately self-destructive nature of homo economicus.

Mastery of relationship repair and reconfiguration skills allows mature relationships that have lasted at least 7 years to be maintained indefinitely. It is a matter of being able to identify and address cognitive dissonance in a timely manner, on an ongoing basis, and as needed to step up or step down the intimacy level of the relationship to eliminate cognitive dissonance.

This relational approach to life is incompatible with the transactional cultural frame of homo economicus.

Relearning and mastering the relational approach to life is at the core of the cultural metamorphosis that the human species is currently undergoing.

Sensitive Autistic animals see and feel the pain of others, this compels us to help, this compels us to fight for social justice and for the overall wellbeing of Gaia. We see the trauma behind internalised ableism. We are in pain because we feel the pain of others.

Within the modern world, hypersensitive Autistic human animals are traumatised from a very young age. In particular all children are exposed in Homo Economicus from a very young age, by well intentioned parents and educators, before we learn anything substantial about Gaia and the living world. This is possibly the most cruel, dehumanising, and life denying part of the modern world. 

So far, metamorphosis is confined to millions of embryonic human scale sprouts growing in the compost heap of homo economicus, engaging in omnidirectional learning. Increasingly these sprouts are connecting, resulting in the evolution of cosmolocal networks of friends on the margins of modern societies.

Friendship

You have a full friendship license if you have one or more lifetime friends in accordance with your emotional support needs.

Be honest with yourself and others when your friendship is at risk of expiring.

A friendship only expires if you have allowed cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. As needed join a circle or care for peer support in relationship repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious friendships, for example by learning how to evolve the commitments that underpin the friendship to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that strains the relationship.

Partnership

You have a full partnership license if you have one or more lifetime friends that you collaborate with on livelihood co-creation and egalitarian resource sharing.

Be honest with yourself and others when your partnership is at risk of expiring.

A partnership only expires if you have allowed cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. As needed join an open space for peer support in partnership repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious partnership, for example by learning how to evolve the commitments that underpin the partnership to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that strains the relationship.

Romantic partnership

You have a full romantic partnership license if you have one or more romantic partners that you share your life with in accordance with your emotional support needs and sexual preferences.

Be honest with yourself and others when your romantic partnership is at risk of expiring.

A romantic partnership only expires if you have allowed cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. As needed join a circle or care for peer support in relationship repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious friendships, for example by learning how to evolve the commitments that underpin the romantic partnership to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that strains the relationship.

Therapeutic relationships

You don’t yet have the full relationship driver’s license if you are still on a learner license, i.e. you have yet to establish one or more lifetime friendships, partnerships, and romantic partnerships.

As needed, join a circle of care to learn how to muster the courage to embark on a learners license for friendship or romantic partnerships, or join a creative open space collaboration to learn how to muster the courage to embark on a learners license for economic partnerships.

Therapeutic friendship

A therapeutic friendship is a form of learning by doing in which you incrementally learn how to co-create and nurture lifetime friendships to meet each others emotional needs.

Be honest with yourself and fully transparent with your friend as soon as cognitive dissonance emerges. This is an opportunity for both of you to learn basic relationship repair and reconfiguration skills.

The bedrock of all relationships is the ability to engage in deliberative dialogue to confirm a shared understanding of the shared value priorities and the shared interests that define the friendship, and then to articulate this shared understanding in terms of mutual commitments.

As needed join a circle or care for peer support in relationship repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious friendship.

Therapeutic partnership

A therapeutic partnership is an on-boarding process in which you incrementally learn how to co-create livelihoods and nurture lifetime egalitarian resource sharing partnerships.

Be honest with yourself and fully transparent with your partners as soon as cognitive dissonance emerges. This is an opportunity for all of you to learn basic relationship repair and reconfiguration skills.

A partnership only expires if a team has allowed cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. Partnership health is maintained by operating an ongoing advice process on an ongoing basis regarding all decisions that can affect others in major ways, and by regularly meeting in open space to coordinate activities and as needed revisit priorities to adapt to changes in the wider ecological context.

As needed join an open space for peer support in partnership repair and reconfiguration skills. Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your precious partnership, for example by learning how to evolve the commitments that underpin the partnership to prevent cognitive dissonance and misunderstandings from building up.

Therapeutic romantic partnership

A therapeutic romantic partnership is a form of learning by doing in which you incrementally learn how to co-create and nurture lifetime friendships that include meeting each others sexual needs and needs for intimate affection.

