This covers NAT’s (neural a-typicals) from WWG part 1, or as they are commonly referred to in pop culture as “autists”, a generic catch all label opposite to “normies” and not autism specifically.
Interesting Times
One of Hunter S. Thompson’s more famous lines which I have used with some frequency lately as well as bastardizing in the subtitle for this post is “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”; and unless you’ve lived thru actually weird times somewhere you might not really get it. Its one of his more popular, and more misused lines—its just not something that is applicable to a Steve Jobs memoir in my opinion.
Weird times are transitional. Where things fall apart. Where society gets desperate for answers. And there is never any shortage of weirdos with answers. Ever.
What changes is society’s willingness to listen to them.
And we are living thru times that if we’re lucky enough to survive, we’ll look back on like George W Bush after Trump’s inauguration and say “that was some weird shit”. Now there are two primary drivers to our weird times; the systemic inequality baked into our political systems while transitioning technological eras, and the rapidly accelerating environmental breakdown from global warming.
The current state climate breakdown in the US is the mostly untold part of the story, and is largely absent from the national conversation which is sadly to be expected—if its not happening directly to the Eastern establishment—is it really happening? But what is going on to the Rockies to the Pacific is nothing short of biblical and outside of covering specific fires it is not even talked about. We’ve run dry.
Salt Lake City and Phoenix metro areas are both on the verge of collapse and will be the first to go without some miracle rain or human intervention. The entire west coast to the Rockies themselves is under exceptional, world ending drought. There is a well-established connection between excessive heat and violence, and the connection between drought and social breakdown—complete desperation is the exact same—just orders of magnitudes larger.
In this context it should be no surprise that places like Idaho and Arizona and the rest of the communities in the western United States are the latest battlegrounds of absolute insanity, and the outright embrace of theocracy in rural areas as they live thru what are end times—for them at least.
These are times as weird as weird gets, or as religious texts call them; times of false prophets.
Monkey Mind
The particular neural divergence I am the most familiar with is ADHD, and specifically ADHD combined with autism. It is in fact quite common for multiple conditions to be present in any given person and it shouldn’t be any big mystery why either—the conditions are hereditary and people self-sort with other people who “get them”. So you get a genetic cocktail of atypical sourced from both the mother and the father regularly.
My brother Zach, who is a few years younger than myself is such a case. He has a combination of conditions: ADHD-hyper type, a rare and debilitating type of autism, aphasia, and some others that I cannot remember off hand.
There are a couple of points to digest when it comes to understanding neurodiverse individuals, one is that most mature mentally at a significantly slower rate (high functioning ones often experience arrested development with early success), and they also do not process thought or think in the same linear functions that regular people do. For comparison, a lot of it more closely resembles artificial intelligence where the brain randomly compares a pool of possible outcomes no matter how bizarre or disconnected in reality they may be. The brain is constantly shuffling images, sounds, smells, random ideas in a head space where time itself disappears. There is also a strong desire for recognition from making a successful unexpected connection even though that most of them are trivial, wrong, or even harmful. Some while being completely novel--lack any utility, and on rare occasion one is revolutionary. Autists with the ability to filter these out are the ones we would consider high functioning.
Zach in particular was a slow developer, physically grew fast and seemed gifted right up until the age where he was supposed to start talking, and didn’t. When he eventually did begin to communicate verbally, it was very difficult for him, and once he had mastered a handful of phrases that got him the attention/response he was after he stopped learning new ones for quite some time. This was a form of arrested development, because once he had experienced the response from saying “I love you” that was virtually all he would say for ages. Decades later it was still a go to move of his for attention or trying to defuse a situation he had gone too far in.
There is this big empty hole of sorts, driven by an endless need for entertainment, attention of any kind, love, or recognition that the monkey mind circles back to on any removal of stimuli or onset of boredom. How this manifests is dependent on each individual, whether they’re ego or curiosity driven, intellectual capability, or if they have any autist savant qualities.
When Zach was pre-K age, before finding his ability to manipulate people into emotional mud puddles, his ability to entertain himself was limited given his limited mental capacity. This more or less only limited him to destructive actions or random violence in his search for attention and entertainment, even though he had little if any comprehension of his actions. For him, it was simply ‘these are the things I can do, these are the reactions I enjoy’.
