Our individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities develop and evolve over the course of our lives. 85% of neurodivergent adults often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, and over 60% often or always feel disrespected and unsafe. Our overall sense of wellbeing is determined by alignment between our sensitivity profiles and the ecology of care we are embedded in (or not).
Development and evolution of human nervous systems
Our individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities develop and evolve over the course of our lives, shaped by the following factors:
Sensitivities that are encoded epigenetically, at least some of which may be the result of traumatising experiences in earlier generations. We now know that childhood trauma can affect the sensitivity profiles of our nervous systems across multiple generations.
Sensitivities that result from further trauma due to the cultural mainstream we are immersed in, i.e. due to the “normalisation” of many forms of violence, bullying, and neglect within social norms, laws, workplaces, healthcare settings, default family structures, anthropocentric religions, and dehumanising economic ideologies.
Persistent positive experiences (over months, years, decades) in the social and ecological environment beyond the human that allow us to feel understood and loved, i.e. experiences with non-judgemental animals and people with compatible sensitivity profiles – such positive experiences allow us to incrementally let go of internalised ableism, and they teach us how to nurture trustworthy de-powered (non-coercive) caring relationships with other living beings.
Laws and social norms that are deemed to be applicable in large (“super human”) scale societies can never be a substitute for trustworthy caring and loving relationships. By definition such laws and social norms are formulated in ignorance of our individual sensitivity profiles and individual life circumstances.
Cults vs healthy cultural organisms
Large scale anonymous social environments are inherently traumatising, as they involve many interactions between people who know very little or nothing about each other. In contrast, over time, small “human” scale social environments minimise interactions between people who know nothing about each other.
The only difference between smaller cults and the social power structures within modern corporations and nation states is scale.
The reality of internalised ableism
The extent to which people consciously experience their social environment as a traumatising cult depends on their level of internalised ableism and their ability to maintain cognitive dissonance over months, years, and decades – which in turn comes back to our individual sensitivity profiles.
AutCollab participatory research reveals that many Autistic and intersectionally marginalised people experience the dominant culture they are embedded in as highly traumatising.
In our hypernormative “civilisation” marginalised population segments are routinely at the receiving end of internalised ableism. In contrast, those who consider themselves to be culturally “well adjusted” experience the dominant culture as relatively “safe” – they have internalised the behavioural patterns of homo economicus.
Cultural and psychological safety in workplace settings
For the experience in workplace environments, our global survey results show that non-marginalised employees experience the culture in typical workplace settings as “normal”. In contrast, employees from marginalised population segments feel much less safe and welcome at work.
Over 40% of employees are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with “superiors”, and over 25% of employees are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with peers.
Our survey results include large numbers of responses from marginalised population segments. This explains the stark contrast between the overall aggregate results (below) and the corresponding numbers for those who consider themselves culturally “well adjusted” (in the following subsection).
Culturally “well adjusted” employees
Amongst the employees who consider themselves to be culturally well adjusted over 20% are not entirely relaxed when engaging with their bosses, but more than 90% are at ease when amongst peers.
Employees from marginalised population segments
Amongst employees who identify with one or more marginalised population segments, over 50% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with “superiors”, and over 25% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with peers.
This raises serious questions about the concept of “normality” in modern industrialised societies.
Neurodivergent employees
Amongst employees who identify as neurodivergent, 70% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with “superiors”, and over 40% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self when interacting with peers.
The differences between these responses and the responses of those who consider themselves culturally “well adjusted” are stark. Internalised ableism in the workplace is an undeniable reality.
The neurodivergent childhood experience in our “civilisation”
The experience of being at the receiving end of internalised ableism starts at a young age in powered-up family structures and education environments.
Amongst neurodivergent children, 90% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self at school, and close to 70% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self within their families. Furthermore, over 90% of neurodivergent children often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, over 80% often or always feel disrespected, and over 70% often or always feel unsafe.
As a result, over 70% of neurodivergent children often or always distrust family, friends, and classmates, and around 80% detach emotionally in order to cope and survive. Over 90% often or always experience anxiety, and 80% often or always feel depressed.
The adult neurodivergent experience in our “civilisation”
The experience of being at the receiving end of internalised ableism continues into adulthood, into all aspects of our lives – unless we consciously choose to opt out of the hypernormative and traumatising life path of “modern civilisation”.
The ability to opt out depends on the extent to which we are embedded in a healthy ecology of care, the establishment of which can take decades. For many the ability to opt out remains out of reach.
Amongst neurodivergent adults, 70% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self at work, close to 60% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self within their families, and over 45% are often or always afraid to be their authentic self amongst “friends”. Furthermore, 85% of neurodivergent adults often or always feel overwhelmed and misunderstood, and over 60% often or always feel disrespected and unsafe.
As a result, over 35% of neurodivergent adults often or always distrust family, parents, and friends, and over 60% detach emotionally in order to cope and survive. Over 80% often or always experience anxiety, and 50% often or always feel depressed.
Our research shows that most neurodivergent people don’t have many healthy trustworthy relationships, and therefore have very limited opportunity to engage in de-powered dialogue.
The competitive “individual sense of agency” postulated by the ideology of homo economicus turns out to be a misguided myth that is incompatible with our scientific understanding of human cognition and the relational ecology of life.
Our overall sense of wellbeing is determined by the health of the ecology of care we are embedded in, by our sensitivity profiles, and our (in)ability to resolve cognitive dissonance.
The catch is that those humans who are capable of considering themselves to be culturally “well adjusted” have a capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance that seems nearly unlimited from an Autistic perspective.
The beautiful diversity of Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent sensitivity profiles constitutes the human cultural immune system that can guide us back towards healthy, life affirming cultural organisms. Small is beautiful.
It is encouraging that more and more young people are discovering that an energetically de-powered and less materialistic life is beneficial for our physical wellbeing, and that a socially de-powered life at human scale is essential for our mental wellbeing.
Given the current state of ecological overshoot, the path ahead includes unavoidable human and non-human suffering.
Becoming fully aware of human scale limitations not only helps us to minimise suffering and cognitive dissonance, it also reintegrates us into the sacred cycle of life via trustworthy relationships beyond the human.
The vast majority of healthcare professionals are ignorant not only about Autistic culture and Autistic ways of being, they are also ignorant about the prevalence of complex trauma amongst intersectionally marginalised people.
This research programme depends on the breadth and depth of lived Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent experience that we can draw on. Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent and marginalised people are invited to contribute their lived experience.
We invite everyone – including you, whether neuronormative or neurodivergent, to support our education efforts with reports of your lived experience in healthcare settings. As needed you can remain entirely anonymous to protect yourself from further harm.
Neurodivergent and otherwise marginalised people often have specific communication preferences, and in some cases, are only able to communicate in one or two specific modalities. In this research project we are collecting examples of both inclusive and marginalising forms of interactions encountered in healthcare settings. You are invited to contribute both negative and positive scenarios, comparing scenarios that you had hoped for or expected with the scenarios that you actually encountered.
S23M is maintaining a unique global database of anonymous baseline data on psychological safety in the workplace via an ongoing online survey. The data is of particular interest for neurodivergent people and other marginalised groups who are experiencing bullying and more or less subtle forms of discrimination at work. You can contribute to this important ongoing research by participating in a 3 minute survey, and by encouraging your friends to participate.
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
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.”
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Slowing down to reflect and relate deeply with the non-human beings that are part of the living planet is an important aspect of life and healing, especially in a social context of prescribed hypernormative busyness.
Slowing down
Disengaging from hypernormative busyness helps us to slow down and clearly distinguish the foundations of flourishing life from anthropocentric hubris:
On the basis of the evidence available to us today, we are well advised to fully acknowledge human limitations, including the limitations of human science and technologies conceived by humans. This entails adopting a scale-aware precautionary principle in all human endeavors.
Scale-aware precautionary principle
At small (human) scales, practicing a high level of autonomous communal self-governance, and applying a political conception of the precautionary principle: ‘Communal decision making in Open Space, supported by an advice process and mutual trust, should incorporate a margin of safety; activities should be limited below the level at which no adverse effect has been observed or predicted (margin of safety)’.
At large (super-human) scales, respecting the sanctity of the living planet, and applying a strict, science based conception of the precautionary principle: ‘Activities that present an uncertain potential for significant harm should be prohibited unless the proponent of the activity shows that it presents no appreciable risk of harm (prohibitory)’
Together, the two parts of the scale-aware precautionary principle imply that no community, regardless of scale, is entitled to conduct an activity that presents an uncertain potential for significant harm beyond small (human) scales.
The scale-aware overarching precautionary principle tells us that social governance should never be placed in the hands of any person or institution with super-human scale decision making abilities.
Now people are listening because their own picture of their own future is threatened. So it’s a bit ironic to reach out to Native people now to save their butts.
Indigenous wisdom that is really needed: How have we survived a 95 to 98% population reduction in a really short period of time. They eliminated, through massacre, starvation, disease from starvation, ninety percent of the population of California Indians between 1848 and about 1875. So we’re talking about one generation. One generation. So how have California Indians managed to survive that degree of Destruction?
To really study the genocide, to study what happens here, is the process of coming to a point of humility.
As long as they are not willing to deal with the human cost, and the cost in all of life that they’ve created with that attitude, taking that same predatory attitude and saying, well now I want indigenous wisdom – it’s really offensive, and it’s not going to work. It will not work.
All empires eventually die, with a perfect track record to date, consistent with everything we know about living organisms. All super-human scale cultural organisms that tolerate dehumanisation and permanent social power gradients between people are based on origin myths that justify such social power differentials.
In the 21st century we live in a multi-polar world dominated by three empires: Westernised countries, China, and Russia. Depending on what metric is used, either the first or the second of these empires is the largest or the “most powerful”. The selection of preferred metric in itself is a reflection of cultural bias – there is no objectively “correct” way to measure the scale of an empire.
Discussions of the risks of living in a multi-polar world are a distraction from a much more important question: Why do we still live in powered-up empires in a world that considers itself technologically “advanced” or “developed”? Asking this question focuses our attention on the role of technologies – of all kinds, in perpetuating and amplifying social power gradients, and on the role of techno-optimists in cult-ivating and perpetuating a myth of technological progress.
In the Anglosphere and in China, the notion of technological “progress” is increasingly entangled with growing levels of investments in digital technologies, especially so-called artificially intelligent digital systems. Anyone who understands the deeper foundations of these technologies knows that they are abstract tools for performing arithmetic calculations. Today’s digital technologies can be understood as the digital descendants of pocket calculators, spreadsheets, and accounting systems. Like a hammer and any other tool, each category of digital tool has certain use cases – and ignoring the limits of these use cases, especially at scale, easily results in significant harm.
The last three decades of fossil fuelled energy and resource extraction, exponentially accelerating investments in the Internet, the abstract logic of interest bearing debt, and the invisible hand (mergers and acquisitions), have led to a digital mono-culture and to a dangerous extension of the delusion of infinite growth on a finite planet, which has dragged humans and most non-human beings deep into the sixth mass extinction of the living planet.
We can only help the living planet heal from anthropocentric cultural diseases, i.e. from the three political empires mentioned above, plus a slightly larger number of digital technological empires, if we probe the origin myths of these cultural diseases.
The assumptions that are used to legitimise the highly unequal distributions of social powers and resources often remain unspoken, and those that are acknowledged amount to dogmatic religious beliefs about the living planet and the cosmos, re-framed either as common-sense or as scientific “facts” about human natures and evolutionary processes for which the evidence is entangled in a circular argument with the “natural” allocation of social powers in one or more technological or political empires. This results in worldviews in which the rise and existence of powered-up empires is an irreversible inevitability.
The rise of powered-up empires as an irreversible inevitability is the manifestation of the infinite linear arrow of progress that powers all modern political and technological empires.
I am less familiar with the specific assumptions that frame the current arrow of progress in China and Russia, but evidence for the misguided myths about human natures and evolutionary processes that frame the arrow of progress in US technological empires is not hard to find.
Current techno-optimism in the US and the Anglosphere is a result of willful blindness, including a complete absence of a nuanced scale-ware precautionary principle, and the elevation of neoliberal ideology to the status of a state religion. The propensity for carelessness and the associated sense of cultural superiority was clearly demonstrated to the world during the era of nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific, and is currently visible in the delusional beliefs that underpin US technological empires.
Digging deeper, the roots of current Western techno-optimism can be linked to a cultural shift in the science of physics and engineering disciplines following WWII, in particular to the Copenhagen interpretation about the measurement problem and the meaning of quantum mechanics. Adam Becker has written an entire book about this cultural shift to correct common misconceptions about quantum mechanics. He sums up the overall cultural effect on the way physics and engineering is practiced in the US as:
The reliance on formal symbolic representations and automated computations, especially since the discovery of data as “the new oil” in wake of the invention of the Internet, has led to a thin veneer of scientific rigor (“data science”), and an obsession with inventing abstract metrics and contrived categories within the digital realm, reflecting the cultural beliefs of techno-optimistic designers working in service of neoliberal capitalists, rather than a deep appreciation for the ecological diversity of the living planet, and a basic understanding of human cultural organisms as being integral parts and active participants within ecologies of care beyond the human.
The casual attitude to the limits of understanding at the heart of physics not only paved the path for the modern cult of techo-optimism, it also resulted in a cultural bias in which the precautionary principle has become irrelevant, especially when critical analysis might expose foundational ideological assumptions as unjustifiable or entirely delusional.