Be honest with yourself and fully transparent with your romantic partner(s) as soon as cognitive dissonance emerges. This is an opportunity for all of you to learn basic relationship repair and reconfiguration skills.

A romantic partnership only expires in case you allow cognitive dissonance to fester and become chronic. As needed join a circle or care for peer support to learn about relationship repair and reconfiguration skills and, ideally jointly, explore how to apply these skills to your romantic partnership.

Doing this early enough or on-demand can help preserve and nurture your romantic partnership, for example by learning how to articulate emotional needs, manage and regenerate your emotional energies, and jointly evolve the commitments that underpin the romantic partnership to eliminate any cognitive dissonance that strains the relationship.

Toxic relationships

Your relationships are at risk of becoming toxic if you don’t have a relationship driver’s license and are too afraid to embark on a learners license, yet still proceed to establish friendships, partnerships, and romantic partnerships.

In this scenario you need to learn to be more honest and compassionate with yourself and the people you attempt to co-create relationships with.

Be gentle with yourself. Don’t beat yourself up. You are a sacred Autistic human animal. You are part of Gaia, and there are always people who deeply care about all aspects of your wellbeing. You may just not yet be clear about who these people are or where or how to find them.

It is when “relationships” become things to acquire and potentially discard that things become toxic. In the fast-paced hyper-competitive world of homo economicus the art of evolving, reconfiguring, and repairing relationships has been lost or is underdeveloped.

Homo economicus takes a transactional approach to all aspects of life, and thereby it fully “normalises” economic and emotional exploitation. This traumatises hypersensitive Autistic human animals and sets them up for recurring exploitation and the disastrous effects of chronic cognitive dissonance throughout life.

A commitment to activism, unlimited compassion for all living beings, and a seemingly self-destructive ability to extend and re-extend deep trust is the only healthy viable survival strategy. In a healthy society hypersensitive Autistic human animals help prevent the worst parts of our evolutionary heritage from overshadowing the strong uniquely human collaborative tendencies that distinguish us from other primates.

To be clear, the emergence and prevalence of toxic relationships is entirely a cultural issue, it is an issue of extreme social inequalities, hyper-competitive social norms, and an issue of (neo)colonialism. It is not an issue that can be blamed on specific individuals. Many people live in seriously toxic cultural environments. The emotional pain of trauma prevents them from being honest with themselves and others. They know of no other patterns, and deep down shame is a big issue. Sadly, in the modern world, psychologically genuinely safe relationships have become rare.

In a genuinely safe relationship there is no need to keep fears to yourself, or to feel ashamed to ask questions or articulate your needs.

As needed join a circle of care to learn how to muster the courage and learn the basic skills to embark on a learner license for friendship or romantic partnerships, or join a creative open space collaboration to learn how to muster the courage to embark on a learner license and learn the basic skills for operating economic partnerships and egalitarian worker coops.

Toxic friendship

A friendship that is at risk of becoming toxic lacks one or more of the essential sacred commitments to meet each others emotional needs.

Don’t lightly throw away your friendships! Learn how to repair, reconfigure, and upgrade your friendships before they become toxic beyond repair.

Toxic partnership

An economic partnership that is at risk of becoming toxic often lacks one or more of the essential sacred commitments towards egalitarian resource sharing.

Embarking on a genuine economic partnership, especially with more than two people, is possibly one of the most difficult ventures that modern humans can attempt, as it involves unlearning all the toxic cultural assumptions that have been shaped by the religion of homo economicus.

And yet, or rather precisely for that reason, it is becoming an increasingly relevant basic life skill within the compost heap of modern industrialised societies.

To avoid partnerships from becoming toxic, it is necessary to learn how go through fire, to have difficult conversations that most people never dare to have, to either come out with all relationships intact at the other end, or to know how to arrive at a consensus about the relationships within the partnership that have become toxic beyond repair. In this process, all affected parties need to come to the table, and appropriate peer support from those with relevant lived experience needs to be in place to bear the emotional load.

Toxic romantic partnership

A romantic partnership that is at risk of becoming toxic lacks one or more of the essential sacred commitments to meet each others sexual needs and needs for intimate affection.

Embarking on a romantic partnership is the second most difficult venture that modern humans can attempt, only slightly behind embarking on a (multi) lifetime economic partnership, as it involves unlearning many of the toxic cultural assumptions that have been shaped by the religion of homo economicus.