The first thing he figured out he could do over and over and found endlessly entertaining at the same time was shattering glass on the concrete patio in the back yard. And he was methodical about it, naturally deploying the scientific process, mentally cataloging which dishes or glasses broke the best, and whatever other variables he could grasp. I don’t know how many jars and glasses my mom ended up buying during the phase, but I think the Ball jars she used for the jellies and jams she made in were either his favorite or just the most accessible—and it was never, ever safe to go bare foot in the back yard.
Ranking Rain Men
Once you’ve been around NAT’s long enough you start to recognize the behavior patterns in others, public figures, coworkers, former friends, it becomes a rolling epiphany of sorts once you “get it”. And if you were at all sentient during the Trump administration you’ve done been around them.
Trump displays a wide range of autist behaviors along with personality disorders, the most talked about being narcissism. It was also nearly impossible for anybody of note to mention his narcissism on social media without some clinical psychologist showing up in the comments screaming that you can’t diagnose somebody you’ve never assessed in person. Well bullshit to that I say.
Actual diagnoses don’t matter a single whit unless you’re trying to prescribe a medication for treatment. There’s a reason they categorize the disorders as cluster-b. Does it matter if he has autism, autism x ADHD, Aspergers, bi-polar, or any other condition? No. Not a bit. What matters is an individual’s configuration and the individual’s place in society.
We’re not trying to get this guy’s medication right; we’re trying to figure out how to think and deal with these individuals and for that we need a set of evaluation parameters. And it really is pretty simple.
1. Basic intelligence: straight forward here, regulates how much trouble one can cause for good or ill.
2. Disposition: well-meaning or malignant, will be some grey area here
3. Empathy/gifts: savant like qualities, exceptional abilities
4. Sanity: on the level or bonkers
5. Maturity: lost in Neverland to all grown up
That’s it. Rank these guys up like Pokémon; we’re not trying to fix them, we’re trying to survive them. That’s all the framework you really need to be able to mentally process how to think about and deal with these guys.
There will be some you cannot answer completely, like Elon Musk’s disposition for example. Is he immature and being manipulated or is he a full on Tankie apologist and ego driven fascist? We’ll never have all the answers there, but we can easily narrow it down to a couple contingencies on individual parts of the framework.
While trying to figure out disposition it can be hard at times to make distinctions between temporary autist rage and genuine malice. A lot of NAT’s conditions place a lock on ability or thought process that is probably best compared to a stutter and is a combination of executive dysfunction and learning disability in most cases. You can be dealing with a completely good-natured person who’s brain gets stuck like a manual calculator trying to divide by zero and spools out only momentarily.
Autists also tend to lack normal filters on what comes out of their mouth at any given moment, because the monkey mind spits out thoughts, thoughts, and lots more thoughts, at speed, perpetually. This is an important thing to understand also in determining disposition because the thought could in reality be something fleeting that just popped into their head, or something they’ve been chewing on resentfully for days.
Or it could be regular old autist oversharing, because oh my goodness do autists overshare. And its relentless. You might unknowingly be talking to an autist and say you like some random band, and the autist responds “OMG I love that band I have all their albums”. You maybe thought it was small talk or you were leading up to talk about this band and this guy just stole your thunder—'who TF is this guy trying to one up me straight away?’—While the autist is like ‘holy shit somebody likes the same thing I do!! Is this a new friend?’ But its an awkward encounter where the autist is left knowing they scared off another potential friend again with TMI in another botched social interaction.
Beyond those handful of quirks, there’s not much difference between determining an autist’s disposition versus any run of the mill person’s.
Very Ape
One of the particular things I get hung up on is how people think about empathy, as a word it simply means the ability to understand and share the feelings of another and yet when used it almost always carries the implication of caring and positive.
Once Zach was a little older, middle school age or so and had a basic conversational level vocabulary it became clear he had several savant like qualities and abilities—the most prominent being an empath. This ability however did not make him any Deanna Troi from Star Trek TNG, it was purely for his own amusement in manipulating other people.
It’s a game where he probes the target with questions and gestures, mimics body language, repeats your responses back to you, reads your expressions and the slightest muscle twitch in your face is all the opening he needs to strike. It is an absolute mind fuck when he is dialed in on you.
In my opinion this is the first place to go in trying to understand and evaluate Donald Trump. Trump and my brother in fact have several parallel tracks but this is why I mentioned how people think about the word empathy. ‘Don’t you have any empathy??’ As is having empathy could be equated to actual sympathy.