Adam Becker, who is an astrophysicist and science writer, is currently writing a new book on precisely this topic. A few days ago he gave an invited talk on the topic at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, amongst other things pointing out the absurdity of infinite exponential human technological expansion into space – simply reminding the audience that within a few centuries the whole endeavor would come to a grinding halt due to the limits of available energy in the galaxy and universe.
“Changing the world one planet at a time …To search through outer space we shall need to rise above our inner spaces, the gravest challenges of our time — from reducing disease and economic inequality, to managing finite resources and surviving war — and to take all necessary steps towards a larger, shared goal: an understanding of life’s place in the universe. Because confronting the challenges of space requires braving and solving the complexities of life…
“… The Miller Omega Program is run according to a set of values considered by the donor, Bill Miller, in discussion with the SFI President, David Krakauer, to ensure the most effective execution of the program in relation to the SFI core mission and donor intent.”
…During his tenure as sole manager of the Legg Mason Value Trust†, its performance exceeded the S&P 500 index for a record 15 consecutive years. He was named Fund Manager of the Year in 1998 by Morningstar‡, The Greatest Money Manager of the 1990s by Money Magazine, Fund Manager of the Decade by Morningstar.com, and was named by Barron’s to its All-Century Investment Team. He received the Sauren Golden Award in 2015 and 2017 for Best US Equity Manager, and Two Gold Medals in 2019, 2020, and 2021 for Excellent Fund Management.
Bill earned his economics degree from Washington and Lee University where he graduated with honors in 1972. Subsequent to graduation, he served as a military intelligence officer overseas and then pursued graduate studies in philosophy in the PhD program at The Johns Hopkins University, where he currently sits on the Board of Trustees. He received his CFA designation in 1986. Mr. Miller is Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute where he served as chairman from 2005 to 2009. The Santa Fe Institute is one of the world’s leading scientific research laboratories, conducting multidisciplinary research in complex systems theory. A long-time supporter of the Santa Fe Institute, Bill established the Miller Omega Fund in 2016.
This tells us everything we need to know about cultural bias at the Santa Fe Institute. Sadly, the Santa Fe Institute is one of many research institutes and universities that have become heavily dependent on donations from individuals and institutions that amplify the the misguided beliefs of techno-optimistic cults.
Is all of this overly dramatic? A stuffy and reflexive resistance to exciting innovation? Why expect the worse? Altman reassures us: “Nobody wants to destroy the world.” Perhaps not. But as the ever-worsening climate and extinction crises show us every day, plenty of powerful people and institutions seem to be just fine knowing that they are helping to destroy the stability of the world’s life-support systems, so long as they can keep making record profits that they believe will protect them and their families from the worst effects. Altman, like many creatures of Silicon Valley, is himself a prepper: back in 2016, he boasted: “I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
I’m pretty sure those facts say a lot more about what Altman actually believes about the future he is helping unleash than whatever flowery hallucinations he is choosing to share in press interviews.
Behaviourism
Techno-optimism is a direct extension of the fiction of homo economicus, which can be traced back to the earliest days of fossil fuel powered industrialisation. The latter manifests itself in the beliefs associated with the language of behaviourism, which exists in multiple dialects, and which has come to permeate and pollute many disciplines in the social sciences.
In our work we’ve tried to test some of the basic predictions made by the Homo economics model using some simple tools from behavioral economics applied across a diverse swath of human societies. Not only do we find that the Homo economicus predictions fail in every society (24 societies, multiple communities per society), but instructively, we find that it fails in different ways in different societies. Nevertheless, after our paper “In search of Homo economicus” in 2001 in the American Economic Review, we continued to search for him. Eventually, we did find him. He turned out to be a chimpanzee. The canonical predictions of the Homo economicus model have proved remarkably successful in predicting chimpanzee behavior in simple experiments. So, all theoretical work was not wasted, it was just applied to the wrong species.
Practices such as Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) to force compliance with arbitrary, externally imposed demands are pseudoscientific practices of trying to change an individual’s behaviour to conform to the social expectations of a particular culture. Various jurisdictions around the world have passed laws against LGTBQIA+ conversion therapy. However, the same underlying techniques of coercion continue to be applied to young Autistic children and other vulnerable people.
By framing the trauma responses to routine use of coercive techniques 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 the self at the core of homo economicus is feeding the addiction to various forms of social power – this “normalises” carelessness and deceptive forms of communication, and it allows the latent capacity for establishing dominance hierarchies to override our innate human collaborative tendencies towards mutual aid.
The delusion of technological progress at the core of techno-optimism is feeding the addiction to various forms of convenience and consumption – this keeps us perpetually busy and it distracts us from our human natures.
In the human social sphere the abstraction of techno-optimistic homo economicus is causing untold harm in the form of [religious] economic wars, which are increasingly waged and executed by digital algorithms with minimal human intervention.
The neoliberal invisible hand has become a self-fulfilling religious prophecy. This prophecy and this actively life destroying religion is a death sentence for the human species, but only if we continue to worship this toxic religion, refuse to confront our trauma responses, and deny our deeply collaborative and relational human natures, as well as our cognitive and emotional limits, and our embodied spiritual dimension, which is completely absent in the digital realm.
The art of living well in the cultural compost heap
The full implications still need to sink in. This will only be possible by framing the associated social dynamics in terms of cults and addictions, i.e. 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 header image for this article was inspired by the following illustration:
The shift in linguistic frame allows us to conceptualise and work with the cultural compost heap, which nurtures intersectional solidarity on the margins of the mono-cult, and which gives birth to an embodied planetary spirituality that understands the living planet as a sacred relational ecology of care, weaving together all living beings, shifting our attention towards:
There is no shortage of small human scale initiatives that re-conceptualise human societies in comprehensible, compassionate, and life affirming ways – the opposite of “Shut up and calculate!”
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.
I’ve studied quantum theory. We realised that the particles in the world are really not the basic reality. The basic reality is potential and energy, and it’s only when you try and measure it, then it shows up as a particle, or it shows up as a wave, but the reality really is that which connects, the non-separability problem. My PhD thesis was on non-separation, non-locality, and quantum theory. We knew [this] 100 years ago in physics, and yet an obsolete physics of more than 100 years ago is being used to shape and and divide a very interconnected world. So dualism today is not just epistemologically so wrong, it is not just ontologically so wrong, it is spiritually just not the right way to think of the world, but it is now becoming a threat to human life, preventing people from living with each other in diversity with love. And that’s why we have to spread the message of non-dualism, of interconnectedness, of oneness through love, and we have to be the practice...
All cultures had economies but it wasn’t the first organising principle, it was a byproduct of good living… Where did that wealth come from? It was an economy, but it was not an economy of extraction. It was not an economy of domination, it was an economy of living. If you go to the roots of the word economy, economy according to Aristotle is the art of living.Our civilisation has very deep spiritual foundations, and through spirituality you know that the diversity in the world is really different expressions of the same oneness… Let all the beings flourish…
– Vandana Shiva
Collectively we can tap into a wealth of knowledge and timeless indigenous wisdom.
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Angarova, G. 2023. ‘Understanding Suffering and Knowing Our Place.’ Holding the Fire: Episode 4. Resilience.org.
Becker, A. 2018. What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics. Basic Books.
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Bowles, S. 2016. The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are no Substitute for Good Citizens. Yale University Press.
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Kohn, A. 1993. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. Houghton Mifflin.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. 1981. Metaphors We Live By. The University of Chicago Press.
Meadows, D. 1972. The Limits to growth; a report for the Club of Rome’s project on the predicament of mankind. A Potomac Associates book.
Metzler, H. et al. 2023. ‘Social Drivers and Algorithmic Mechanisms on Digital Media.’ Perspectives on Psychological Science OnlineFirst. July 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231185057.
Roman, J. 2023. Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World. Little, Brown Spark.
Rushworth, S. 2024. ‘Prayer for the Earth: An Indigenous Response to These Times.’ The Poetry of Predicament. March 2024. https://youtu.be/anVEGa43xvM .
Shiva, V. & Shiva, K. 2020. Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Spicer, A. 2020. ‘Playing the Bullshit Game: How Empty and Misleading Communication Takes Over Organizations.’ Organization Theory, Volume 1: 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787720929704.
Tainter, J. A. 1988. Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press.
Humans are not going to find solutions for the polycrisis, conquer new planets, the galaxy, and the universe, fully understand the human condition, let alone the living planet or the cosmos, or develop technologies that replace anthropocentrism with technocentrism – in fact these two terms are synonyms for one and the same human collective grandiose delusion.
Cultures that appreciate these ten aspects of life are co-creating conditions conducive to life – they are conducive to human and non-human wellbeing. Cultures that negate one or more of these aspects of life are are not conducive to human and non-human wellbeing.
(*) These four aspects of life are biological facts.
Becoming conscious of and genuinely appreciating human cognitive and emotional limitations is the foundational step that allows us not only to appreciate all the other aspects of being alive, but it also highlights the absurdity and the harm caused by all attempts to establish and maintain institutions that attempt to “control” life beyond human comprehensible scales.
… How many, back then, preferred imperial control to non-imperial freedoms? How many were given a choice? How much choice do we have now? It seems nobody really knows the answers to these questions, at least not yet. In future, it will take more than zombie statistics to stop us from asking them. There are forgotten histories buried in the ground, of human politics and values. The soil mantle of Earth, including the very soil itself, turns out to be not just our species’ life support system, but also a forensic archive, containing precious evidence to challenge timeworn narratives about the origins of inequality, private property, patriarchy, warfare, urban life and the state – narratives born directly from the experience of empire, written by the ‘winners’ of a future that may yet make losers of us all.
Investigating the human past in this way is not a matter of searching for utopia, but of freeing us to think about the true possibilities of human existence. Unhampered by outdated theoretical assumptions and dogmatic interpretations of obsolete data, could we look with fresh eyes at the very meaning of terms like ‘civilisation’? Our species has existed for something like 300,000 years. Today, we stand on a precipice, confronting a future defined by environmental collapse, the erosion of democracy, and wars of unprecedented destructiveness: a new age of empire, perhaps the last in a cycle of such ages that, for all we really know, may represent only a modest fraction of the human experience.
For those who seek to change course, such uncertainty about the scope of human freedoms may itself be a source of liberation, opening pathways to other futures.
Fully appreciating human diversity
When we are conscious of human cognitive and emotional limits, we can start to appreciate human and non-human diversity, interdependence, mutual aid, and the compostability of all living beings.
Life (re)creates conditions conducive to life. Humans evolved to collaborate in groups that don’t exceed human comprehensibility.
The latent capacity for forming groups beyond the scale of human comprehensibility is best understood by adopting a non-anthropocentric ecological lens, and enumerating a few obvious consequences. In groups beyond human scale:
No one can claim to understand the unique lived experiences, limitations, and needs that are associated with all the relationships within the group
Anyone who makes decisions that have the potential to affect others in major ways is likely causing suffering without being aware of it – setting the stage for ableism to become established
Interactions between people who don’t know much if anything about each other become normalised
Maintaining social norms that clamp down on all emergent social power structures becomes difficult – if such social norms are maintained over long stretches of time it is the result of an evolutionary process beyond human control, for example thanks to favourable ecological conditions and feedback loops, and not thanks to “super human abilities” of an elite of “leaders”
Once social power structures becomes established, the group increasingly suffers from the instability and energy cost of in-group competition, and as a result compromises its ability to fully pay attention to ecological conditions and feedback loops beyond the human
Within a frame of social competition, any disinterest or inability to participate in competitive social games is viewed as a weakness and a sign of inferiority
Everyone has some awareness of the unique lived experiences, limitations, and needs that are present within the group
Anyone who makes decisions that cause others to suffer in major ways will be made aware of it – reducing the risk of ableism becoming established
People who interact know each other, and have some level of shared understanding and mutual trust
Maintaining social norms that clamp down on all emergent social power structures is a viable collective practice, and the benefits of investing in the effort are obvious to everyone
In a group in which radically egalitarian practices are well established and de-powered relationships have been maintained over many years, individual attempts at establishing social power are quickly recognised and confirmed from multiple perspectives, and can be dealt with effectively
Within an egalitarian frame of collaborative niche construction, all dimensions of diversity become potential sources of unique capabilities, strengthening compassion and commitments to mutual care – and active disinterest in competitive social games reinforces the frame
The lived experience of ability and disability is entirely a matter of social context and framing.
Diversity and disability in modern industrialised societies
Sadly in hypernormative societies experiences with radically egalitarian human scale organisms have become very rare. Experience in the practice of de-powered dialogue has also become rare, even within households and families.
David Wengrow’s observations on the distorting lenses of kingdoms and empires fit beautifully with the introduction to the Ecologies of Care peer support model:
As we live through the current human predicament we are well advised to understand capitalism as a collective learning disability that actively contributes to human and non-human suffering…
The neurodiversity, disability, and indigenous rights movements are part of the cultural immune system of human societies, responding to the mechanistic, hypercompetitive, and rule based approach to social arrangements imposed by the learning disabled mono-cult with a holistic social justice approach. The key element that holds together all the threads, which has been systematically eroded in Westernised societies is the notion of trust, including the role of trustworthy, sacred relationships within the context of life affirming ecologies of care…
When the existence/emergence of social power dynamics is fully normalised, human social interactions are no longer about deepening shared understanding and relational ecologies of care, but about winning and losing competitive social games and systematically marginalising the less fortunate.