Relearning how to co-create, nurture, and repair loving and caring romantic partnerships is becoming an increasingly relevant basic life skill within the compost heap of modern industrialised societies.

To avoid a romantic partnerships from becoming toxic, it is necessary to learn how go through fire, to have difficult conversations that many people never dare to have. In this process, both parties need to come to the table, as needed with appropriate peer support from those with relevant lived experience, to bear the emotional load.

In a genuinely psychologically genuinely safe romantic partnership there is no need to keep your fears to yourself, or to feel ashamed of anything that may have happened to you, that you may have done, or that you may feel.

For Autistic human animals it is important to be fully aware of the beautiful infinite diversity and possibilities of Autistic relationships. This can not be reiterated often enough. We are not limited to the WEIRD culturally defined sexual preference norms and gender norms.

Join us!

Autistic, Authentic, and Autonomous ecologies of care beyond the human grow organically, at human scale, at a human pace, one trusted relationship at a time. Join us!

The world in reality is a beautifully interconnected world, and it’s interconnected through many many layers. It’s interconnected through consciousness, which is why we are spiritual beings in human form. But the plants outside my window are spiritual beings in plant form. But the plant of the lychee is in lychee form, and the tree of the mango is in mango form. They are just different expressions of one spiritual interconnected consciousness in the world.

– Vandana Shiva

🔊 Listen

Underneath the surface of internalised ableism, no one wants to be seen and heard by many. Everyone prefers to be understood and loved deeply by a few, and everyone wants to love and help. This is what makes us sacred human animals. Continuous dialogues about commitments make life sacred. This is how humans create meaning for each other and with each other. This is the experience of life as a process of becoming.

Following the recent article on the inability of many Autists to think in terms of social hierarchies, a timely submission for the next NeurodiVerse Days of Intersectional Solidarity in December 2024 landed in the AutCollab inbox:

I’m the founder of a neurodivergent community and also a therapist and indigenous person. I’m interested in how to promote mutual aid within our community, when there is a lot of interpersonal trauma including difficulty with trust for many. 

The social challenges described and foreseen in Guy Debord’s and George Orwell’s work have become a highly disturbing reality, especially for cultural minorities and intersectionally marginalised populations. Early indoctrination in the belief in homo economicus attempts to transform humans into soulless machines. In particular, for many Autists, and possibly for everyone, the more we have an ability to relate to other humans and non-human living beings the less we are able to conduct transactional busyness.

Underneath the surface of internalised ableism, the following observation applies to all sober humans.

No one wants to be seen and heard by many. Everyone prefers to be understood and loved deeply by a few, and everyone wants to love and help. This is what makes us sacred human animals.

Commitments make us uniquely human

There is one healthy way forward, which is accessible on the basis of mutual trust and shared values, which involves a shift towards shared beliefs that represent sacred commitments at human scale:

Sacred commitments between specific people or across human scale groups can be verbal or in writing. They only scale up to the limited numbers of relationships that we can maintain. As needed we can jointly update these commitments to reflect evolving needs or constraints in the wider ecology we are embedded in. For those who identify as Autistic, a significant number of beliefs held fall into this category, especially agreements with family members, friends, and colleagues.

The massive trust problems created by homo economicus, the implications of which are well explained by the combination of Debord and Orwell, are cultural beliefs based on what others have encouraged us to believe, including beliefs that we have absorbed from from our social environment subconsciously, i.e. beliefs for which we can’t recall the origin. For those who do not identify as Autistic, the majority of beliefs held may fall into this category.

Unilateral commitments with ourselves act as our spiritual commitment to life and to Gaia.

Breaking our commitments makes us physically, mentally, and spiritually sick. Humans evolved this way. This is how we have become cultural organisms.

Bilateral commitments that are offered by one party are sacred invitations to others, as part our spiritual commitment to and recognition of the sanctity of all relationships with living beings. Both parties can make sacred invitations, and then they can be brought together, as needed via deliberative dialogue, in love and mutual respect and understanding, into the sacred form that becomes a spiritual commitment to each other.

In contrast to the practices in the industrialised factory model of society, there are no simplistic cookie cutter commitments. Every commitment is tailored to a specific relationship, either with ourselves – and by extension with Gaia, or with others.

By sharing the commitments that we make with ourselves and with others within our ecology of care, we are able to better understand each other, trust each other, and rely on each other. This is of course easier said than done when the wider cultural context is dominated by individualism and mutual distrust.