Donald Trump is an empath, and Trump DGAF about anybody. It’s a weapon in his hands. If you feel the need to explore this idea just throw some of his rallies on and watch his interaction with the crowd. He’s constantly probing them, test ballooning new material, gauging reactions, improvising new material on the spot based on reactions—fully engaged with the crowd. He’s fleshing their innermost desires out.
It was some time before I made the connection with Trump and Zach, and I should have made it sooner to be honest, but it is as clear as day to me now. Trump goes up on stage and starts dropping glasses on the ground and seeing which ones get the best reaction when they shatter. The words coming out of his mouth mean almost nothing to him, he will and does say anything. The message changes to the crowd’s whims.
That’s where regular people and traditional media get hung up, he’s saying this about Mexicans or this about democrats, and then the words get analyzed. It was a vibe to him, and a vibe to them. Yes the words have meaning and the words are dangerous--the ones that stick become more than vibes, but the right operates on emotion and set the table for a savant to walk in usurp the whole thing.
So is Donald Trump evil? I don’t even like to think about it like that anymore; he’s clearly a below average intelligence individual with a malignant disposition using his empath gifts without any care for the consequences. He’s very sane but when it comes to maturity level; "When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different" we have a clear case of arrested development.
Another gift of my brother’s was the ability throw rocks or other assorted items with uncanny accuracy, like strike me in the head from 50 yards out without thinking about it if he caught me with my back turned or coming around the corner unsuspectingly. I’ve got no idea what kind of arm Trump had but given his record of throwing rocks at a toddler in his younger days I suspect this also tracks. Zach simply had no comprehension of what it felt like to get tagged in the head, mostly because even at four years younger than myself he could out-range me substantially. Was young Trump any different? Its really hard to say but I suspect that it was the same as Zach, the reaction to violence was the objective of the violence and any injury from violence itself was collateral damage. It’s a hard concept to truly grasp.
Arrested Development
Now taking a look at the villain du jour Elon Musk, we have a case who is probably the most clear cut and severe case of arrested development ever seen in public life. Not only is he an absolute man child, he is also a degenerate gambler and huckster and perhaps the perfect living embodiment of the Simpson’s monorail man.
Musk has over the years created a reputation as some kind of tech wizard, genius engineer, business prodigy, all the way up to savior of mankind. He is of course none of those things but the illusion helped him become the richest man in the world parlaying ground floor tech companies while running pump and dump schemes on twitter. Which he just bought and over-paid by approximately 20-30 billion dollars for.
The twitter deal itself sets up and interesting decision tree in trying to come up with an accurate evaluation on Elon’s autist qualities. His Aspergers is well documented and is in fact the root of Elon’s confidence game. Circling back to the AI qualities of autist monkey mind and the “out of the box” connections autists regularly make; Elon has managed to create an aura of genius by combining theses abstract thought processes with a child’s reading of bad science fiction and his autist skill for manipulation.
There is only one conundrum to evaluating Elon and that is just “exactly how bad of faith” are we talking about here? We know that with previous projects like the Hyperloop or Boring company he’s acted in tremendously bad faith, these projects merely existed to kill off mass transit in California and make himself more money. The Boring company does have potential to be something useful if it could manage to dig holes as fast as Elon’s mouth.
The twitter sale sets up an interesting pair of potential possibilities regarding Elon’s fidelity & disposition. Because the motivation could be tremendously insidious or merely an episode of childish recklessness. While Elon on one hand is a malicious actor akin to Zorg from the Fifth Element, he’s also equal part Zoolander with a big empty hole inside of him that all the attention in the world cannot fill.
In the first scenario, Musk himself has been manipulated into purchasing twitter at a greatly inflated price while exposing his other business dealings to jeopardy in the process. Here we had Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey both encouraging Musk to buy twitter, along with a long list of right-wing agitators and his Saudi and Crypto backers were likely part of the push as well. Here Musk is being used for the “wrecking ball” role Steve Bannon that describes as Trump’s in service of the fascist right.
Twitter in scenario one is now Musk’s personal clubhouse where he is the “chief twit” and gets to play out savior fantasies directing society into a glorious techno-utopia while safeguarding internet and tech-bro culture from the wokes, prudes, and evil governments.
That is what the whole “free speech” thing is about for the better part of the online hoi polloi, yes there is a state sponsored hybrid war being waged along with white supremacists who are trying to take advantage of the situation. But for your average gamergate tech bro they just want to shit post their politically incorrect little hearts out and being performatively offensive is both the beginning and the end of it.