Diversity and disability in earlier times
Based on what we can glean from earlier times, the cultural bias inherent in the modern myths of social progress via industrialisation and the religion of the invisible hand is exposed.
Archaeologist Lorna Tilley and her colleagues, who specialize in the way past societies cared for people who were sick or disabled, remind us of the cooperation, flexibility, and ingenuity shown by past peoples in caring for one another.
Many papers challenge (sometimes overturn) assumptions about aspects of health, disease and care practices and/or social attitudes in relation to disability in medieval times (e.g., B ́ed ́ecarrats et al., 2021; Miclon et al., 2021; Robb et al., 2021; Tilley and Cave, 2023), demonstrating that a bio- archaeological lens can offer new perspectives on a past we believe is ‘known’. Finally, a number of the case studies highlight the importance of (re)considering medieval attitudes towards those experiencing disability, with findings indicating a lack of stigmatisation and an acceptance of difference which support the observations of some medieval historians (e.g., Metzler, 2006; Cilione and Gazzaniga, 2023) and add a touch of humanity to our understanding of life in this era (e.g., Bethard et al., 2021; Kozakaite ̇ et al., 2022b; McKenzie et al., 2022; Tilley and Cave, 2023).
Neanderthal healthcare is significant not in its distinctiveness compared to that of biologically modern humans in later periods but in its similarity. Neanderthals appear to share a common human emotional and practical response to vulnerability and suffering of those that they were close to, attitudes also reflected in care of children, attitudes to the body at death through mortuary practice. The very similarity of Neanderthal healthcare to that of later periods has important implications however – that organized, knowledgeable and caring healthcare is not unique to our species but rather has a long evolutionary history. Healthcare provisioning is likely to have been significant in reducing mortality and ameliorating risks in resource acquisition far into the distant past.
So what can the bioarchaeology of care approach tell us? In the cases of both Man Bac Burial 9 and Lesley, provision of health-related care entailed intensive and time-consuming efforts on the part of caregivers. In both cases, those providing care in response to acute distress would more than likely have anticipated that, were initial health care measures successful, some level of long-term support for the recipient might be needed. Conscious choices were required: To give or to withhold care? To assign scarce resources to caring for one individual or to assign priority elsewhere? In both instances, group members chose to allocate their time and energies to caring for the vulnerable in their community.
Our past contains important lessons for the present. if we are willing to pay attention. As we write this article, uncertainty reigns over the fate of the millions who will lose health care coverage if the Affordable Care Act is repealed. Is this really the best ‘art of the deal” that we can manage? An archaeological focus on health-related care completely overturns the notion that society has evolved by embracing a winner-takes-all “survival of the fittest” approach to health and welfare policy. On the contrary, research demonstrates the cooperation, flexibility, and ingenuity shown by past peoples in caring for one another. The bioarchaeology of care approach highlights a defining hallmark of the human species: our capacity to support each other in times of need.
In early Neolithic Vietnam, a young man survived from early adolescence into adulthood completely paralysed from the waist down and with very limited use of his upper body. Dependent on others for meeting his most basic needs, Burial 9’s survival was only possible because of the high quality, dedicated and time-consuming care he received.
The skeletal remains of Man Bac Burial 9, shown in Figure 1 below, provide evidence of a pathological condition difficult to manage successfully in a modern medical environment. Four thousand years ago, the challenges to health maintenance and quality of life would have been overwhelming.
Looking after those who are unable to look after themselves is a behaviour that defines what it is to be human. Evidence suggests health-related care has been practiced within the human family at least the last 100,000 years, and some biologists claim that conspecific caregiving was essential to human evolution.
Deconstructing ableist views of the past, however, is a work in progress, powerfully explored by Vogel (Citation2023) in this volume in a careful consideration of studies of bodily differences and disabilities in the fields of Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology. The author interrogates the variable nature of how disability has been, and can be, understood in this field, revealing the early tendencies for cataloguing and identifying disease in medicalised terms with embedded assumptions that these defined physiological and bodily differences. Discussions of disability in terms of treatment, care and therapy are recent developments. Southwell, Gowland, and Powell (Citation2016) in particular highlight the universal importance of care in past human relationships, dispelling simplistic notions of othering and discrimination and underlining the complexity of responses – positive and negative – to disease and impairment in the past.
Vogel, in relation to Egyptian studies, calls for a rejection of a dehumanising medicalised language, and a new focus on rethinking the disability paradigm, with consideration of the cultural variability in perceptions and the agency of those with disabilities and bodily differences. In doing so, we can move away from ableist interpretations but also empower the voices of those who directly experienced impairment, disease and bodily difference in the past. In different ways, the case studies from contemporary archaeology presented in this volume by Hattori (Citation2023) and Dezhamkhooy (Citation2023), also use archaeology to document the lives and deaths of individuals denied permanence, safety and an identity in the modern world. For example, Hattori’s archaeological and forensic exploration uncovers evidence of the structural erasure of the identity of the disenfranchised poor in Brazil through the state sponsorship of mass cremations. The study poses powerful questions about individual rights to care at death, commemoration and remembrance (Hattori Citation2023).
An archaeological focus on health-related care completely overturns the notion that society has evolved by embracing a winner-takes-all “survival of the fittest” approach to health and welfare policy. On the contrary, research demonstrates the cooperation, flexibility, and ingenuity shown by past peoples in caring for one another. The bioarchaeology of care approach highlights a defining hallmark of the human species: our capacity to support each other in times of need.
Palliative care for institutions of empire & exit paths for the inmates
Once we acknowledge the magnitude of the current predicament of humanity, our focus shifts away from wasting precious time on delusional and life destroying notions of technological progress, towards minimising human and non-human suffering as part of the big cycle of life that is far beyond human control.
Minimising human suffering translates to providing palliative care for the institutions of empire and proving safe exit paths for the inmates. Minimising suffering beyond the human translates to nurturing ecologies of care beyond the human, and to falling in love with human limitations.
The emerging results of our ongoing survey on cognitive dissonance speak loud and clear.
Demographics:
Note: we have yet to circulate the survey to a wider audience that extends beyond the intersectionally marginalised Neurodivergent, Autistic, LGBTQIA+, and Disabled communities.
Quantitative results:
20% could not [bring themselves to] write a job application for a corporation or big government department – this matches my own experience, and it would make over 30% feel really bad. Less than 10% would feel somewhat good about.
Only 20% would feel somewhat good about the prospect of accepting employment based on the standard corporate employment contract of an employer. 30% could not do it or would feel really bad. It is not a viable option – I know that it was not a survivable option for me.
Many of us could not [bring ourselves to] market and sell services and products to a corporation or big government department, and most would feel bad about it.
In contrast, most of us love helping friends who are in need.
But then our competitive hypernormative society has taught us to feel bad about asking for help.
When in employed work, we are routinely pushed towards and beyond our ethical concerns and emotional limits.
We know that we can’t expect much if any tangible assistance from employers. The modern conception of employment is a very one-sided exploitative relationship. Comparable relationships within our families would be characterised as neglect and abuse.
Most of us love helping strangers if we are in a position to do so.
And yet, as with our friends, our competitive hypernormative society has taught us to feel bad about asking for help.
Lived experiences of cognitive dissonance in our “advanced” globalised civilisation:
As an autistic therapist working with ND folxs, it is exactly like handing out sunblock to people burning in Hell. our entire society is actively hostile to any person who is not cis, white, het, rich and male. and we are all going to work, buying groceries and dropping the kids at daycare like everything is fine.
I don’t feel good about asking for help, but do feel good about helping others. This is unfair to myself. Second, the large inhuman institutions that make up most of society are not acting in service to humans, but we are asked to see them as human.
My own desire to please and appease others learned before I could speak due to trauma and abuse which happened regularly since I was an infant right through my first marriage. I appease others to avoid their anger or disapproval. The abuse stopped at age 30 when I got therapy to teach me how to be self assertive and make healthy choices. This was not what I had learned growing up or in the relationships I chose before therapy. I stuck to familiar scenarios with no idea I could choose multiple ways to respond to others in any situation. My autistic rigid thinking did not see I had choices. Today’s ” ABA therapy concentrates on teaching small children to please and appease and I see it as dangerous practice to do this. I was abused for much of my young life, taken advantage of by predatory people, etc because I needed to prove to them that I was “good”. After years of conditioning, the immediate response to appeasement/ people pleasing is still a struggle for me to deal with, but at least I mostly refrain from putting myself in danger through extreme appeasement responses. I am fortunate I survived. Getting therapy and better, healthier communication tools to work with saved my life and my sanity.
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.
Working in a caring profession for employers and managers who care primarily for themselves and the organisation.
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.
Worldwide there are many thousands – likely millions of small human scale initiatives to re-conceptualise human societies in comprehensible life affirming ways, as an integral part of the living planet.
I refer to the (re)establishment of radically egalitarian social norms as de-powering. Many of these initiatives have their origins in indigenous communities. Some of the longest running initiatives are facilitated by organisations like Navdanya, by our friends at Local Futures, and by the permaculture movement that was conceptualised and nurtured by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren.
For those who grew up in urban environments and industrialised societies the learning curve can be long and steep.
But collectively we can tap into a wealth of knowledge and timeless indigenous wisdom.
Neurodivergent, indigenous, and otherwise marginalised people depend on each other in ways that differ from the cultural norm – and that is pathologised in hypernormative societies. The endless chains of trauma must be broken.
The Autistic Collaboration Trust has been active in researching cultural and psychological safety from an intersectional perspective. We now explore the level of cognitive dissonance that is generated by the societies that people are embedded in. You are invited to contribute! The results of this research will inform the education services we provide to healthcare professionals and education providers.
Cognitive dissonance surfaces whenever human emotional limits are reached. The catch is that those humans who are capable of considering themselves to be culturally well adjusted have a capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance that seems nearly unlimited from an Autistic perspective.
As pointed out in earlier articles, the discipline of economics and the modern belief in the invisible hand are best understood as the foundational beliefs of a cult. More and more people are reaching this conclusion.
In case you remain skeptical and prefer to think of the discipline of financial economics as a social science, the following short talk by John Seed may help you to see the many dogmatic assumptions that are baked into the modern economic discipline. John Seed advocates to replace the religion of economics with a spiritual movement based on the sanctity of the living planet:
Contribute your lived experience to our participatory research
The survey explores 21 social scenarios. For each scenario you are asked to think about the following questions
How do you feel?
How does society expect you to feel?
How do your friends expect you to feel?
How does your life partner expect you to feel?
and choose one of the following answers
Really bad
Somewhat bad
Neutral
Somewhat good
Really good
Could not do this (for example due to ethical concerns)
Not applicable
The above survey design is new. If you have any questions regarding the survey, or have suggestions for improving the survey, please leave a comment. All feedback is appreciated.
As with all our participatory research, the results will be published via AutCollab.org, and will inform the education services we provide to healthcare professionals and education providers.
Are you able to identify the biggest source of cognitive dissonance in your life? If so, what is it?
Initial answers to this question provide a window into the social world generated by the institutional landscape of modernity. Most of the responses to date are from participants who identify as neurodivergent:
The fact that I am as highly educated as I am and that my skills are so undervalued in a capitalist economy and that I have so little idea how to market myself or make a living in a way that is consistent with my values. How much shame I have around the fact that I depend financially on my elderly parents because I am raising an ND child by myself and parenting has been so hard for me that I have not been able to work in years. That my value as a person is so tied to being able to be productive in a capitalist economy and all the inner work I do and have done throughout my life, and all I do to support my child, counts for nothing.
I don’t really do cognitive dissonance. I’m wide open to myself and the world. It sucks.
I feel bad (because I have been programmed to by my family and society) for being on disability benefits though I strongly believe that basic income and life necessities should be provided to all regardless of their ability to work in the capitalist workforce.
Sometimes, when it becomes ‘obvious’. Right now, I’m working for the main organization in my country that claims to represent autistic people, but it is not autistic-led… I got here with the idea to change things from the inside as the only autistic activist and advocate… Knowing I might fail, I have to accept being misjudged and many things I know go against my values and dehumanize who I am. Being silent because violence and trauma and wanting to scream all the time because I want others to know the truth about this organization.
I don’t think I have much. I live pretty true to my identity and values and anything from society/others that doesn’t reflect those I keep externalised and boundaried. I’m fortunate there are not ways in my life I have to go against myself. I can walk my talk in all areas of life.
As important as trust is in relationships, my behavior is more on the side of mistrust.
Every day I deal with people who get a larger share of the values they assign to activities, events, people, and customs from what is expected by their social circle and political context than I sense that I do. I see money, jobs, consumerism, and social media groupthink as constructs that serve impersonal systems at the expense of communal connections and individual autonomy.
Ableism. Classism.
In the future, I will die. It will probably be painful and frightening. There will also be times when I will feel that I have failed at some moral obligation, and that will be hellish. But I go through life very lazily and mostly by conforming to comfortable habits instead of by always striving to be my best self and have a good meaningful life.
Sometimes I need help and I don’t feel like I can ask for it. I feel there is a lot of social stigma around having different or extra needs.
Being alive.
Wanting to trust others and feeling I need to protect myself.
New purchases and wanting to beautify my wardrobe and home vs discarding old items and how those discarded items affect the environment. I try to donate, resell, or recycle to quell the feelings of discomfort I have with consumerism. I also drive a luxury SUV which I enjoy and feel I deserve, but I do have to quell feelings of materialism and consumerism to enjoy it.