Deliberative dialogue

Continuous dialogues about commitments are a beautiful part of lived Māori culture. This is how we can all honour life and Gaia.

This is what makes life sacred. This is how humans create meaning for each other and with each other. This is the experience of life as a process of becoming.

Explicit social agreements beyond human scale have severe limitations. This is why Māori have to engage in the cultural practices of collective action they have developed.

In hierarchically structured societies, agreements such as laws issued by regional or national authorities apply to large groups of people, and by necessity have been developed with limited input from those who are affected. Such agreements invariably cause untold harm that for the most part remains invisible to the authorities. Humans did not evolve to live in hierarchically structured super-human scale societies. Pretending that we can maintain such structures without causing untold harm is a form of anthropocentric hubris.

Trauma is propagated between generations. We have to find ways of breaking the cycle without destroying those who are the most sensitive, who are the ones capable of nurturing ecologies of care not based on power and manipulation. The question of the evil of coercive power has been with me since I was a child. Coercive power is the root of all evil. Those who are capable of resorting to coercive power on a regular basis are the ones destroying and killing the entire planet. There is infinite timeless wisdom in the social norm against the emergence of any social power gradients. When civilisations erase that norm, unimaginable suffering unfolds.

Autistic people often make sacred commitments to themselves at a young age to minimise cognitive dissonance. When we make sacred commitments to other people we often learn that not everyone honours their commitments, or rather we notice how many others seem to go through life without any genuinely sacred commitments or firm convictions.

In the modern socially hyper-competitive world experience with the practice of de-powered deliberative dialogue is very limited. Life without sacred commitments is experienced as empty and meaningless.

The religion of Homo economicus systematically generates lost souls, searching for meaning without a solid foundation that allows meaning to be found.

Co-creating ecologies of care

Sacred commitments based on a basis of deep mutual trust and shared values are the foundation of all healthy cultures.

De-powered dialogue to deepen shared understanding is the tool to maintain and evolve commitments on an ongoing basis, along the way deepening love, compassion and mutual trust in a virtuous cycle, even through the most difficult times. All indigenous cultures know this.

This is also what Māori culture is gifting to the world in these difficult times, which humans collectively have inflicted on Gaia in their culturally generated ignorance and arrogance.

• Peaceful protest and intersectional solidarity against all elite attempts to consolidate power
• Never handing over framing and interpretative powers with respect to indigenous rights to modern big government authorities

Intersectional solidarity across indigenous rights movements, the neurodiversity movement, and the disability rights movement is at the core of healing from the cultural cancer that has caused the metacrisis.

This is not theory, this is consistent with our lived experiences in depowered egalitarian worker coops. De-powered dialogue, omnidirectional learning, and consensus based decisions shape our daily practice. This experience was the first part of my healing in a world dominated by the religion of homo economicus. 

Hunter-gatherers also engage in deliberative dialogue and reach decisions by consensus. It is beautiful. This is the art of living at human scale, as cultural organisms.

De-powered deliberative dialogues in a safe environment co-created by shared commitments allow us walk each others minds. In these dialogues we share what think, how we think, and what we believe in. We can also do this in writing. The important part is the commitment to ongoing dialogue, to share our inner worlds with each other. Of course all of this is completely incompatible with the religion of homo economicus. Yet this sharing is what our nervous systems evolved for! It is no surprise that many Autistic people are continuously operating at or beyond their emotional limits.

Furthermore, the more time we spend stuck in the digital world, separated by “interfaces”, the more the essential ability to extend deep trust has become an increasingly rare gift in our time.

Our nervous systems are deeply connected. We are embodied spirits, everything is connected. Interfaces limit our humanity. They are non-living anthropocentric machines. We evolved to be fully present with each other. This is what we know and feel deep down in our hearts.

Co-creating ecologies of care is sacred work. We can only do it together.

Onwards!

🔊 Listen

Many Autistic people have great difficulties to think of the world in hierarchical ways. From what we know about our evolutionary path as humans, this is a reflection of innate human collaborative cultural capabilities in combination with a much reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance on an ongoing basis, which in turn can be traced to uncommon sensitivity profiles that fall outside the bell curve of hypernormativity.

When Autists learn about the social expectations that are attached to participating in and operating in hierarchically organised structures of social power, we have difficulty comprehending that such structures are considered acceptable. We are consciously aware of the pain and the potential we harm we can cause by exerting social power over others, as well the pain and cognitive dissonance that we experience when authorities impose arbitrarily demands on us that are incompatible with our unique individual sensitivity profiles.