Its an arrangement where a generation of lost boys gets to play out their own Lord of the Flies fantasies in Elon’s digital Neverland where speech is can do no harm, all real-world negative consequence of said speech are absolved by uttering “just a prank bro”—a magical digital Hail Mary for our era.
It is an impossible dream rooted in the same nostalgia Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is, except instead of pining for the white picket fences of boomer utopia, they long for the original anything goes chat room days when people still used Netscape, and nothing was too outrageous because none of it had filtered thru to the real world yet. It was in a way innocent fun, well—as innocent as trying narcotics for the first time could ever be.
Twitter in scenario two is much less forgiving to Musk’s reputation. He is an active participant along with his Saudi and Crypto financiers in an active attack on the rule of law and the nation state model of government that guarantees our freedoms and way of life. Here he isn’t a useful idiot for Putin but a co-conspirator pursing the same international right-wing agenda of destroying the United States in all but name, while stealing the world’s wealth. Here his timing of the purchase is to run interference and shape public opinion post-election when the republicans are engaging in ‘stop the steal’ 2.0 and usher in a single party state. Where the single party happens to be a criminal enterprise.
That is not even a little bit hyperbolic either, if you understand the fascist movement and what crypto is, and how twitter will be used to promote crypto. Everybody knows the story of Jesus and the money changers in the temple—a den of thieves—well crypto is the ultimate money-changing scam. The whole purpose of creating a competing ‘hard money’ private currency is to crash the dollar and force the world to liquidate their property for pennies on the dollar to the holders of the new currency. Because burning coal while running server farms in China for a decade entitles one to the world’s wealth evidently. The goal is to take everything you and yours own.
Regardless of whichever scenario describes Musk best, the situation is untenable for twitter’s future. What twitter is and what Musk envisions it as, is something that cannot be. Twitter cannot be a wire or PR service for government or corporate officials at the same time MAGApatriot69420 is going on about the Jews and the platform itself is a weapon aimed squarely at said governments. It will be radioactive.
Additionally, the whole affair it has revealed Musk to be wildly incompetent and shattered the illusion of his genius. The emails between himself and others from the Chancery trial reveal a bunch of guys just winging it. Degenerate gamblers without a care or concern. Musk has at best, a slightly above average intelligence level—his autism is part of the con itself.
His first week at twitter has revealed that his other businesses are run in an equally reckless manner. The pay for verification plan appears to have had zero forethought, and if it did the forethought was sabotage. It is users from outside the app bringing their already established credibility into the app that makes it work. The quality of this idea is on par with Zuckerberg’s metaverse project and if implemented as planned currently (without verifying ID’s no less) the site becomes a platform organized around fraud. Again, radioactive—credible users cannot associate.
What he’s doing is turning Twitter into an OnlyFans and ad platform of sorts, and maybe that was the point. To destroy the utility of what had become a tool for the public to resist right wing authoritarianism. It had actually evolved into something akin to a digital public square, so he bought it and is snuffing it out. That is the generous version based on competency, the more critical one is y’all are going to die on the trip to Mars because Elon gets bored on the way there.
Autist Games, Autist Prizes
What I have been ultimately trying to get across throughout this post is there’s no point in wasting time trying figure out good/evil or a deeper meaning, that kind of certainty is impossible. So much of this chaos is generated purely from boredom and insecurity. Just as I said ‘by definition normies are not special’ in the previous post on identity, autists KNOW they’re special. And if I’m so special why is nobody paying attention to me???
So the brain is constantly focused on ideating things to get that attention. Parlaying whatever worked the last time I got attention with it into a second act and beyond, and chucking rocks at somebody might be as good as it gets for some. When something stops getting attention they can either move onto a new game or escalate the current game (this is where most autists try and pick up a guitar or any other activities they can peacock to).
As I got older developed interests above his comprehension level my brother’s own game became “try to injure Marginal” as violence became the only sure-fire way to generate reactions. He had already put me in the emergency room with severe injuries by 2nd grade iirc. He would get me, I would retaliate and take counter measures—it was the only game he could play with me, or anybody really.
The counter measures ranged from barricading my bedroom door at night or taking round about out of Ichiro level arm range and accuracy paths. And once that play was taken away from him he had to find a new angle and that typically meant experiments with new weapons. You guys are not ready for this. It does not stop on its own. You gotta put the brakes on it.
