A month back I listened and wrote about to Born Lucky, written by Leland Vittert, who is autistic. He was trained by his parents from a young child to operate in the regular world, without people making concessions for him. In order to do this, he had to learn skills that come naturally to most people, and set up early warning systems to make him aware of his own outlier behaviours. It wasn't an easy path, but nothing rewarding comes easily.
I am interested in autism, even though I believe that a lot a of the diagnoses made today are not diagnosing autism as much as they are identifying learned autistic traits and attributing it to autism. Similar to ADHD, I think that a lot of our environmental conditioning is changing our brains and behaviours to exhibit traits of a condition, even though the condition itself isn't the cause. But the reason I am more interested in autism now than I was earlier, is because after I had a stroke, my brain changed, as did my behaviours and in some way, I now exhibit some autistic traits, as well as some ADHD traits - but I have neither conditions.
I was reading an article today in the Australian news about how sexual assault is three times more likely for autistic women than others, largely because they are unable to read social cues as well, which means they can "trust" without seeing the red flags. And the fact is, that when people are gullible, there are other people who are going to take advantage of the situation.
And this highlights something that I have been predicting for the last decade or more, where I believe that the more time people spend on screens, the more their social skills decay. And in the case of young people, never get built in the first place. I have written many posts over the years mentioning things like how a lot of teens are unable to look even their peers in the eye, and are always looking over their shoulder for something more interesting. Or how people are only interested in their side of the conversation, failing to listen to the other. Or how the micro-expressions that we would normally learn how to read and navigate through social interaction, aren't being learned at all, because the screen doesn't show or do them justice. Even when real faces are used, the expressions are exaggerated and provided in closeup, but that is not the reality of everyday interaction. So, through environmental conditioning,
People have less ability to tell a genuine person from the disingenuous.
This means that people in general are going to put themselves into situations where they are going to be taken of advantage of in some way, with little chance of picking up on the warning signs. If people remember reading "Flowers for Algernon" at school like me, they will remember that the protagonist, Charlie Gordon, who was mentally disabled at the beginning, didn't realise his "friends" at the bakery were mocking and taking advantage of him. But as he got smarter, he was able to read the situation clearly and recognised they were not his friends at all.
As I see it, if we do not develop the social skills in our childhood and aren't exposed to a wide range of human behaviour, including the people we can't trust, who mean harm, and are looking to take advantage to meet their own desires, we are going to be at a massive disadvantage. While we can blame the perpetrators, they are also acting on their own internal programming, so being their natural selves.
We can't stop people from acting poorly for the most part, at least not before they behave that way, so we have to be able to mitigate the risk by improving our personal defences. Closing ourselves off doesn't save us because we have to interact at some point, so it makes us weaker when are forced into the situations. Which will lead to being taken advantage of, disappointment and suffering, and ultimately more fear created and reasoning why we shouldn't interact with others.
But most people aren't terrible people.
And good people are awesome.
So we have to learn how to effectively and efficiently filter people we interact with so that we are able to be relatively confident in our judgement. This doesn't mean "feeling confident" because everyone who was ever scammed has felt confident that it wasn't a scam, which is how they got scammed. We have to be able to accurately evaluate people through our interactions and recognise that if there is a sense of risk, it might be better to walk away or at least, be very wary.
I am not victim blaming, but people put themselves into some incredibly stupid situations that anyone with even a modicum of wisdom and foresight would not put themselves into. Yet, I think this is happening more and more today with younger folk, because they haven't learned the skills to interact with a wide variety of people. Which is again ironic, since they believe themselves accepting of diversity.
Developing social skills is on the job training.
We can read books on body language and physiological fallacies, but when it comes to skilled application for a situation at the right moment, it takes practice. But if we aren't practicing in the real world like we used to, how are we going to learn? And I think that this is a big factor in a lot of the unnecessary sexual assault and crimes of today, because people have become more extreme in their desires, more self-centred in their fulfilment, and less compassionate, whilst people have also become less skilled socially, less able to read people's intentions and more interested in getting what they want too. It is a set of conditions for some people to take advantage, and others be taken advantage of.
Autistic or not, if we want to live as free individuals, we also have to learn to operate in the conditions we have. Those conditions are not ideal for bringing out the best in ourselves, nor others. So we have to learn how to behave in less than ideal and often quite horrible conditions where there is a lot of potential for harm to ourselves. We can't just expect everyone is going to treat us well, because that is not the reality of the conditions. But if we act as if there is no risk and everyone is trustworthy, when we know that is not the case, we are putting ourselves in unnecessary danger.
We should live in a world where we can wear what we want, walk where we want and trust everyone we ever meet. But we don't. Behaving that way and believing it is up to everyone else to protect me, is inappropriate. Yes, we should protect each other, but we also have to learn how to protect ourselves. And the best way to protect oneself from a bad situation, is to avoid getting into it in the first place.
What do you need to learn?
Taraz
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