Within the cultural frame of internalised ableism, the Autistic reluctance to exert social power over others is interpreted as a social deficit, i.s. as an inability to be entrusted with so called “leadership” responsibilities, and at the same time, the Autistic reluctance to submit to arbitrary social power is interpreted as a social deficit, i.e. as non-compliance, as disagreeableness, and as disrupting the “natural” social order.

This explains why in the context of some concrete social situations Autistic people are dismissed as being “weak or incompetent leaders”, and in other social contexts and situations the same Autistic people are dismissed and punished for being “aloof, arrogant, insensitive, and inappropriately competitive”. In many cases, both conclusions are completely misguided.

Instead, Autistic people are much better understood as vital parts of the cultural immune system of the human species. In the modern world Autistic people are well positioned to reimagine healthier collective ways of being and much healthier, human scale egalitarian cultural organisms.

The modern world is dominated by the state religion of Homo Economicus, in which the majority of people experience social hierarchies as a “law of nature”, justified as needed by correspondingly culturally biased evidence from disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology, or Western psychology. The state religion of Homo Economicus is an outgrowth of a cultural heritage with roots in misguided anthropocentric interpretations of cultural frames found at the core of monotheistic Abrahamic religions. These interpretations have unfortunately risen to great heights in over the course of colonial and neocolonial history.

Traumatised Autistic people

Within the modern world, hypersensitive Autistic people are traumatised from a very young age. In particular all children are exposed in Homo Economicus from a very young age, by well intentioned parents and educators, before we learn anything substantial about Gaia and the living world. This is possibly the most cruel, dehumanising, and life denying part of the modern world. 

Especially if such early exposure to Homo Economicus is combined with social power dynamics in patriarchal and otherwise abusive family systems, children are severely traumatised. In such a context all children are at great risk of developing harmful trauma coping mechanisms, and this of course includes Autistic children.

Due to the unusual baseline sensitivity profiles and reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance of Autistic children, it makes sense that traumatised Autistic children are more likely than other children to develop a deep distrust of all humans, to the point where they become unable to extend deep trust to anyone, including their closest family members.

Such highly traumatised Autistic children end up completely isolated. Their coping mechanism can be understood in the same way as the harmful coping mechanisms exhibited by traumatised people who are not Autistic, including bullying and extreme attempts at exerting control over family members, and thereby perpetuating inter-generational trauma. Autistic people are no less and no more likely than others to perpetuate trauma, and those who do, tend to differ from other abusers in terms of their reduced ability to maintain cognitive dissonance. This means their controlling agenda is completely open. Usually their desire for social control is limited to their immediate family system, and does not extend to the wider social sphere.

Much more often, due to their unusual sensitivity profiles, reduced inability to maintain cognitive dissonance, refusal to participate in social games in wider society, as well as refusal to submit to arbitrary unjustifiable demands from social authorities, Autistic people end up at the receiving end of bullying and other forms of abuse.

The level of early childhood trauma experienced by many Autistic people can severely impact their ability to extend trust to others and develop intimate relationships. Luckily this has started to change since the invention of the Internet, which has enabled Autistic people worldwide to connect and learn from each other. The Internet enabled many of those who were unable to relate to culturally “well adjusted” people to find, connect, and develop lifelong relationships based on compatible sensitivity profiles.

Sadly some positive developments have been compromised by the rise of profit-oriented commercial social media in the public sphere, with all its well known polarising and traumatising effects, including the active and deeply misguided encouragement to develop “super-human scale” social networks of “friends”.

Many Autistic people can’t help but viscerally feel the trauma and the pain they see, cutting right through all the layers of internalised ableism that others may have developed as a protective shield to cope in a cruel and dehumanising social world.

Our compassion with all living beings allows us to nurture unique relationships, and heal communities in ways that that have been suppressed and forgotten in hypernormative, life denying cultures.

Autistic culture

In recent years, thanks to innate reluctance or inability to participate in social games, Autistic people have shifted and are increasingly shifting towards genuinely human-scale online spaces for cosmolocal community co-creation, peer support, and egalitarian relationship building on Autistic terms, beyond the influence of the dominant culture of Homo Economicus®.

The Autistic inability to think hierarchically turns out to be the ability to think and live entirely relationally. We see this in the level of interest and growing participation in the human scale Ecologies of Care support model, and in the growing worldwide interest in the egalitarian NeurodiVenture worker coop model for engaging with the external social world.