Definitely! The distance between what society expects me to feel and how I actually feel, less so what my friends and life partners expect me to feel. These days it is mainly the sense of shame I am supposed to feel at needing assistance with my basic needs and daily living. But in truth I don’t feel shame! I feel the effects of others’ shame, but I genuinely feel that we all are interconnected and that we will all need help at some point or the other. Note: 1. By society I also include “birth family”, who loom large in my life. 2. Also, I found myself shrugging a lot, like “I don’t know how society expects me to feel” or also like I don’t care what society expects me to feel (Something I imagine many other ND people face). 3. I would also add that I have caste privilege in the country I live in.
I find it harder to ask for help than expected by others. I get more joy out of providing help than might be expected by others.
Feeling useless and worthless for not having capitalistic value as a disabled person, when I believe that everyone has an inherent right to live a comfortable life with all of their needs met.
There is an urgent need to catalyse intersectional neurodiverse and indigenous ecologies of care all over the world. Neurodivergent, indigenous, and otherwise marginalised people depend on each other in ways that differ from the cultural norm – and that is pathologised in hypernormative societies. The endless chains of trauma must be broken.
The NeurodiVerse Days of Solidarity offer a rich opportunity for omni-directional learning across cultures and geographies.The diversity in the way we collectively think about the future shapes the futures that are possible!
There is an urgent need to catalyse intersectional ecologies of care all over the world, and to expose and oppose the internalised ableism that is holding our societies hostage. The endless chains of trauma must be broken.
Internalised ableism
The two deepest subterranean – i.e. subconscious – ideological roots of modern industrialised society are (a) internalised ableism and (b) ubiquitous cognitive dissonance across all aspects of life.
Internalised ableism manifests in a refusal to fully acknowledge human cognitive limits, and in the misguided and unfounded belief in continuous technological progress powered by human ingenuity and human created technologies, including so-called artificially intelligent systems.
Cognitive dissonance surfaces whenever human emotional limits are reached. The catch is that those humans who are capable of considering themselves to be culturally well adjusted have a capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance that seems nearly unlimited from an Autistic perspective.
At scale, in the social realm, the combination of internalised ableism and a large capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance over extended periods – to the extent that bodily symptoms of chronic dis-ease and stress are ignored and for the most part not associated with cognitive dissonance, is the substrate that perpetuates the paradigmatic inertia of a sick society.
The following commentary on the poly-crisis from Chris Hedges, Peter C Downey & Paul Ehrlich comes to mind.
Autistic people are routinely marginalised when they expose social power games and the myth of meritocracy. Pathologisation of Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people is best understood as the push back from a sick society with cultural norms and expectations that are disconnected from our evolutionary heritage and from the local ecosystems that we are part of.
This article contains many references and examples that expose the “normality” of internalised ableism and cognitive dissonance.
Human cognitive limits
Becoming conscious of human cognitive 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.
It is only once we have understood the extent of internalised ableism within modern industrialised societies that we can begin to comprehend human cognitive limits and the extent to which we are surrounded by anthropocentric hubris.
If we care to look, we can easily find highly concerning examples of human cognitive limits in all the large institutions that define the modern industrialised way of life that is characterised by addictions to consumerism and competitive social games.
The living planet is far more adaptive and creative than any human, far beyond what any of us can understand. No human institution is “in control”. Furthermore, a multitude of waste products of the modern industrialised way of life are having a direct and non-negligible effect on human cognitive abilities and performance.
A good example of a source of self-inflicted cognitive impairment that is widely ignored is the continuous rise in CO2 levels, and the elevated CO2 levels that billions of people are regularly exposed to in indoor environments. The normalisation of spending many hours in crowded offices, classrooms, and other indoor spaces with elevated CO2 levels has led to a significant decline in human cognitive performance. A few quotes from the referenced article, which is only gaining in importance with every year:
… carbon dioxide (CO2) has a direct and negative impact on human cognition and decision-making. These impacts have been observed at CO2 levels that most Americans — and their children — are routinely exposed to today inside classrooms, offices, homes, planes, and cars.
… Significantly, the Harvard study confirms the findings of a little-publicized 2012 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) study, “Is CO2 an Indoor Pollutant? Direct Effects of Low-to-Moderate CO2 Concentrations on Human Decision-Making Performance.”
That study found “statistically significant and meaningful reductions in decision-making performance” in test subjects as CO2 levels rose from a baseline of 600 parts per million (ppm) to 1000 ppm and 2500 ppm… They found that, on average, a typical participant’s cognitive scores dropped 21 percent with a 400 ppm increase in CO2. Here are their astonishing findings for four of the nine cognitive functions scored in a double-blind test of the impact of elevated CO2 levels:The researchers explain, “The largest effects were seen for Crisis Response, Information Usage, and Strategy, all of which are indicators of higher level cognitive function and decision-making.” The entire article is a must-read as is the LBNL-SUNY study.
… All of this new research is consistent with — and actually helps explain — literally dozens of studies in the past two decades that find low to moderate levels of CO2 have a negative impact on productivity, learning, and test scores.
… in recent decades, outdoor CO2 levels have risen sharply, to a global average of 400 ppm. Moreover, measured outdoor CO2 levels in major cities from Phoenix to Rome can be many tens of ppm higher — up to 100 ppm or more — than the global average. That’s because CO2 “domes” form over many cities primarily due to CO2 emissions from traffic and local weather conditions.
… The places where most people work and live — CO2 concentrations are considerably higher than outdoors. CO2 levels indoors that are 200 ppm to 400 ppm higher than outdoors are commonplace — not surprising since the design standard for CO2 levels in most buildings is 1000 ppm. In addition, that differential increases when more people are crammed into a space and when the ventilation is not adequate. As the Harvard researchers point out, in recent decades, buildings have become more tightly sealed, and there has been less exchange of inside air with fresh outside air.
… “In surveys of elementary school classrooms in California and Texas, average CO2 concentrations were above 1,000 ppm, a substantial proportion exceeded 2,000 ppm, and in 21% of Texas classrooms peak CO2 concentration exceeded 3,000 ppm.”
… Interestingly, the authors of all of these studies — the direct CO2 studies and the CO2-as-a-proxy-for-ventilation studies — are generally public health researchers focused on indoor environmental quality (IEQ). As a result, their published work does not examine the implications these findings have for climate policy.
… But the implications for climate policy are stark. We are at 400 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 today outdoors globally — and tens of ppm higher in many major cities. We are rising at a rate of 2+ ppm a year, a rate that is accelerating. Significantly, we do not know the threshold at which CO2 levels begin to measurably impact human cognition.
… Loftness, who oversaw the GSA study, explained that CMU’s analysis showed that “humans are pretty good sensors of high CO2 levels.” Occupant perception of indoor air quality drops sharply as CO2 levels rise from 600 to 750 ppm.She is familiar with the recent work showing a direct link between CO2 and human cognition. She said of the original LBNL-SUNY study, “a seminal piece of work and a great research team.” She considers the Harvard study “an absolutely important study.”Loftness draws two key conclusions from these studies, her own work, and the vast database of scientific literature she has surveyed.
First, the immediate public health message is to increase ventilation and the use of outside air in buildings. And second:We have to do everything we can to keep outdoor CO2 levels below 600 ppm because something serious starts happening then.
No wonder AI is being sold as the “solution” to all our problems.
Human emotional limits
Growing levels of social inequality correlate with a rise in mental health issues throughout the population. The root cause may well relate to the formation of increasingly absurd group identities and associated signals of social status that make it acceptable to exclude the less fortunate.
From evolutionary biology we know that in-group competition has negative group survival value. Humans are using a diverse range of external and visible coping mechanisms for dealing with perceived, anticipated, or experienced lack of safety. The combination of early childhood experiences and individual neurology determines which coping mechanisms come into play in specific situations.
Additionally, the increasingly tangible effects of extreme weather events and ecological collapse are pushing more and more humans towards emotional limits.
However, emotional states such as depression and emotions such as grief have a purpose, they have evolved to force us to reflect deeply on our values, to shed internalised ableism, and to remind us of our capacities for mutual aid and creative collaboration.
The constraints of language and framing
Language and framing play critical roles for maintaining and breaking paradigmatic cultural inertia. A few examples illustrate how the frames of modern industrialised society perpetuate paradigmatic inertia:
International “trade agreements” – better understood as corporate rights agreements. This is the story of global economic warfare, how colonialism seamlessly morphed into neo-colonialism, and how corporate rights consistently over-power human rights in international trade.
Modern taboos – Yanis Varoufakis reminds us how the institutional landscape has engineered a frame in which Julian Assange’s release sets the precedent for further restrictions on journalism.
Perhaps less well recognised is the way in which the science of biology is affected by modern cultural framing.
Many biologists seem to be unaware of the impact of framing on their thinking. Our understanding of evolutionary processes – including the evolution of non-human cultures, is still very limited.
A somatic genetic clock for clonal species – The somatic genetic clock is applicable to any multicellular clonal species where the number of founder cells is small, opening novel research avenues to study longevity and, hence, demography and population dynamics of clonal species.
Framing evolutionary processes in terms of collaborative niche construction instead of competition remains an under-explored topic. The motivation for collaborative framing is grounded in what we are learning about ecosystems and what we know about the collaborative tendencies of human babies, for example the research by Michael Tomasello on The Origins of Human Collaboration.
Disability
Many with the neurodiversity and disability rights movement are familiar with the social model of disability and with the stigma associated with openly identifying as neurodivergent.
The internalised ableism within our society has multiple detrimental social effects beyond stigma, dehumanising discrimination, and widespread addiction to various forms of social power. For example, Covid continues to cause elevated numbers of hospitalisations, growing numbers of those who suffer from Long Covid, and elevated death rates.
Aotearoa New Zealand currently has more than 1,000 Covid deaths annually according to the published statistics, in spite of high vaccination rates. To put this number in perspective, this is 3 times the number of people that die in traffic accidents in Aotearoa. The risk of dying from Covid is roughly 1/2 the risk of death that motorcyclists expose themselves to voluntarily, but the risk of dying from Covid is largely a matter of public health policy and social norms, and not a matter of personal choice. The odds of acquiring Long Covid and long-term disability are much greater than the risk of dying from Covid, but as pointed out above, in the interest of maintaining paradigmatic inertia, the institutional landscape of the mono-cult has relied on framing to fully “normalise” all risks associated with Covid.
Downplaying the dangers of pandemics like Covid is one of the many consequences of widespread internalised ableism, consistent with the neoliberal framing of cultural evolution in terms of survival of the richest.
The current social operating system amplifies the influence of the opinions and whims of a few people (including algorithms that are designed to act as extensions of these people) by several orders of magnitude. At the same time these people are subject to the same cognitive limits as all humans – if anything they may lack sensitivity and self reflective capacities, not understanding that their influence, amplified to the scale of millions and billions of people invariably causes great harm to large numbers of human and non-human living creatures.
It is a form of collective insanity to allow concentrations of social power.
Within the institutions of a stratified society, the only people who are in a position to change the state of affairs are those few who currently hold positions of highly concentrated social power – but these people are in these positions because they are hopelessly addicted to the most dangerous drug for humans, namely social power.
Rehumanisation
In industrialised societies 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.
In his excellent book How Forests Think – Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human Eduardo Kohn elaborates how humans are not only part of an ecology of care, capable of nurturing relationships that extend far beyond humans, but he also reveals the fundamental patterns of semiosis and thought that are inherent to all forms of life, at all levels of scale.
The European conceptualisation of the individual human ego is a product of the misguided metaphor of society as a profit generating machine. A shift 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. Adaptive complexity saves energy – it is the result of humans engaging in collaborative niche construction as a part of biological ecosystems.
The delusion of control
Authoritarianism
The technocratic approach to “digital governance” across the Anglosphere is a good illustration of how to create an illusion of freedom and democracy by presenting the world beyond the ruins of empire as a “threat”. Here is a good piece of investigative journalism:
South China Morning Post columnist Alex Lo is one to have put the situation into stark relief.
“The West will soon be sharing their citizens’ biometric data,” Lo wrote. “If you already think China’s state surveillance is intrusive and dystopian, you have not yet seen the brave new world that is just over the horizon.”
Human scale ecologies of care
The Permaculture Designer’s Manual that Bill Mollison wrote in 1988 spells out the disease of modernity in very clear and simple words – and it offers deep timeless wisdom for co-creating living systems that are conducive to life, i.e. for collaborative niche construction. Bill Mollison wrote in a refreshing and life affirming way, not in any way deterred by the modern insanity he saw around him. From the many astute observations he made about industrialised society, to me it is obvious that Bill Mollison was Autistic. What’s amazing is how much ecological knowledge he was able to curate and pass on to future generations. Much of this he seems to have picked up very early, as a young person, growing up in rural Tasmania, in a richly diverse ecological and partially non-commodified context. A few examples of the down-to-earth principles and guidelines documented by Bill Mollison:
Principle of Cooperation: Cooperation, not competition, is the very basis of existing life systems and of future survival.
A Policy of Responsibility (to relinquish power): The role of beneficial authority is to return function and responsibility to life and to people; if successful, no further authority is needed. The role of successful design is to create a self-managed system.
Policy of Resource Management: A responsible human society bans the use of reseources which permanently reduce yields of sustainable resources, e.g. pollutants, persistent poisons, radiocatives, large areas of concrete and highways, sewers from city to sea.
