Autism

Did you do teenager k, work k, or spouse k?

I hope I won't be too long on the topic. This is an historical question.

Why it's like this, why are NTs deciding for us? It began in the Renaissance period with René Descartes. He was a philosophe and saw the human body as a machine. He wrote about this vision of the human. Each organ, muscle, bones are a piece of the machine. He did a direct comparison between the human and the material.

Later in the first half of the 19th century, an astronomer, and statistician had the idea to use statistics for human. Prior, statistic were in majority an instrument used for astronomy. Adolphe Quételet studied Scottish soldiers to make statistics of the human. He went further and did not only statistics on the body. He did statistics about injuries, body, and a lot more. With all of this, Quételet invented the average person. Without statistics, you can't have an average person. This idea is important for the following. It's also the key idea at the beginning of eugenic.

Someone was very interested in this topic. At the point, he coined the word “eugenic” itself. Francis Galton was the half-cousin of Charles Darwin. He came from a wealthy family and really like the work of his half-cousin on evolution. But, Galton wanted to apply it to society. He was also inspired by the concept of the average person of Quételet. Galton diverges of both of his predecessors. For Galton, the average person was not the person in the middle. No, it was the person at the bottom. There is a shift down compared to Quételet.

The poorer, the people without education, disabled, slaves, race shouldn't be considered with Galton. There were just this average for the one able to work and earn what they need to survive. The others were not even at the bottom of the social ladder.

People with education, wealthy people, were of course at the top of this ladder. Galton also believed in birth control based on the assumption of the categorization of the human. Wealthy should reproduce as their genetic was better.

On this base, Galton developed a lot of theories that we still use nowadays, and in particular in psychology and psychiatry. But, his ideas in pathology survived.

More general, some of his ideas and theories are still around. Eugenic was very popular at the beginning of the 20th century – Galton began his work at the second half of the 19th century. People founded during this time eugenic society, university cursus, etc.

With WWII, eugenic fall in disgrace. People working in the field made a shift in their career. They went to psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, sociology, anthropology…

In the 50s and later in the 60s and 70s, a new movement emerged with anti-psychiatry. In this ideology, you will find many points of view. They had and have in common that we should not intern people that aren't the average person, in other words the norm. Yes, the average person of Galton became a norm. If people are disabled, they don't produce anything and aren't included in the norm. They interned these unproductive people. Some went against it.

But, in one side of anti-psychiatry, you had people who think that people with psyachiatric issues were faking it. The idea is that people are lazy and invented their illness, condition, difference to do nothing. These people in anti-psychiatry wanted to close the asylums, so people will have to work. Spoiler alert: It didn't work, and people ended on the street or in jail.

But, all these people thinking people were lazy were in the normal at least. This scheme continued to today, and we end with NTs in charge of deciding...

I can only recommend the read of the book “Empire of Normality; Neurodiversity and Capitalism”, by Robert Chapman.

Use too much improper grammar and you're lazy and rude. Use too little and you're also rude.

Genuinely not sure what you mean by this.

It's rude to use "too little" improper grammar?

Where are you getting that from?

But to your main point:

Why are neurotypicals in charge of making up the social rules?

Why are you under the assumption that the social rules are something they all got together and agreed upon?

Social rules form over time in cultures, based on the interactions of individuals. It's part of the social zeitgeist. Neurotypical people make up the majority, they do the most social interaction, so the overall "rules" are formed by them.

You should ignore every single one of those people bitching about punctuation.

They are not in charge. It's just that autistic people sometimes take non-critically not even what they are told, but the situation and the emotion as something normal, because that other person is more social and knows how it is.

The rules are different for every tone, discourse, context, etc. Adjusting for one of them won't do much good even.

You won't ever lift the weight of adjusting yourself for such expectations well enough. Putting more trust in your own perception of what's rude and what isn't is the only way to deal with it.

I mean, probably a therapist would say that. Still ask your therapist and not Lemmy.

There are no official rules, we NT just kinda feel it, like a sixth sense and so because we are the majority and we share this ability no one is even aware of it consciously. How can you describe a sight to a blind person? It’s difficult at best and impossible at worst. It’s like an instinct. We can describe it logically but it will always be imperfect and not feasible at times

No one is specifically in charge of social rules. There are reasons why things are the way they are, and it seems common that geeks and people who have often operated outside of this system think that they can intentionally defy the social rules without consequence if they understand the reason for it and think they can compensate.

This sort of "social hacking" doesn't work because geeks don't fully comprehend all the reasons why things are the way they are and it ultimately blows up in their face.

Your friend sounds impressively tedious.