In the hypernormative culture that dominates the modern world, it is hard to explain to non-Autistic people what the immersion in healthy Autistic culture feels like and what the development of healthy sacred lifetime relationships between Autistic people feels like. In mainstream society people don’t understand how Autistic people support each other, love each other, and care for each other in ways that go far beyond the culturally impaired neuronormative imagination.

NeurodiVerse : human scale cultures created by neurodiversity within the human species
(a) the universe of NeurodiVentures
(b) the set of all neurodivergent people

Our evolving web of relationships, mutual aid, and peer support initiatives is best understood in terms of emergent Ecologies of Care beyond the human.

There is the saying that “It takes a village to raise a child.” The Autistic Authentic Autonomous translation of this saying is “For an Autistic person it takes a human scale Autistic family to feel loved and alive.”

Most Autists are not born into healthy Autistic families. We have to co-create our families in our own space and time. In a healthy culture Autistic children are assisted in co-creating their unique Autistic families, but in our modern civilisation this cultural knowledge has been lost and is suppressed.

In many indigenous cultures children with unique qualities are recognised, given adult mentors with similarly unique qualities, and grow up to fulfill unique roles in their local community, connected to others with unique knowledge and insights, perhaps even in other communities.

If we are embedded in an ecology of care, we can thrive and share the pain and the joy of life.

Understanding a cultural organism as a set of relationships

In Autistic culture we understand a human scale cultural organism as a set of relationships, recognising that all humans have cognitive and emotional limits. We therefore intuitively know and deeply appreciate that small is beautiful. There is a human scale that is comprehensible, intimately integrated into Gaia.

Beyond this scale, we intuitively understand that cultural institutions amount to anthropocentric hubris, especially if such institutions are shaped by permanent hierarchical structures of social power. 

As humans we have the ability to appreciate the interdependencies and the beauty of the diversity of the unique and complementary relationships within every healthy cultural organism, including all the richness of interdependencies with other cultural organisms.

All healthy relationships contribute to the wellbeing of the cultural organism. There are no permanent social power differentials, and no particular relationship is more important than any other.

Furthermore, in a healthy cultural organism, there is a reasonable backup for any relationship that is potentially critical for group survival.

The self is a product of relationships. Anyone who has ever felt completely isolated knows this. Then the world shrinks to the relationship with oneself. But no one is completely isolated.

We are all part of Gaia, in relationship with Gaia.

Imprisonment in isolation, including isolation from Gaia, is an unimaginably cruel form of torture, a violation of a sacred human right. Social isolation in an urbanised environment is much worse than social isolation in a natural environment with access to plants and animals. In fact, being integrated into Gaia is a sacred right that applies to all living beings.

So-called “individual” wellbeing is a derivative of the health of all the human and non-human relationships a person is involved in. What really counts is relational health and communal health at human scale.

Understanding the modern social world

The modern social world we live in can only be understood from the margins, because the very notion of sense making has been confused. This is no surprise, because our capacity for sense making operates at human scale.

When a culture has destroyed the collective ability for deliberation at human scale, life is experienced as incoherent from the individual perspective, which is subconsciously attempting to generate coherence at human scale. When that process fails, nothing seems to make sense anymore.  “The Con : Fusion of Debord & Orwell” into which everyone alive today in the modern world was born, was succinctly articulated in 1986.

There is not much constructive to be learned from a growing cancerous mass that is destroying all cultures. All we can do is analyse the symptoms of the cancer, i.e. we can analyse and describe the dissonance between theory and practice of the institutions of our society. But this ability to recognise and describe cancer is far from being an ability to “cure” it. Below are three sources that describe different aspects of the cancer that are perpetuating paradigmatic cultural inertia.

The legal engineering behind the power of capital, explained by Matt Kennard.

The government machine that backs capital with raw violence explained by Jeffrey Sachs.

The cultural diseases that emerge if the limitations of human scale are not understood as the sacred bedrock of cultural organisms explained by George Tsakraklides.