Principle of Disorder: Any system or organism can accept only that quantity of a resource which can be used productively. Any resource input beyond that point throws the system or organism into disorder; oversupply of a resource is a form of chronic pollution.
Principle of Stability: It is not the number of diverse things in a design that leads to stability, it is the number of beneficial connections between these components.
Types of Niches: Niche in space, or “territory” (nest and forage sites). Niche in time (cycles of opportunity). Niche in space-time (schedules).
Information as a Resource: Information is the critical potential resource. It becomes a resource only when obtained and acted upon.
In our society the fiction of homo economicus manifests itself in the beliefs associated with the language of behaviourism, which exists in multiple dialects, and which has come to permeate and pollute many disciplines in the social sciences:
Leaders, authorities, managers, superiors, social power gradients
Life is a highly dynamic system. Reflecting deeply on the relational nature of life allows us to become reacquainted with human emotional limits. As was well understood by Daoist philosophers 2,500 years ago, and as reiterated by Bill Mollison in the foundational permaculture principles, powered-up relationships, including the cult-ivation of leaders are inherently incompatible with healthy ways of being human.
All social power gradients systematically dampen feedback loops, they constitute a collective learning disability. Economists Arjun Jayadev and Samuel Bowles describe the effort needed to maintain social power structures as guard labour. Guard labour is wage labour and other activities that are said to maintain (hence “guard”) a system. Things that are generally characterised as guard labour include: management, guards, military personnel, and prisoners. Guard labour is noteworthy because it captures expenditures based on mistrust and does not produce future value.
Note that the concept of a “flat hierarchy” is an oxymoron. Either you tolerate social power gradients or you don’t.
Available archaeological and anthropological evidence points towards highly egalitarian social norms within human scale (i.e. small) pre-civilised societies. In such societies social norms against wielding power over others would have allowed the unique talents and domain specific knowledge of Autistic people be recognised as valuable contributions.
In a psychologically safe environment at human scale (up to Dunbar’s number of around 150 people) the Autistic inability to maintain hidden agendas becomes a genuine strength that creates a collaborative advantage for the entire group.
Our society faces the unprecedented challenge of making a transition towards significantly different values within a single generation. This is the real challenge, rather than finding our way back to a state of “normal” that only ever worked for a very small minority. Here is a beautiful cosmolocal collection of voices from our friends at Local Futures from all corners of the planet:
The NeurodiVerse Days of Intersectional Solidarity – July 2024
The awesomeness of life lies beyond control. The NeurodiVerse Days of Solidarity offer a rich opportunity for omni-directional learning across cultures and geographies.
There is an urgent need to catalyse intersectional neurodiverse and indigenous ecologies of care all over the world. Neurodivergent, indigenous, and otherwise marginalised people depend on each other in ways that differ from the cultural norm – and that is pathologised in hypernormative societies. The endless chains of trauma must be broken.
The April NeurodiVerse Days of Solidarity catalysed a range of conversations, with many threads weaving through the topic of education. Several topics resulted in in-depth discussion and new emerging ongoing collaborations, which is beautiful to see. Changes towards a more egalitarian culture that deeply and fully appreciates cultural, biological, and ecological diversity are changes that improve the lives of all people, re-align humanity with our evolutionary heritage, and help us nurture sacred relationships beyond the human.
The quarterly NeurodiVerse Days of Solidarity offer a space for omni-directional learning in Open Space. The quarterly cadence provides room for distilling, sharing, and fermenting results between workshops. This article offers a synopsis of conversations in April 2024, as part of an ongoing Socialisation, Externalisation, Combination, and Internalisation (SECI) knowledge creation spiral. Important topics can be picked up again in July, with new energy and proper attention!
Many thanks again for all your contributions to this event!
NeurodiVerse Days of Solidarity – April 2024
The Autistic experiences of modern day colonialism
What can the Neurodivergent community in the West do to support healing?
The Autistic experiences of modern day colonialism. What can the Neurodivergent community in the West do to support healing?
Two experiences need to be highlighted:
That of the autistic observer
That of the autistic lived experience- the more important point.
The Autistic experience cannot be talked about without framing it within anti racism. DisCrit (Dis/ability Critical Race Studies) needs to be more widespread in our academic and professional fields.
Pathologization of neurodivergence and institutional racism in the context of identity and diagnosis (self or otherwise) can be considered as a part of neo-colonialism, in a similar way to the gender spectrum, which became a gender binary.
The persistent big differences in life expectancy between countries and between population segments tell the story of global economic wars – and they also include examples of countries with relatively low “economic performance” with lower levels of inequity and excellent primary healthcare services, where life expectancy is less than 5 years from countries with the highest life expectancy.
It is thinking about how we can meet people where they are at (means, spoons, etc.). I think it would be great (one day, somehow) to have a work group where neurodivergent people could regularly meet to come up with realistic mini actions for dismantling white supremacy. I’m doing a reading group right now, where the focus is prison/police abolition. It’s useful because there is discussion around how we can all take daily tiny actions towards this incredibly daunting eventual goal of abolition. An idea that has come up frequently is establishing communities of care, which is certainly something that AutCollab possess in spirit.
Industrialisation introduced an artificial distinction between “paid” work and “the rest of life”. This “great idea” has been exported globally and has led to many problems. It has meant that people have come to accept horrible conditions at work. I try to understand social problems in terms of how much out of sync cultural practices are with our evolutionary human scale heritage. For this I use a visual language for describing wellbeing.
Education and how disabled groups can work together
This is an important question that was proposed and a complex topic that we did not get to discuss in April. This topic weaves through many AutCollab articles, and through the lived experience reports and results that are emerging from our participatory research. The NeurodiVerse Days of Intersectional Solidarity could be one crystallisation point for intersectional collaboration. We are seeing it in the active conversations we are having around replacing / transforming the Western education system.
Nurturing diversity in humans and non-human nature – bringing the two together
How to find and create a network within my community after coming back from being abroad for 6 years
It’s not easy, I wouldn’t try directly to create a network. IMHO, I’d say you have to try and find an action that could reward you all, like organising a party, an event or simply an interview about an article you want to write. I think this last solution is a “good” one because it’s a case-by-case approach and each person will probably feel differently about your absence. Or maybe contact them one by one and check their reaction? Just to say that I’m an amateur when it comes to friendship.
One of the challenges most of us face is local isolation due to our relatively small numbers (we are a small minority) and due to the stigma and lack of active local support for Autistic community formation. Hence the AutCollab initiative to co-create centres of Autistic culture. I have since relocated to a smaller city, but this topic is on my “take action this year” list of things to do. I intend to start a conversation with the local council and the local library about this topic, and perhaps in combination with a local in-person NeurodiVerse Days of Solidarity event to get started.
Non-violent communication
I fell in love with Rogerian active listening, NVC, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen And Listen So Kids Will Talk, P.E.T. etc. When I started supporting other people in learning to facilitate Self-Directed Education for young people, I recommended that they also go study one or more of these. Some of them also found this enormously helpful. A few, did not. They told of bad experiences with these approaches. When I listened, I discovered that it’s not the tool you use, it’s what you do with it. All can be weaponised. Especially when a person already experiences challenges with formulating and expressing through the spoken word it’s so easy to use these styles to dominate from a place of ‘moral high-ground’. I started excavating for the common DNA behind these approaches. I call it Horizontal Communication. I like to say it’s not how you communicate, it’s why you’re communicating. Intent is key. Www.horizontalcommunication.org outlines the basics.
I’d love to hear from other people here what your own experience is/has been.
And have any of you encountered “Clean Language” facilitation?
This is such an important topic! I like to use the term De-powered Dialogue to refer to the kind of conversations and ways of communication that are needed for omni-directional learning and genuine compassion – the mutual deep desire to understand a precious living being. Let us compare notes. See these notes on cultural and psychological safety and this article on de-powered dialogue.
Yes, the intent makes all the difference. As Autistic people we communicate to better understand and help one another. But in powered-up industrialised societies we learn the very hard way that we live in a culture in which communication is often used for deceptive purposes, to the point where a leading “autism researcher” and no shortage of neo-Darwinian social scientists and biologists consider the capacity for “flexible deception” to be a foundational and beneficial human trait, no recognising that this capacity is largely if not entirely a product and symptom of a sick culture. This takes me back to the very first post that encapsulates the motivation for establishing the AutCollab.org website.
I looked up Clean Language. It seems to have some similarity with the techniques for creative collaboration. It works beautifully if people genuinely trust each other and are curious about the other.
Things get difficult as soon as social power dynamics are present or can’t be excluded, which, speaking from painful experience 🙂 is what consistently trips up Autistic people. As soon as one party feels entitled to some form of social power, communication seizes to be honest and transparent. Things get especially tedious when the other party(ies) openly reject being subject to coercive demands / techniques. Two AutCollab articles come to mind:
So far my ecology of care has mostly been limited to remote collaborations and 12 years of operating an egalitarian worker co-op where we share the burden of interfacing with the external world. This is an important piece of a much bigger picture.
I now live on a plot of land with two households that are collaborating on establishing a food forest, and I am learning a lot. My experience in this local aspect of ecologies of care is currently still less than 12 months, but I am immensely enjoying the experience. I love Vandana Shiva’s work, and I am delighted to now be in a position to put it into practice and adapt it to the local context. The egalitarian worker co-op experience comes in extremely handy. Now the learning can focus on the ecological aspects beyond the human.
Also, over the last 5 years or so, my focus has shifted more and more towards de-powering collaboration between human scale groups. We know how to operate small egalitarian worker co-ops, and we also have plenty of experience in interfacing with the powered-up external world. My learning is now centred around the question of how to help other small groups to transition to egalitarian worker co-op models or to catalyse the formation of such groups. We arrived at our specific worker co-op model 12 years ago as a result of another 10 years of learning from somewhat more traditional ways of operating, for example, in the early days we made the big mistake of thinking that a financial investor could help us become more established.
Now I am also interested in the ways of collaboration and non-monetary mutual aid that emerge locally, between households. This is so important. I see it as a way of incrementally and increasingly reducing the toxic levels of commodification and financialisation in our societies. These are active steps towards de-growing the “economy” and replacing it with an ecology of care!
The emerging threads of discussions this month prompted me to put together a curated list of public education resources that attempts to weave together all of the threads. Further links and insights shared in these conversations will find their way into future articles and into emerging ongoing collaborations between participants.
Questioning the neuronormativity of friendship. What is friendship for an autistic person?
I’d like you to answer three questions:
(1) What is friendship to you?
Thanks for opening up this conversation. This is a good question. I want to think, to be able to provide a succinct answer that also highlights the limits of what we can put into words. Linear language is such a limited tool 🙂
I can’t answer succinctly either, I’m using two approaches that (I think) complement each other to arrive at a vague definition: complementation through otherness -> the projection of the non-self, the satisfaction of implementing a collective holotropic understanding of the world, sustained in time.
This is about care and love as well.
But more simply, I use these words: otherness, non-self, collective, holotropism, joy, sustainable, care, love
(2) What is not friendship?
Individualism, reward circuit, comradeship.
I am not sure why ‘comradeship’ is excluded, as the word is somewhat synonymous with friendship?
(3) How does friendship with, or between, autistic people differ from neuronormative friendship?
I’m thinking about neuronormative expectations from the Western world. If you wish, there will be a second stage during which we will use your answers to guide the process of creation (to be defined collectively).
I’ve read a few academic studies but, unsurprisingly, they deal with what makes autistic people difficult friends. Further reading:
Changing the lived realities within children’s education spaces as a necessary foundation for cultural evolution
I’d like to discuss changing the lived realities within children’s education spaces as a necessary foundation for cultural evolution. I’m watching kids in Self-Directed Education grow up with substantially less trauma – it’s making a big difference. “Pathological Demand Avoidance” provides a litmus test for non-coercive education.
It took me ages to recover from schooling, and the masking it took just to survive. The SDE kids seem more authentic, seem to have a level of self-integrity I’m still acquiring in my mid 50s. My son just turned 18 and he’s already wiser than me in many ways…
I presume you are referring to approaches such as described by The Alliance for Self-Directed Education, right? This is very much the approach that I advocate. I went to school and university, but mostly I am self taught and have learned a lot by facilitating peer-to-peer learning, learning from and with others.
Much of my work with organisations within the so-called economy has been the context of collective learning. My role in particular tends to be one of knowledge archaeologist, facilitator of de-powered dialogue, and visual language co-creator. In this context typically I work with adults, with domain experts from various fields, who have come together in a transdisciplinary space to address a wicked problem.
Anecdotally, from my experience, looking back over 30 years, it seems many people within corporations and government departments have become increasingly afraid to share insights, ask uncomfortable questions, and talk openly about the limits of their knowledge and understanding, in line with what W E Deming was already observing in the 1980s.
I was not aware of the SDE Alliance. This can be helpful in our efforts to educate teachers and other educators. Many thanks! I have discovered the ecoversities network which aims to reclaim diverse knowledges, relationships and imaginations to design new approaches to higher education, which operates in the space of collective learning across all age groups, and is primarily focused on adults.
There are also valuable insights to be gained from various approaches to continuous improvement, especially practises that assist indoctrinated adults to relearn how to share knowledge and learn from each other. All such approaches involve getting people to temporarily pretend that social power gradients don’t matter. This observation led to the egalitarian neurodiventure co-op model and to the realisation that all forms of “powered-up” relationships are toxic.
Persistent Demand for Autonomy (PDA) is a healthy reaction to a powered-up traumatising social environment.
I am keen to learn from your experiences!
