Initial Notes on Autism

Autistic man is overspecialized man. He appears in the more recent vintages of the human. He is so overspecialized as to be unable to survive on his own, and is a product of man’s ever increasing domestication, his subservience to specialized technologies and the social structure that emerges from them.

The autistic is the unintended consequence of man’s commitment to a particular metaphor and myth: the individual, ultra-competitive, hyper-rational economic man; a man modeled upon the computer; a man who being perfectly rational exists anonymously in the aggregates of the central planners.

The body is all he is. He experiences no “inner-life.”

He is artifice, the development of a culture’s worship of science and the computer, and the use of technologies to handle greater and greater amounts of information processing. Man has begun to resemble his technology, to merge with it, to become the artificial intelligence he endeavored to create.

He does not have an appreciation of music, though he may very well be able to perform it in a mathematically rigorous way.

He understands little of art or literature, or anything of a qualitative, non-technical quality.

He does not have empathy. He does not feel the emotional or physical pain of others. Indeed, the other as other consciousness, does not exist for him.

He does not understand the idea of a mother and father or the family. As such, he is unable to receive their gift: he cannot understand what is given, he cannot understand cooperation.

His inability to reflect upon the other, the consciousness of the other, the other’s perception of him, disconnects him from other men. Thus disconnected he is without self-consciousness beyond the rudimentary recognition that his body is his own and that others are other bodies.

Autistic man has broken the bounds of empathy and cooperation and the gift. Without consciousness of others beyond being bodies necessary to his survival, or the carrying out of a particular task, he is without consciousness. He is conscious of others only in so far as his needs and desires require others for their satisfaction.

He does not know that he will die and is unequipped to consider it. He does not comprehend the death of others in a way meaningful enough to consider it a possibility for himself.

He is incapable of boredom. For through boredom man experiences the extremes of self-consciousness and the consideration of death.

His emotional life is severely limited. His fear is limited to the fear of injury to his body, the only aspect of himself he is conscious of.

His recognition of his parents is limited to his need for them. He recognizes them because he needs them.

He can be said to be exclusively concerned with himself and therein lies his absence of consciousness. For consciousness exists in so far as it makes reference to other consciousnesses. A man’s recognition of other consciousnesses provides him the framework for the understanding of his own--his being self-conscious.

The appearance of autistic man heralds the gradually evolving disappearance of consciousness in humans.

Autistic man is not found to be excessively skilled economically. Indeed, the hoarding of wealth interests him little and he understands almost nothing of taking economic advantage. His interests and ability, when present, are with the code of technological life.

Technology allows for the continuing domestication of man. He is both a product of and reliant upon the technologies that compose his environment.

Technology both makes autistic man possible and allows him to live, to thrive in fact, in a society increasingly technologically focused.

Autistic man’s favorite color is green.

Autistic man finds inspiration in trains, in watching and listening to them, and in train schedules.

Note on States and Systems

In places where a Western-style State does not exist there is still order be it the order of warlords or tribes or families. Appeals have been made to a large State as a means of protecting a population from the aggression of other States, and there would appear to be some truth to this. For certainly a State looks to procure for itself and its moneyed interests the assets and resources of weaker states, when it is expedient, through war or trade. The question of how a population without a State would protect itself would appear to be an important question.

But does the State really protect its population, safeguarding the country's resources for its people?

In Colombia, for example, because the domestic corporate elite remains underdeveloped, the State has aligned itself with foreign corporate interests to develop and take to market the country’s abundant raw materials. In doing so Colombian politicians have enriched themselves and no doubt provided employment to Colombian workers. But the greater part of the profits from these deals leave the country to foreign corporate interests. Has the Colombian State failed or succeeded in protecting its population?

The American State differs from the Colombian in that its privileged corporate interests are for the most part domestic ones, and, additionally, that it is better equipped to use war, treaty and tariff to promote those domestic interests. But both the Colombian and American State make the argument that their alignment and privileging of certain corporate interests is ultimately beneficial to the populace at large. It is the oft-made argument of a kind of trickle-down economic effect, one in which the immediate (and measurable) economic benefits to the ruling and corporate elite are argued to far outweigh the negatives for even the poorest of its citizenry. It must be noted that these secondary, trickled-down economic effects are mostly difficult to measure.

Indeed much of the American economic success can be attributed to a State highly skilled and committed to promoting its corporate interests abroad and working with other, comparatively weaker States, often with lesser developed corporate elites, to extend American corporate interests. The American State is the best among the State agents of plunder and it is no coincidence that it is backed by the world’s most powerful military (as well as an expansive prison system).
_______________________________________________

Larger systems are constructed upon injustices. In dealing with aggregates, macro ideas, and anonymous others, the large system is unable to respond to the injustices committed against the few. It is only the threat of violence from those that maintain the larger system that contains those against whom these injustices are committed from rising up against it. A strong military is thus essential to the larger system, as much to deter violence from within as from without.