George Tsakraklides does not make any mention of scale, but accurately describes what happens when anthropocentric hubris comes to dominate globally:

The idea that a small group of individuals can form a “government” that represents the best interests of its people, has been one of the biggest leaps of faith humanity ever took. Arguably, as our societies grew, we had no choice but to form these governments ••• The pooling of resources in practice often meant the accumulation of these resources within the hands of the few ••• Governments significantly expedited the exhaustion of resources, widened inequality to previously unimaginable levels, and alienated almost every citizen, who sooner or later felt the cold, heartless hand of indifference and discrimination from the very people who had been elected to “represent” them ••• It doesn’t take much effort to argue that government represents neither people, nor a privileged class of humans. It represents, defends, and protects the entity behind every single one of humanity’s decisions: money and wealth ••• Despite being an abstract, mechanistic, non-DNA based entity, money behaves very much like a life form: it too needs to secure its future existence, which it does by pursuing profit. Through the creation of money, humanity unintentionally gave rise to a new life-form which eventually parasitized it.  The role of government in this symbiosis has been, and remains, to be a puppet.  ••• Like any biological life form, they (governments) will do anything to survive.  It was a mistake to create institutions which attained so much power and autonomy that they eventually became super predators of society.  Both government and money behave as selfish life forms which need to survive and procreate. 

The popular perception that governments exist to “maintain order” is as false as the definition of order itself.  Order of what? For whose benefit? At what cost?  Order is open to multiple interpretations, rules and prohibitions which become vehicles for societal control.  Order is the favorite word of fascists •••The most dangerous aspect of all forms of government and power is that they despise change.  They want to keep everything the same: the same economy, the same players, the same mistakes.  This is how they ensure that their sponsors will not be unseated from positions of power.  The downside of this is that the most serious existential threats are only ever addressed at the level of pantomime theatrics •••If anything, governments are effectively Reality Management Authorities, servicing the need of the most powerful to maintain social narratives which control the production and distribution of wealth.  Governments are the visible manifestations of the psychonomy, enabling the most controlling, psychotic and unstable personalities to thrive and attain leadership positions ••• A successful leader today is more of an ideological chameleon than a mission-driven decision-maker.  Their most critical skill is masterfully dancing around the bullets of the psychonomy’s crossfire, pretending to be a peace maker ••• By managing people and agendas and keeping the wild jungles of the power ecosystem from closing in on them, politicians can secure their tenures as sitting representatives of the corporatocracy •••Stubbornly protecting their corporate bosses, governments simply hasten and amplify recurring convulsive episodes of economic and social seizure.  The wealthy elites have been consulted.  The PR agencies have been briefed.  And the casualties have already been selected, before the guns are fired •••Governments can easily be classified as existential threats.  Their dithering, inertia, inaction and procrastination create all of the horrifying conditions for small, once addressable issues to grow and one day become terminal, impassable predicaments.  Because of their inability to handle change even when it knocks on their door, RMAs are incapable of addressing the worst type of change: an existential threat.  In the face of a polycrisis, RMAs will typically avoid, deflect, distract and postpone, while at the same time weaponize the crisis for propaganda.  As looming threats grow, the government will spend all of its energy to do what it does best: reality management •••The priority of politics during an existential threat has always been to create, curate, and broadcast narratives which regurgitate the lies this civilisation desperately needs to keep calm and carry on living its fantasies.  When a collapse begins to register, it is already too late. This is because collapse is only the very last stage in a long process; a stage which, however, is irreversible: it can only be observed and endured.  As the crisis enters free-fall, the RMA goes quiet: leaders literally disappear, retreating into their pre-built bunkers and golden parachutes. Social services vanish, silence falls across the political spectrum, and the public is abandoned.  The government who we all thought would come to our rescue, was indeed merely a glorified PR machine ••• Following so many failed COP meetings attended by all these RMAs, it would be delusional to nurture even the slightest bit of hope in any government to solve the existential threat of the climate crisis and civilisational overshoot •••From the much larger Gaia perspective, authority and power are meaningless human constructs. The only authority and power on this planet belong to nature, and physics.

I agree with the conclusion. To sum up WEIRD paradigmatic inertia in one sentence, I frame the “iron law of social design” as follows: 

The universal iron law of social design: everything is allowed to change – as long as the established structure of social power is maintained or strengthened.

I have witnessed this dystopian hypernormative law play out in many corporations and large government departments.

Where to from here?

Humans are part of nature. We have evolved to operate, survive, and thrive as cultural organisms at human scale, especially in challenging / marginal environments. We still have this capacity, but it has been eclipsed by a global cultural cancer. So, when cultural reforms are futile, what options do we have for re-booting healthy cultural organisms?

The cancer can not be reformed, but there are many little sprouts of new human scale ways of being emerging in the cultural compost heap. The dying process of a cultural cancer is the unavoidable metamorphosis we are undergoing. 