This is so fascinating as I had not known about this Self-Directed Education initiative, though its theory is at the core of the work that I do as a school psychologist. Thanks so much for sharing!! I find that SDE is highly in line with Dr. Ross Greene’s Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model: Lives in the Balance. I usually recommend its approaches when working with students who I suspect are PDA.
How would you say SDE differs from traditional Montessori schools? The impression I get is that Montessori schools generally still operate as regular schools under the illusion of self directed learning, whereas true SDE establishments truly focus on full autonomy without imposing an educator’s (or society’s) views during the learning process. Are outdoor or nature schools the same things as SDE? I am hearing about many “outdoor preschools” pop up all around my area.
I’m on the Ecoversities WhatsApp group but mostly lurking as my time is very full so I prioritise carefully – So far this space seems more promising, grin.
Montessori is what we call Progressive rather than SDE, and forest schools vary widely – some are SDE, some are not even Progressive. The bottom line is whether an adult is ultimately attached to their own idea of what a child needs to learn, or whether the adult is able to fully respect the child’s autonomy and step back into a genuine assistant role.
My younger child is a PDAer. My experience is that SDE is ethically appropriate and helpful for all kids, deeply liberating for Neurodivergent kids and 100% necessary for PDAers. The defining feature of SDE is not in the way the child learns e.g. curriculum, project based, free exploration or whatever. The defining feature is that the child is the genuine decision maker.
I love Ross Greene, although my experience is that PDA doesn’t respond well to any communication that is in any way formulaic. The principles need to be internalised and then the communication can be more natural. Even asking Whatsup can become a demand if used more than once.
Please send teachers my way if they’re interested. I make my living training adults in SDE Facilitation. Teachers have a harder time than non teachers though, as they have so much to unlearn, and they often struggle vocationally making the shift because they’ve often been attracted to teaching because they need to feel useful and central and it’s hard to become peripheral. Many teachers really enjoy the creativity that goes into getting a disinterested person to engage with prescribed content. SDE does not attempt, in fact carefully avoids, trying to manipulate attention.
Many thanks for sharing your experiences. Perhaps we can collaborate in educating teachers. One aspect we try to emphasise is that neurodivergence is not limited to children. For schools, providing a safe environment for all staff is just as important as providing a safe environment for the students.
The emerging threads of discussions this month prompted me to put together a curated list of public education resources that attempts to weave together all of the threads. Further links and insights shared in these conversations will find their way into future articles and into emerging ongoing collaborations between participants.
You make me wish I had more time to explore this rabbit hole. Thank you for this. I will dip in as I can and am saving links. Right now I’m figuring out effective emancipation strategies in the face of oppressive draft legislation around school education in South Africa. Everything you say in the article above applies…
Thank you so much for your thoughtful response. The article you provided was further clarifying, but I also found your distinction very helpful. I think you opened up a whole other rabbit hole for me to explore when I have the spoons so I truly appreciate that!
To one of your points about teachers having so much to unlearn, I find it is the same in the field of ABA, at least here in America. In addition to the need to feel helpful and need for control, I feel like a lot of ABA therapists also may be autistic themselves and perhaps make a living of how to help others like them. This is exactly how I would also describe my experience entering the field of school psychology. The problem becomes, however, that the systems we have in place aren’t complementary to these ideas we are talking about and so we are systematically training teachers and ABA therapists alike, who may have completely the right intentions, how to indoctrinate neurodivergent students into this transactional world that is not built for anyone except the privileged, truly. Public education was designed to indoctrinate, not to educate, so I am afraid as hard as educators might try, the system just doesn’t work.
Happy to discover there are several in my state and one SDE school in particular near me. I am currently working in public education to pay school loans but am constantly investigating alternate options given my skill set- I feel my job in general shouldn’t exist in the sense that special education should not have to exist (i.e. as in SDE schools), but I think there is value in identifying educational “profiles” with respect to identifying an individual’s needs and omni-directionally problem-solving (student learns from mentor and mentor learns from student) to navigate effective ways around barriers.
I find that the topic of PDA relates directly to The fifty-seventh chapter of the Dao De Ching. PDA can be understood as the result of our bodyminds leading us to the healthy insight of letting go of internalised ableism – to stop playing the [hypernormative social] game. This insight is very old. Yet it seems to be an insight that is missing, or at the very least subordinated to dogmatic, coercive systems of beliefs in capitalism and in many monotheistic religions. This chapter of the Dao De Ching is a beautiful reminder of human scale limitations, an antidote to anthropocentric myths of superiority.
I am host to a small group busy finalising a Declaration of Educational Rights that we started work on in 2020 and that I strategically need to complete this month, and one of the clauses to be written this weekend concerns neurodivergence. The placeholder so far reads:
“Article 7: Should deal with neurodivergence to be de-pathologised and neurotypical norms shall not be imposed.”
Your input would be welcomed. Please let me know if you’d like to see the full document for context.
Yes, please share details. The Design Justice Network is possibly related or a source of ideas for adaptation to your context of education.
Navigating the political research landscape, when you don’t have a map or a guide, only a moral compass
It will be valuable to hear first hand accounts from within the web of political constraints of the neoliberal Overton window academia. Because of the severe constraints, there is a need for independent research.
This is one of the reasons why ongoing AutCollab participatory research is so important. We are not institutionally constrained in terms of the questions that we are asking. We invite everyone to contribute and also to suggest useful questions and research agendas that are relevant for neurodivergent communities. At the same time we are open to exploring collaboration with aligned academics, on condition that AutCollab is the custodian of the research data, so that we can consult with Autistic communities when putting together a research agenda, before granting academic researchers within the established [neoliberal] system access to any data we are gathering.
The topics of omni-directional learning and conceptual framing are close to my heart. George Lakoff offers a good introduction to the role of framing in language and thought – please note that some of the linguistic examples of frames and metaphors provided apply to Western cultures and to the English language, they are part of WEIRD psychology and do not translate one to one to other cultures and languages.
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
Great examples of decolonising frames are found in the following episodes of The Moanan podcast, which acts as a bridge, connecting indigenous pacific knowledge holders and scholars to descendants of the Moana, living in diasporas today:
The (neo)colonial perspective denies the oneness of life, and relies on framing the evolutionary process of life as a competitive game, which culminates in an anthropocentric notion of progress, rather than in terms of ecologies of care beyond the human, which are part of a regenerative cycle of life bound by planetary biophysical limits.
Cultural framing determines whether competitive or collaborative motives are the primary drivers of social interaction, and by implication, whether competitive or collaborative motives are understood and treated as secondary drivers.
Anyone who has ever worked with agent based models and simulations knows that confusing first order effects and second and higher order effects results in radically different behaviours. Depending on which cultural framing prevails, and depending on the degree to which human collaborative tendencies and ecological frames are not only denied, but also actively discouraged and pathologised, we can distinguish four basic categories of human societies:
There is a good reason for ecology having become a discipline in its own right. To this day the dominant frames in the discipline of biology remain entangled with a paternalistic capitalist ideology. David Sloan Wilson has done some good work on multi-level group selection and dual inheritance, but he is still trapped within the Western frame of technological “progress”.
When you are doing the right thing for the earth, she gives you great company. – Vandana Shiva
Cultural framing and individual sensitivity profiles define the relative priorities of competitive or collaborative motives. The evolution of the human capacity for language and culture, as well as results from experiments with small children indicate that collaborative intentions dominate prior to socialisation.
Re-humanising neurodivergence
In times when social paradigms have become toxic, 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.
A♾tistic : Autistic, Artistic, and other ways of being that deviate from hypernormativity.
We are the utopian dreamers. The invisible pioneers. The vulnerable change-makers. The compassionate healers. We are the creative pathfinders. The quiet adventurers. The accidental discoverers.
Re-humanising learning
Conventional education ignores the priorities of basic human needs.
Conventional education aims to try and get the child to learn stuff, and then now that we’re focusing on getting the child to learn stuff we want to try and add some mental health stuff on top, where we kind of also try to make them feel a bit competent and have good relationships but that’s secondary.
Self-directed Education Works exactly the other way around: we start by focusing on meeting those core needs so that we have a strong thriving person because after that things tend to happen fairly naturally because especially with PDA there is that drive for Mastery that drive for competence um that desire to do things well and when there’s enough.
Within the neurodiversity paradigm PDA is understood as a healthy response to a hypernormative, oppressive (neo)colonial cultural context, it is referred to as a Persistent Demand for Autonomy.
CARDS = Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness, Dignity, and Safety
When these core needs of Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness, Dignity, and Safety are met for any human being, you’re going to have a state that is leaning more towards thriving, and to the extent that these core needs are not being sufficiently met, you’re going to have a person struggling no matter what their neurotype.
Within modern industrialised cultures, those with uncommon sensitivity profiles and a distinctly reduced capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance, especially over longer periods of time, increasingly receive pathologising and stigmatising diagnoses such as autism spectrum disorder, pathological demand avoidance, and oppositional defiant behaviour.
The key question: Who is benefitting from stigma and from labels that pathologise individuals? The obvious answer: Established institutions of social power within modern industrialised cultures – in other words, the institutional landscape that perpetuates (neo)colonialism. In this context the corporate neurodiversity-lite attempt of co-opting of the language of the neurodiversity paradigm reveals itself as an exercise in perception management, and as a tool for subordinating neurodivergent people to the oppressive system of control of the mono-cult.
Pathologising and dehumanising individuals for not conforming to the factory model of industrialised society has become a core practice of neo-colonialism, alongside the perpetuation of deadly wars, including deadly economic wars across the artificial national boundaries conceived by colonial powers.
Assigning pathologising labels to individuals allows the institutional landscape of (neo)colonialism to marginalise all those who openly resist subordination to the mono-cult, including those who are not already part a marginalised minority group or an “underdeveloped economy”. Modern hypernormative practices of dehumanisation are specifically designed for perpetuating social power gradients in a globalised world, irrespective of national boundaries.
Furthermore hypernormative practices and values in the digital era increasingly devalue all forms of biological life, and are deeply entangled with the goals of eugenics and the suicidal narrative of linear and ultimately unlimited technological progress:
Pathologising labels facilitate the “free” unlimited imposition of demands from self-declared cultural authorities on those who are considered insignificant by the mono-cult. In this context the institutional landscape of cultural authorities relies on the internalised ableism of parents, educators, and medical professionals to perpetuate the mono-cult. Internalised ableism is the Achilles Heel of the mono-cult.
Changes towards a more egalitarian culture that deeply and fully appreciates cultural, biological, and ecological diversity are changes that improve the lives of all people, re-align humanity with our evolutionary heritage, and help us nurture sacred relationships beyond the human.
I borrowed this fitting one-liner from The small things Manifesto, a work in progress, a living document, written and compiled by Andrew Roach. A quote from the introduction:
Many of the major technological and cultural innovations of the last several hundred years have served to flatten the world, eliminate or obviate distance, and bring us closer together as people. Printing, transportation, telephone, radio, television, home video, and the internet have each, in their own way, made our impact on the world bigger, and made parts of the world smaller.
But this came at a price.
Technology is not a net good, or even a neutral force. Technology is a Force Multiplier. It reshapes the world to fit the vision of those who design it, regulate it, and wield it. Oil companies poison our lakes and rivers, slowly boiling our planet. Facebook tracks everything we do online and uses that data to make us miserable. Disney owns an outsized portion of modern folklore. The FCC decides who gets to launch a radio station, and under what circumstances. Television turns reasonable people in to rabid fans of raving monsters, and turns raving monsters in to celebrities, politicians and thought leaders.
It does not have to be this way.
It is this way thanks to a combination of factors, most of which can be summarized as “The Profit Motive.” For some companies, making people angry is a surefire way to drive Engagement, and driving Engagement is a surefire way to make money. For other companies, the money lies in controlling our access to our own culture, gatekeeping who is allowed to tell stories, and when, and how. For these major corporations, there is no incentive to Help, to Improve. There’s no money in making the world a better place.
It will not be easy.
Most new technologies, but especially Digital technologies, experience a period between inception and corporatization during which they florish as a result of a bunch of disparate people with distinct goals who Explore the space that the technology creates, often without regard for profit of any kind, or at least with some motivation beyond pure profit. Then there is, usually, a period of contraction and consolidation around the things that have made the most money (or, in the case of television, have had the most Regulatory support from the corrupt FCC) and you’re left with HBO/DISCOVERY, Disney, Facebook, and Joe Rogan.
But we can reject the profit motive!
Local theater still happens, in spite of the fact that it stopped being profitable ~100 years ago. Local music still happens, in spite of the fact that only 1 band in 100 is going to make their living making music, and significantly fewer than that are ever going to Make It. Small creators make video games in their spare time because they enjoy it. Hundreds of people work together to run free and open alternatives to major social media networks, funded out of their own pockets.
Ars Enim Mutare; Art for change
These things happen in isolation, from creators who make things because the want to make things. They toil, often in isolation, for little reward. This is a call to action for solidarity, and support and intentional creation. We can reshape the world, and support one another as we do it. We can opt out of activities that enrich corporations that seek to make us suffer or to destroy us. We can (and must) become our own media.
Money and social power gradients are abstract cultural artefacts designed to defy compostability – social conventions that we can accept or reject, which are perpetuated by careless and learning disabled societies – creating conditions that are literally hostile to all life.
The main purpose of the traumatising indoctrination system of the mono-cult is to override the above fact with the myth that social power gradients are a law of nature and the myth that money is essential for coordinating human affairs in so-called “advanced” societies.