By contrast, within smaller systems, a family or small village for instance, any injustices are addressed immediately by the elite of the smaller system. One does not easily or profitably take advantage of one’s neighbor without consequences. Hence, smaller systems are more easily changed for the benefit of their membership and, indeed, smaller systems do not require military power to deter violence from within.

Additionally, the smaller system is more robust than the larger. In the case of its breakdown the effects are limited to a smaller number of people. The members of the smaller system are less specialized than those in the larger (with fewer members they are required to perform more tasks) and are thus less system-dependent and more able to survive should the system collapse.

Much of the larger system's power derives from that one cannot say exactly what it is.

My Ugly Nigger

Because it is not simply to explore her firm large ass and well-hanging breasts, the nipples dark and large, but it is her moans, her whispers, and then she moans more loudly and begins to say these words to you, one after the other, as if a kind of code: mi amor, mi corazon, mi cariño, mi cielo, mi vida, and then when you smile at her she calls you "my ugly nigger" (mi negro feo), a term of great endearment. Then more moaning, and exploring her dark swarthy body, sweaty now and pulsing, looking up at you with those almond shaped eyes of hers, set just so far apart on her face as to make you crazy to look into them, and she inspires you deeper and deeper inside her, she grabbing your ass and pulling you in not letting you out, not even to pull back to thrust, your bodies crushing together. Then you struggle away and turn her around to have that big, smooth, tanned ass from behind where you can control it and shove into it and her groaning increases and more and more and si papi si Papi Si and then you both lay back, you having spent it all, it all gone now, something empty and peaceful, a long grassy Wisconsin field in the spring, the tall pines moving just slightly in the high wind and the dew drops on the grasses. Mi amor, you hear. Mi corazon. Mi cielo. Cariño mio. And you are coming back now from far away, and she is there again, stroking the head of your cock in a hotel room in Bogota.

Bulletproof

Today in Bogota the sun was out and it was blue and warm, the mountains visible high behind the city and I walked up the calle from the hotel. I took a tinto at a café and then continued through Chapinero past the little shops and restaurants and street vendors, and along the route of the Transmilenio, until I reached Miguel Caballero’s bulletproof clothing store on Calle 71, no 15-28. The door is kept locked and an attendant in a black bulletproof vest opened it for me. Inside the clean, bright shop two women at the counter asked what I needed and I explained I was interested in both motorcycle clothing and bulletproof garments.

A small woman guided me to the motorcycle section where I tried on a number of jackets of a durable synthetic material. These jackets were implanted with hard protection on the elbows, shoulders and back. There were various colors other than black and some fit more snugly than others against my body. She showed me to the mirror and we both marveled at how well the jackets looked on me. All were quite affordable at prices around 300,000 COP.

Then we went into the bulletproof section and I tried on the jackets there. There were many wonderfully designed jackets and pants as well as boots and other protective wear and I wondered if this tiny woman who was assisting me had upon acceptance of employment with Miguel Caballero, donned a bulletproof jacket and allowed herself to be shot in the chest with a handgun. I had read that a condition of employment, including that of his lawyers, was a personal trial of the bulletproof qualities of the garments.

I helped the little woman hang the last jacket up on the rack and I thanked her and explained I would most certainly be returning to the shop. I thought the clothing, all from the design of Miguel Caballero himself, was both expertly made and fashionable. She smiled graciously and told me she would be at my orders upon my return.

Social Construct vs. Hard-Wired

3. What they call “hard-wired” is just a “social construct” that has existed for a long time; that has been repeated many times over, with slight variation, in many successive vintages of man. It is what comes to be encoded most deeply in a man's genetic memory and institutions. What is hard-wired was constructed and subsequently refined and repeated by man's ancestors over many generations.

4. What they call “social construct” is an institution or value that has appeared more recently, usually defined as being in opposition to what is “hard-wired.” It is a conscious attempt at remaking or correcting man so that he may live within some new myth or value.

6. Some want to denigrate the so-called social construct, saying that it is not how things have been. What is hard-wired has existed for longer and is thus truer and more authentic, they say. Their's is a conservative attitude: the conservation of the past. Furthermore, many of these conservatives argue that man cannot be changed in any meaningful way from those values characterized as “hard-wired”. But man is an animal with consciousness, and with consciousness any sort of overcoming is possible. Though, verily, what is oldest is only overcome with the greatest difficulty.

11. Man can overcome himself with new values and new institutions, and he may very well carry out a program to reconstruct his society. But the resulting transformation will be far different from that which he intended. Indeed, the restructuring may result in a new generation of men hard-wired for something entirely unintended (autistics and the obese are prime examples). For it is both man’s privilege and curse to be conscious of his own development and to reflect upon it, and sometimes to actively fight against it and remake it.

19. Indeed, those that encourage the distinction between social construct and hard-wired fail to recognize that a man's genetics do not reveal themselves in the absence of the institutions they were charged with responding to. For genes and institutions require each other for their expression. What is hard-wired emerges over time from what was socially constructed.