Some of the inmates of dying institutions may consciously choose to jointly exit, and metamorphise into a life affirming organism, or they may eventually be forced to leave involuntarily by the social circumstances. In the former scenario the emerging human scale organism may, amongst other things, offer palliative care for the dying institution from the outside – i.e. assistance with exit path for the remaining inmates, alongside the provision of new life regenerating gifts as part of Gaia. This is a kind of life affirming logic that is not accessible via the dystopian logic of Homo Economicus. 

Biologists who have not read broadly enough about our cultural evolutionary past, i.e. biological and cultural anthropology, tend to extrapolate from other primates, and arrive at the confusion of humans with Homo Economicus, ending up discounting human imagination and the innate collaborative tendencies that distinguish us from other primates.

The most compelling biological metaphor I have found to date to gain a sense of what might play out in the realm of culture is the metamorphosis of a developing insect. Life is fractal. 

Metamorphosis is one of the most profound restructurings of a biological organism. As humans we are far too limited in our abilities to foresee exactly how such a pattern maps and is already playing out in terms of human cultural organisms.

However, transposing the steps of metamorphosis onto modern human cultures suggests a path that includes: 

1. A non-growing developmental stage for human scale groups to seek a safe space, and as needed construct a protective physical/cultural shelter for the group.
2. Internal collaborative niche construction to develop new internal functional structures and external functions that are adaptive to the anticipated cosmolocal ecological conditions going forward.
3. Cultural reproduction. The final stage would be the adult, or ‘imago’ form of a human scale group, where new external and internal functions are fully operational, and able to feed the group, including reproduction of the group culture. This would not need to involve physical reproduction, but rather knowledge and skills transfer to other cosmolocally related human scale group, and especially groups within the same bioregion experiencing comparable ecological conditions.

As established super-human scale institutions decay and become unreliable, not dissimilar to what is the case in many so-called “less developed” countries, individuals and small groups will inevitably stop entrusting their entire livelihoods and lives to such institutions, and gravitate towards some expression of the rough pattern outlined above. 

Of course we have no way of predicting when and where such developments will emerge. What we can do is to offer education to prepare communities for this possibility in a life affirming way, reiterating what Joseph Tainter observed in his seminal work in 1988. For the majority of an oppressed and impoverished population so-called “collapse” of dysfunctional and resource intensive institutions can be a liberating experience. This of course assumes that communities are educated and equipped with locally adapted subsistence level life skills.

This presents WEIRD countries with an overdue opportunity for radically new forms of cosmolocal collaboration with communities in the Global South. As part of the global metacrisis that Gaia is facing, the populations in WEIRD countries will increasingly experience a need for education in subsistence level life skills – a kind of proactive “development” assistance in reverse, and a re-balancing of the extreme levels of global and in-country social inequities and injustices that dominate the entire modern world.

Metamorphosis back to human scale can be imagined as a cultural development stage for global intersectional and neurodivergent solidarity beyond the human, undoing some of the harm perpetuated in throughout the colonial and neocolonial era, at least for the generations alive today.

Human cultural adaptivity

Our best bet is to relearn and remember everything we can muster about the cultural adaptivity that is at our disposal at human scale. 

This requires the kind of deep and profound shift in trust from established institutions towards mutual aid and the community co-creation at human scale that indigenous Mexican scholar Yuria Celidwen talks about: 

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.

This shift in trust is already happening outside established institutions. It can only happen via self-selected and self-organising groups. I sense this is what we are already starting to experience on the intersectional margins of modern societies.

As part of co-creating health cultural organisms we are uncovering and documenting knowledge that is useful for human scale groups, engaging in omnidirectional learning between emerging theories and cosmolocal practices, learning by doing, and heading into an uncertain but much more life-affirming collective future at human scale, sharing all our joys and pains of life in ways that have been systematically denied by the life destroying logic of Homo Economicus.

The following clip from an Adam Curtis’ interview has aged well.

Certainties we can count on:

1. Humans have cognitive and emotional limits. Implications: Small is beautiful. There is a human scale that is comprehensible, intimately integrated into Gaia. Beyond this scale, cultural institutions amount to anthropocentric hubris. 
2. The last human won’t be a capitalist.
3. This list is evolving, contribute your observations at the next NeurodiVerse Days of Intersectional Solidarity!

There is no recipe book. There are only timeless life affirming human scale values and our innate capacity for relational thinking.

Onwards!