The best way to expose these two misguided myths is by providing counter-examples. There is no shortage of indigenous societies that had no need for money. If we look carefully, we can even find small scale examples that persist to this day. Similarly, if we care to look closely enough, we can find small scale examples of radically egalitarian societies that persist to this day.
Life creates conditions conducive to life. – Janine Benyus
This simple ecological truth tells us so much about life and about healthy life giving cultures. It encapsulates the observation that all living beings are compostable, integrated into the sacred cycle of life by decomposing into the building blocks of life.
Money as a social carcinogen
The global fungibility of money results in carelessness.
The notion that everything has a price and that everything can be substituted by an “equivalent” service is misguided.
We can’t survive without oxygen – oxygen and clean air are non-fungible. Polluted air makes us sick.
We can’t survive without nutritious food – nutrients are non-fungible. Junk food makes us sick.
We can’t survive without love and care – trustworthy long-term relationships are non-fungible. Social isolation and social power gradients make us sick.
etc.
Communal wellbeing is incompatible with the tradeoffs and social norms that emerge from engaging in competitive markets – especially in “free” global markets that prioritise the free flow of capital over all ecological concerns of the living world.
When the tradeoffs become invisible externalities, out of sight & out of mind thanks to global supply chains and 1-click® consumer culture, it is easy to become addicted to the convenience of money – to the delusion of fungibility.
Money is a non-compostable abstraction that violates the sacred cycle of life.
The abstraction of money creates an illusion of permanence that distracts from our impermanence, and from the wonder of being alive, the wonder of being part of the sacred cycle of life. The concept of money is entangled with:
An anthropocentric sense of superiority.
The denial of death.
The perpetuation of social power gradients across generations.
The construction of money as interest bearing debt turns it into a highly addictive drug.
The notion of interest bearing debt amplifies the non-compostable quality of money – it literally defies death – it grows automagically by design, and its growth is not constrained by any biophysical limits. Interest bearing debt:
Is at the heart of capitalism and the so-called economic system, which is anything but economising – by design it optimises for maximum busyness, for maximum consumption of energy and resources; it is addictive for culturally “well adjusted” social status conscious human primates.
Ensures that not only everything has a price, but that everything is available as a potential object for financial speculation – applying this idea recursively has led to multi-level financial derivatives, turning money into the most dangerous and addictive drug for human primates.
We have created a dystopian social world that is obsessed with “winning”, in which nothing is ever enough. The desire to win is not healthy, it is a deadly, addictive, and dehumanising collective learning disability.
The actual effect of the myth of meritocracy, which is used to normalise and rationalise head to head competition, is a consistent bias to over-represent capabilities, and to actively avoid thinking about externalities.
I recently read ‘The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations’ (Christopher Lasch, first published in 1979), written in the year when neoliberalism got “installed” by Margaret Thatcher in the UK, apparently a very popular book at the time. Our institutional landscape has learned nothing over the last 45 years. Below are a few quotes from the book. Nothing has changed:
Michael Maccoby describes the new corporate leader, not altogether unsympathetically, as a person who works with people rather than with materials and who seeks not to build an empire or accumulate wealth but to experience “the exhilaration of running his team and of gaining victories.” He wants to “be known as a winner, and his deepest fear is to be labeled a loser.” Instead of pitting himself against a material task or a problem demanding solution, he pits himself against others, out of a “need to be in control.” As a recent textbook for managers puts it, success today means “not simply getting ahead” but “getting ahead of others.”
He has little capacity for “personal intimacy and social commitment.” He feels little loyalty even to the company for which he works. One executive says he experiences power “as not being pushed around by the company.” In his upward climb, this man cultivates powerful customers and attempts to use them against his own company. “You need a very big customer,” according to his calculations, “who is always in trouble and demands changes from the company. That way you automatically have power in the company, and with the customer too. I like to keep my options open.” A professor of management endorses this strategy. “Overidentification” with the company, in his view, “produces a corporation with enormous power over the careers and destinies of its true believers.” The bigger the company, the more important he thinks it is for executives “to manage their careers in terms of their own . . . free choices” and to “maintain the widest set of options possible.”‡
According to Maccoby, the gamesman “is open to new ideas, but he lacks convictions.” He will do business with any régime, even if he disapproves of its principles. More independent and resourceful than the company man, he tries to use the company for his own ends, fearing that otherwise he will be “totally emasculated by the corporation.”
In all his personal relations, the gamesman depends on the admiration or fear he inspires in others to certify his credentials as a “winner.”
bureaucracy has made life predictable and even boring while reviving, in a new form, the war of all against all. Our overorganized society, in which large-scale organizations predominate but have lost the capacity to command allegiance, in some respects more nearly approximates a condition of universal animosity than did the primitive capitalism on which Hobbes modeled his state of nature. Social conditions today encourage a survival mentality, expressed in its crudest form in disaster movies or in fantasies of space travel, which allow vicarious escape from a doomed planet. People no longer dream of overcoming difficulties but merely of surviving them. In business, according to Jennings, “The struggle is to survive emotionally”—to “preserve or enhance one’s identity or ego.” The normative concept of developmental stages promotes a view of life as an obstacle course: the aim is simply to get through the course with a minimum of trouble and pain.
A warlike society tends to produce men and women who are at heart antisocial. It should therefore not surprise us to find that although the narcissist conforms to social norms for fear of external retribution, he often thinks of himself as an outlaw and sees others in the same way, “as basically dishonest and unreliable, or only reliable because of external pressures.” “The value systems of narcissistic personalities are generally corruptible,” writes Kernberg,
The cult of personal relations, which becomes increasingly intense as the hope of political solutions recedes, conceals a thoroughgoing disenchantment with personal relations, just as the cult of sensuality implies a repudiation of sensuality in all but its most primitive forms. The ideology of personal growth, superficially optimistic, radiates a profound despair and resignation. It is the faith of those without faith.
The upwardly mobile corporate executive “does not view himself as an organization man.” His “anti-organizational posture,” in fact, has emerged as his “chief characteristic.” He advances through the corporate ranks not by serving the organization but by convincing his associates that he possesses the attributes of a “winner.”
As the object of the corporate career shifts “from task-orientation and task-mastery to the control of the other player’s moves,” in the words of Thomas Szasz, success depends on “information about the personality of the other players.” The better the corporate executive or bureaucrat understands the personal characteristics of his subordinates, the better he can exploit their mistakes in order to control them and to reassert his own supremacy.
the successful bureaucrat survives not by appealing to the authority of his office but by establishing a pattern of upward movement, cultivating upwardly mobile superiors, and administering “homeopathic doses of humiliation” to those he leaves behind in his ascent to the top.
More than twenty-five years have passed since David Riesman argued that the transition from the “invisible hand” to the “glad hand” marked a fundamental change in the organization of personality, from the inner-directed type dominant in the nineteenth century to the other-directed type of today.
essential aspects of the new man: his eagerness to get along well with others; his need to organize even his private life in accordance with the requirements of large organizations; his attempt to sell himself as if his own personality were a commodity with an assignable market value; his neurotic need for affection, reassurance, and oral gratification; the corruptibility of his values.
Beneath the concern for performance lies a deeper determination to manipulate the feelings of others to your own advantage. The search for competitive advantage through emotional manipulation increasingly shapes not only personal relations but relations at work as well; it is for this reason that sociability can now function as an extension of work by other means. Personal life, no longer a refuge from deprivations suffered at work, has become as anarchical, as warlike, and as full of stress as the marketplace itself. The cocktail party reduces sociability to social combat. Experts write tactical manuals in the art of social survival, advising the status-seeking partygoer to take up a commanding position in the room, surround himself with a loyal band of retainers, and avoid turning his back on the field of battle.
Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It “educates” the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment.
As Daniel Boorstin has pointed out, we live in a world of pseudo-events and quasi information, in which the air is saturated with statements that are neither true nor false but merely credible.
The bureaucracy not only provides supposedly reliable information to high officials; it provides misinformation to the public. The more technical and recondite this product, the more convincing it sounds. Hence the pervasiveness, in our culture, of the obfuscatory jargon of pseudo-science. This language surrounds the claims of administrators and advertisers alike with an aura of scientific detachment. More important, it is calculatedly obscure and unintelligible—qualities that commend it to a public that feels informed in proportion as it is befuddled.
The degeneration of politics into spectacle has not only transformed policy making into publicity, debased political discourse, and turned elections into sporting events in which each side claims the advantage of “momentum,” it has also made it more difficult than ever to organize a political opposition. When the images of power overshadow the reality, those without power find themselves fighting phantoms.
On the margins of society the number of people who have serious concerns about the toxicity of money is growing.
A society that uses money never grows up, and remains forever ignorant of its limitations. Together with money, the notions of investment and philanthropy are also completely broken. By neglecting deeper analysis of the polycrisis, they contribute to the perpetuation of the problems caused by money.
In a social world in which everything has been commodified, for a number of reasons, phasing out the use money overnight is not a viable option – addicts are experts at kicking the can down the road. It is time to sober up.
Sobering up
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.
To sober up we need to acknowledge all our fears, face the pain, and turn fears into courage:
Fully letting go of the delusion of the self – exiting the cult of the self. This includes letting go of all the internalised ableism that permeates modern social norms, and weaning ourselves off all of the addictions that stand in the way of committing to sacred relationships within an ecology of care beyond the human.
Fully letting go of the 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.
One viable approach for gradually phasing out the use of money would be a collective social agreement to prevent central banks from “printing” further money, and to attach a negative interest rate to all money (debt) that is currently in circulation. Negative interest rates can not only catalyse urgently needed initiatives to reduce the human ecological footprint, they also significantly reduce if not eliminate the toxic addictive quality of money. The miracle of Wörgl, described in detail in Bernard Lietaer’s books, is a good example.
Within the S23M worker co-op, we also make use of negative interest rates to address temporary differences in cashflow needs between individuals that may arise due to specific life circumstances. The mechanism allows members to grant a ‘trust extension’ to a member with a temporary need for additional money. We use the term trust extension instead of ‘loan’ or ‘debt’, as there is no predetermined repayment schedule, and as the interest rate is negative. Those granting the ‘trust extension’ have trust in the recipient, and the negative interest rate eliminates financial speculation/exploitation.
When a currency with negative interest rate is combined with a policy commitment to prevent “printing” further money, the result is (a) a strong incentive for those who own financial capital to lend it to those who are working on important transformational initiatives, and (b) an incremental reduction of the money that is in circulation, eventually converging towards zero. The overall result can be understood as “composting” the money that is in circulation into life giving initiatives, with a number of benefits along the way:
Elimination of the impossible, cruel, and life destroying expectation of a positive “return on investment” on a finite planet within a social context of ecological overshoot.
Providing a gradual path for ethical entrepreneurship within ecological and biophysical constraints.
Providing time for people to (re)learn the art of de-powered dialogue, slowly reestablishing trustworthy relationships, even within societies that are currently plagued by high levels of inequality.
The incremental approach provides time to co-create and nurture de-commodified human scale communal social arrangements, thereby incrementally moving away from the social myopia caused by a one-dimensional anthropocentric metric.
The negative interest rate catalyses ‘trust extensions’ for ethical entrepreneurship.
(Re)localisation, as in the absence of positive abstract financial return, investors will benefit most from investing into local initiatives that tangibly improve communal wellbeing – including the wellbeing of the investor.
The above proposal may seem radical, but anyone who takes more than a few minutes to reflect will have to conclude that it offers an incremental pathway towards egalitarian human scale cultural organisms that is designed to not leave anyone behind. All we can do is sow seeds. We are not in control. We have to trust the big cycle of life that is far beyond human comprehensibility and beyond human control.
The biggest obstacle is the widespread addiction to various forms of social power amongst those who currently own financial capital, which in most cases includes an addiction to the expectation of monetary “return on investment”. This leads us to the need for composting social power gradients, which involves systematically tackling addictions to social power.
Composting power
Reducing social power gradients is at the heart of all social movements and at the heart of revolutions. Daoist philosophy offers the best advice on this topic that I am aware of. There is no quick fix. We are dealing with the toxic paradigmatic inertia of super human scale institutions, and with inmates who are paralysed by fear, and, to varying degrees, are addicted to convenience and various forms of social status within the social pyramid scheme.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ― Buckminster Fuller
Along the way we can offer palliative care to dying institutions, and advice on possible exit path for inmates who are ready to confront their addictions to the status quo.
Initial results from a survey on psychological safety and mental wellbeing indicate that the biggest fears of Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+, and Disabled children – and especially those who also belong to cultural minorities, relate to classmates, parents, and teachers. 97% indicate often or always having anxiety, and 80% indicate often or always feeling depressed. We are committed to gathering further data from as many geographies as possible. The data and lived experience reports will flow into our education courses for teachers, and will inform our advocacy work.
The results from our Feeling Safe Growing Up survey highlight that neurodivergent and intersectionally marginalised children grow up in a highly traumatising environment, and often don’t seem to have any genuinely safe and trustworthy relationships. The numbers are so staggering that they leave me speechless, they speak louder than words. And yet, they are in many ways consistent with my own childhood experience. Even the limited initial results are worthwhile sharing to encourage wide circulation of the survey.
This article presents participatory research data in a visual format, and provides context in terms of the demographics covered.
How safe do intersectionally marginalised students feel?