With Zach it climaxed when he escalated to 8” chefs knives when I was in high school. The first time he was waiting for me in the kitchen standing by the knife block I ignored him and walked right up to him--he had to think about trying to get the jump on me by the time I realized what he was up to. The second time the knives came out of the block the second I turned the corner into the kitchen and were incoming hot a moment later.
But here’s the thing, the counter measure for that was ‘gotta have a 20 on Zach’ before ever going into the kitchen again. Like, this bullshit is for real your fuckin life now. If you’re feeling lazy, you gotta weigh how much you want that glass of milk vs potentially getting stabbed. The autist will play up to the highest skill level game they can be competitive at while generating sufficient responses of attention (it truly is the game and not the money, I assure you). In the end after the game had escalated to mortal danger with Zach the only solution was to respond with overwhelming ‘attention’ at smaller provocations.
And when one of their games get a foothold in society—gains network effects; a critical mass of normies organized around greed, fundamentalism or whatever becomes wrapped up in the outcomes of their games—the games must play themselves out. Positions have been taken, people are exposed and now its up to luck, goodwill or an overwhelming response to stop it. Chat room shit posts now keep score.
The current game revolves around the early stages of the information era, and assholes trying to game the ground floor of the next human reality as per every single other gd time in history we’ve done this. The weapon of choice, disinformation is born of the same mother as “all cruelty springs from weakness”. It is literally shitting in the pool so nobody else can swim.
The dis-ingenuousness of their bullshit is its superpower, they can maintain a fantastical world of make believe where they are the victims of the elite’s conspiracies, while carrying on endlessly about violent delights—yet the moment one of their followers steps forward to make one of those delights reality—it couldn’t possibly be one of innocent old us, the elites are framing us again. But then after the dust settles they of course had it coming anyways. This operating system is just one big autist game, and the fact is that any game need not have any grand agenda behind it beyond watching glass shatter on the patio. And while you’re trying to fact check their last move, three more glasses have already been broken.
Autist games are the very essence of Calvin ball. You might win a hand or two playing along, but the rules will change, or if the autist thinks he’s losing will just start a new game while you think you’re still playing the old game. The fact is that you’re engaged in games against devoted game players who make the rules up as they go along and who’s primary motivation is to amuse themselves. You can. not. win.
You can only change the game. And you can only change the game by placing outside constraints on what games can be played. Normie society will continue to get “owned” by mass distribution of disinformation until it can first digest that it is playing an autist game, and then figure out where it can place constraints on the game itself.
That is a lesson every era needs to learn on its own, as technological shifts or environmental changes alter the existing social contract or balance. It’s the essence of bad actors trying to game new systems as discussed in the first WWG post. Its why we had inheritance taxes, ridiculously high top marginal tax rates, and anti-monopoly laws that the authoritarian right has sought to eliminate. Because while its easy to argue these measures are unfair as the right has without fail since Eisenhower left office, they are check valves on individuals accumulating enough power to upend collective society and wreaking the kind of havoc we’re currently living thru.
When the reward structure in existing systems get wildly distorted, guardrails within institutions get broken down it only incentivizes bigger and bigger bets. The republican party spent decades building up their red state machine through state houses, gerrymandering and stacking the bench—a true political juggernaut. And then one day some autist rode down an escalator and took it from them. Everything will be stress tested by autist games at some point in time, and the GOP folded instantly in theirs.
Standard boiler plate resistance to this is the capitalist argument that risk takers need to be rewarded, but as the current day clearly demonstrates, risk taking is hard wired into human DNA. Trump and Elon will play every card they’re dealt until there are no more cards to play. For Zach, his game was over the day I got dropped off at Uni—and his attempts at finding a new game did not last long as the two even younger siblings could not in any way hold their own physically against him. It was an untenable situation and he became a ward of the state shortly after.
Just keep in the back of your mind the main point of this game being played by the new-right, alt-right, authoritarian-right, fascist-right, libertarian-right, Christian-right or whatever they’re calling themselves; at their core they are the very same kind of monarchists the United States was founded on rebelling against. The autist’s who’ve taken command of the game; their end game is a new age of digital Kings and Queens unbeholden to any nation state, who are free to play their games regardless of consequence to their own unending amusement.
this was the most personal and hardest thing I’ve written to date, thanks for reading
Fascinating take; I agree with the majority of what you've said. This country is absolutely brain-broken, and half of the electorate literally votes against themselves/progress; it's insanity.
Grew up with a sister like this, bear the scars. I get it.