The vast majority of education professionals are ignorant not only about Autistic culture and Autistic ways of being, they are also ignorant about the prevelance of complex trauma amongst intersectionally marginalised people, including both students and their colleagues.
The data and anonymous lived experience reports on psychological safety during childhood presented in this article are the initial results from an ongoing survey.
Especially if you are part of a minority group, you can greatly assist our ongoing efforts by contributing your childhood experiences to our anonymous survey Feeling Safe Growing Up.
The results presented relate to all the responses received from marginalised population segments, 36 responses so far, with an emphasis on lived experiences in education settings.
If you are part of a minority group, you can also assist our ongoing efforts by contributing your lived experiences to our anonymous survey Feeling Safe.
Demographics
Geography
Whilst so far most of the responses received are from the US, an analysis of the the data set reveals that responses from other countries are very much consistent with the US results. It seems childhood experiences are very similar across Western societies, underscoring the hypernormalising effects of the global mono-cult. In this article we therefore only explore the aggregate numbers across all geographies.
Intersectionality of Autistic communities
The level of intersectionality visualised in this graph is consistent with the larger dataset from our survey Feeling Safe that covers the lived experiences of adults within their families and in other social spheres.
(Un)safety in different social spheres
These numbers need no commentary. Answers to similar questions related to adult lived experiences are visualised in the graph below.
The answers from students below should be alarming for all educators and teachers, raising serious questions about typical classroom experiences, and what if anything is being learnt.
How feeling unsafe is experienced
Again, the numbers above are noticeably more disturbing than numbers relating to the experiences from the lives of adults (in the graph below).
Back to the way in which neurodivergent and intersectionally marginalised students are experiencing / have experienced their childhood:
The numbers speak louder than any words:
Lived experiences from school and educational environments
What are the most important things you wished your teachers to know, respect, and do, when engaging with you?
Just because I was quiet and got good grades didn’t mean I was doing okay. I was horribly bullied and abused by classmates, and no one did anything about it. And I didn’t feel like I could speak up. I didn’t even know that was an option.
I wish there was more awareness and compassion towards mental health problems and what “high functioning” neurodivergence looks like. I wish teachers had bothered to ask about my home life and mental health rather than comparing my academic performance to other students’ and questioning why I wasn’t applying myself.
I wish my teachers had understood that I was not attempting to be disruptive when asking questions or raising issues. I wish they had treated me as a more genuine person, and as a person at all, instead of an obstacle.
I honestly wish teachers and professors knew that I may not always able to reach out for help. I wish they would react to signs of struggle sooner if even at all.
I wished I had been identified as Autistic in school and had received help then. I wished I had someone recognize I was being abused at home and helped me.
Saying “so much potential” doesn’t help unleash potential in any way. Forcing us to do repetitive work (multiplication tables in grade 9 math, for a real example) is intellectually stifling. When a child is performing poorly in school, and they test as very intelligent, consider whether it might not be the child at fault, but rather an educational system designed to teach by rote and not by understanding. Don’t incarcerate a child for giving literal answers. Don’t assume a child giving literal answers is trying to talk back. That might be an autistic attempt at complete honesty. (Unfortunately the police who need to know this are unlikely to understand.) It’s hard to overstate how much damage is done by criminalizing a child for autistic behaviour.
Abuse isn’t teaching. Asking for clarification isn’t insolence. Not wanting to engage isn’t ‘acting out’.
Just because the teaching and learning method you know is what you teach doesn’t mean it’s going to work for me and saying it louder and more often doesn’t change that.
i wish my teachers understood my needs when i was younger, and even now. even when i go out of my way to tell them about my conditions, which is already draining enough, they refuse to adjust, despite it being *documented* that it helps me.
Understanding how seriously damaging the bullying was and the double empathy problem.
I listen best when I don’t look at them. I need protection from bullies.
I was overperforming (using anxiety to get good grades and gain approval) and did not have a happy home life. I needed extra support with executive functioning and making friends. Just because I was quiet and “good” didn’t mean I wasn’t struggling.
I wish all professionals, whether teachers or medical, would accept the neurodiversity paradigm and stop pathologizing the existence of so-called “invisible minorities”. While LGBTQIA+ is a bit further ahead in acceptance than Autism, there are still so many problems there as well.
Be patient, and don’t yell at me or mock me. Don’t tell me “rules” that don’t actually apply to everyone because I will follow them forever at great personal cost. Intervene when you see bullying rather than expecting children to fight it out themselves. Don’t force speech.
I was a curious, inquisitive kid, and I asked a lot of questions. Sometimes teachers didn’t have time for to answer those, or they just didn’t have answers. That’s fine. Just say so. Sometimes they gave me non-answers, or were otherwise dismissive of the substance of my questions. That would really piss me off, and would result in conflict that was serious enough to make teachers quit teaching. So don’t do that. Just say you don’t know, or don’t have time to answer my question at this time. If you’re going to demand that I accept something, solely on the basis of your authority as a teacher, pupils like me will buck, and everyone will be worse off for it.
Have you had any traumatising experiences in school and other education settings that no one should ever experience? Please outline.
in grade school (middle school especially) i was constantly a victim of bullying which the teachers/administration did nothing to prevent. multiple times staff turned it around and asked if i had done anything to _provoke_ the bullying (once when i complained of bullying they even asked if i had been having sex with the bully, which was absolutely an inappropriate question and completely unfounded), and multiple times they told me they could either do nothing or suspend both me and the bully (usually i took this option, because it seemed better than nothing, and when i returned from suspension sometimes students/other teachers would ask why i had been away, and i could say i had been unjustly suspended and use that as a conversation starter to try to point out the systematic issues, although nothing ever seemed to come of that).
the trauma was more pervasive rather than any one incident. more the environment generally, especially the expectation to chase grades destroying long term motivation to learn
Yes. My bullies would torment me daily, making fun of me and various aspects of how I look or who I am. I was in survival mode all of my school years. Home was the only place I felt safe.
My baby sitter convinced me to stand up and tell my teacher I was being bullied. The bully’s teacher made me apologize for a *fake accusation* because “oh she would never have done that!” The accusation wasn’t fake. Trust broken. Completely.
I was assaulted on a school bus which was cheered and applauded by peers and ignored by the bus driver. I had sat in my normal seat, which someone standing in the aisle had apparently planned to sit in. I refused to move, and she attempted to force me. I was accused of plagiarism on my reading log by a teacher due to my extensive reading record. My physical appearance was publicly mocked by a teacher. I was in gym, so in the mandatory gym uniform, and another teacher came in and made fun of my legs, I believe something akin to “Now I know why you don’t wear shorts.” I’m sure there are others i’m forgetting at the moment.
Yes. “School” below refers to K-12. I was scapegoated and shunned in school. I do not use those terms lightly. Elementary school, teacher-led scapegoating ended after a couple of years but I remained a pariah through high school. Those traumatized me more than physical violence. I did not have a chance to develop socially until my 20s, when it was much much harder (probably because it was after neural pruning). At school, I was under constant, unending risk of violence from classmates. I was almost expelled for refusing to ever shower after gym class, but the walls and floor were concrete, and I was justifiably afraid of concussion and rape. I was the fastest one to get changed, too, because adults also avoided the change rooms, making them especially dangerous zones. At school, I was violently sexually abused (punched in the crotch). “Stand with your arms at your sides or go to detention” meant I went to detention instead of unclasping my hands, which I clasped firmly over my genitals for protection. At school, i was consistently told that my poor performance was my fault. For context, I tested several standard deviations above average intellectually, I was writing software in grade 3, reading before kindergarten, and reading at a university level by grade 7. School was prison, torture. Again, not terms used lightly. And being intellectually quashed was deprivation. It’s illegal to keep a child in a house’s basement, denying them stimulus, refusing to speak in their presence; it shouldn’t be acceptable to do so in a school basement. It is a quiet killing, a destruction of the future of that child.
Regular physical and non-stop mental abuse.
Often abandoned when asking for clarification or accommodations. “Figure it out what I meant or get an F. No I will not help clarify” – Ridicule and mocking from both peers and teachers when not understanding social contexts or apparently cultural touch points such as movies TV shows or books that I have not yet experienced or was not aware of. – Being grouped with people that are known for harassing autistic kids in the school.
My peers eventually bullied me enough, to the point i was both hospitalised for risk of harming myself, and then pulled out of the school. i don’t typically remember much, but i remember that night vividly. i’m still in distance education, and i don’t plan on changing.
I was emotionally and physically bullied to the point where I was having flashbacks by second grade and had all the symptoms of CPTSD by middle school.
One time i was asked to resolve a math problem that i did not understand in front of the classroom and the teacher made fun of me. It took 30 minutes before the teacher let it go, but he never explained. My classmates stood by my side though. Later i perfectly understood the math problem, it was the teaching method that wasn’t right for me.
I believe being unseen because of being quiet and a “good girl” was traumatizing. Especially in difficult subjects like math (I have identified as an adult that I have dyscalculia) taught by an unaware man who had no sense of how to handle children, very unaware of my struggles. I suffered in silence. I marked above that I was never angry and never had meltdowns and it’s important to note that’s because I wasn’t ALLOWED to be that way. I had to be good, and that was heavily encouraged by society, parents, teachers, and adults. It was the only way I could receive positive attention and not receive negative attention.
Being grabbed by classmates and having grass clippings shoved down the front of my shirt. Being unable to use the washrooms at school due to the sensory environment and danger of being attacked by other students and developing severe constipation for 6 years as a result; being too afraid of my teachers to ask to go to the washroom during class time in the early grades.
I shouldn’t have been mocked and othered for just being myself and getting excited over the things I liked.
Safety of work environments in the education sector
Our survey data on the safety of work environments is from an ongoing survey across all sectors of the economy, across a population of more than 329 workers, of which more than 10% identify as Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and/or Disabled, and of which 177 work in the education sector.
You can greatly assist our ongoing efforts by contributing your lived experiences to our anonymous survey Psychological Safety. We would love to expand our dataset to be able to compare differences between various sectors in the economy and between the lived experiences in different geographies.
Demographics
Baseline across all education professionals
The demographics of marginalising categories across education professionals within our database:
Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled education professionals
The intersectionality of marginalising categories amongst Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled people across the education professionals within our database:
How safe do educators feel at work?
Baseline across all education professionals
Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled education professionals
The lack of psychological safety of Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled educators underscores the lived experience reports from students. If teachers bully and mistreat colleagues from minority groups, what are the chances that students from minority groups will have positive experiences at school?
Further answers from Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled educators. These numbers are consistent with the datasets from Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled workers in other sectors:
Conclusions
Safety of intersectionally marginalised students
Across the board, most Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled students do not feel safe within their families, amongst their classmates, and with their teachers.
Prevelance of trauma
In our survey data, 92% of Autistic and otherwise Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled students often or always feel overwhelmed, and over 89% of Autistic and otherwise Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled students often or always feel misunderstood. Over 70% of Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled people often or always have at least five negative feelings, in addition to the above, feeling bullied, insecure, and disrespected. Furthermore over 60% often or always feel unsafe, and over 30% indicate that they often or always feel betrayed and abandoned.
84% of the Neurodivergent respondents to our Feeling Safe Growing Up survey identify as Autistic. This means that the demographics of our data show the large overlap and the intersectionality between Autistic communities, and the LGBTQIA+ and Disabled communities.
In our survey data 45% of Autistic students also identify as Disabled, and 61% number identify as LGBTQIA+. This means the majority of Autistic students are intersectionally marginalised. We are are part of an easily overlooked minority within the Disabled and LGBTQIA+ communities.
Given this context, it is no surprise that complex trauma is very common amongst Autistic students, and that this is reflected in our mental health statistics.
Our survey data indicated that 97% of Autistic and otherwise Neurodivergent students often or always experience anxiety, and 80% often or always feel depressed. 67% often or always suffer from stress related health problems, and 58% often or always suffer from burnout and insomnia.
The biggest fears of Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled students relate to:
classmates (78%)
their parents (64%)
teachers (58%)
In comparison, the numbers of those whose greatest fears relate to other social spheres are much lower:
healthcare environments (36%)
school bus / transport environments (25%)
unmet healthcare needs (22%)
siblings (22%)
friends (19%)
It is very clear that education settings are consistently experienced as highly unsafe by Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled students.
This is also reflected in the experiences submitted in the qualitative parts of our survey.
Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled education professionals
Many Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled education professionals often or always feel unsafe amongst peers, and more than 50% or more of Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled professionals often or always feel unsafe with their superiors, noticeably more so than their non/less-marginalised colleagues.
Across the board, the level of psychological safety amongst Neurodivergent, LGBTQIA+ and Disabled workers is much lower than the level of psychological safety amongst workers in general.
Next steps
Contribute to our participatory research
Participate in our anonymous surveys, submit lived experience reports, and encourage your colleagues, families, friends, and local schools to participate. Our surveys do not ask for the names of schools. We are not interested in ranking schools, we are interested in gathering country wide statistics.
Feeling Safe Growing Up – This 5 minute anonymous survey (fifteen questions) is conducted by the Autistic Collaboration Trust and is sponsored by S23M.
Feeling Safe – This 5 minute anonymous survey (fourteen questions) is conducted by the Autistic Collaboration Trust and is sponsored by S23M.
Regularly attend our education courses for educators
If you are a teacher or education professional, join our education courses for educators as part of your Continuous Professional Development (CPD) efforts.
Our courses are taught by neurodivergent educators, allow you to learn from our unique database of lived experiences, and provide interactive opportunities to learn from and with members of the intersectional AutCollab community.
