Social Rules, Autism, and Shadows — is transactional relating your big secret?
Imagine if, for your entire life, you were intensely focused during every social interaction. Like you were solving a maths puzzle. The puzzle you were solving? What the other person really felt.
Many people say one thing for their reputation, and it doesn’t always represent what they feel. I suspect that their audience infers the truth intuitively. It’s not taxing to figure it out. And the whole game takes place largely outside of awareness. At least that’s true for neurotypical people. For me, and other Autistic people, it takes concentration - effort. The whole thing is cognitive and conscious. And with all that effort on working it out, we have few resources left for strategy. For, um, how do I say this… for profiting.
We go NAIVEMODE™
Taking neurotypical people at their word has not served me well. I’ve been ripped off (to a huge extent) when buying and selling things "informally", like a car or furniture sale over the net. I’ve been slaughtered in negotiations with employers. I’ve been confused and bereft when explicit commitments from "friends" have been revoked without warning. And in the moments afterwards, making my stoopid face, asking "how could you?" the NT has dismissed me, typically by deriding my naivety, as if it were a crime to believe in their advertised generosity. When it’s a stranger who’s ripped me off, I have heard them spit the word "idiot" on their way out the door.
Even in cases where I concentrated, consulted, and planned the negotiations (because the thing was important or big), I've found afterwards that I have been played. Typically it felt at the time like all was well. I bought the charming pitch entirely.
In the card game called "bridge", we have swindles like these, whereby one player can deceive one or two others about their intentions, thereby sneaking through an unattended gate. Just like the real world, the swindles are intriguing, cute, clever, and reliant on the naivety of their victims. Unlike in the real world, however, when the bridge hand ends, the conversation is real and well-intentioned. There are no more lies. The acknowledgements and apologies are sincere:
SWINDLEE: "Oh I got played. You creep."
SWINDLER: "SUCKER! yep. I slaughtered you. Sozlol"
EE: "Nicely done. I feel like an idiot."
ER: "Thank you. And sorry."
It's all on the table now. In fact, it always was. The bridge swindle is almost always preventable if the swindlee considers all the facts and makes all the inferences at the time. This ain't so in the real world where the rules, and the cards, are not all explicitly known. Many of the rules seem to be intuited by NTs, but rarely can an NT say out loud what those rules are, and how they are manipulating those rules, and the situation, to their advantage. NTs can do the thing. They can't necessarily describe the thing.
For us Autists, I think it's the opposite. We can describe the thing, but we can't do it. We've been concentrating on it, trying to understand it, all our lives, so we really can describe the behaviours (and the "invisible" rules that go along with them) with some accuracy. But performing them takes an intuitive module we lack, or extreme masking skills, which are exhausting to employ. When we mask, we still fall short when it comes to self-interested game playing - our minds are occupied by following the rules, so there's not much cognition (nor desire) available for swindling. And hell, we assume people are like ourselves - attached to fairness, not winning.
Humans, NDs and NTs alike, will lament the transactional nature of some human relating. It is my contention, for which I make no apology, that this mode - the transactional mode - is at the core of neurotypical relating inside neoliberalism. Dazzle your victim with charm while you strip their savings account. Call it normal. It is lauded by market culture and packaged and sold by corporate enlightenment gurus. When the plastic-moulded breakfast TV host reports the story of a youngster getting played, but not destroyed, he tilts his head and smirks a little. His compassion is laced with a little mirth too. "Oh poor kitten" but with a wry curl at his mouth's corner. He's implying the kitten is young, she'll learn, but for now we laugh a little. Don't worry, the commercial break distract us before we ask why we're smirking. It's not that one human gaining advantage over another is funny and that is wretched. That situation has always been funny. It's just that when Shakespeare wrote that scene, the actors and the audience knew what they were laughing at. They knew that they were laughing. Not so much any more. Subliminal sadism is rife. We gotta maintain an image - to the world, and also to ourselves.
The cruel consequences of this - de-spiritualizing relating schema - have found their way to every nook of human connection; even inside the walls of nuclear family relations. Capitalism has forced it and I’m here to tell you, Autists are people who’ll see it and say it out loud. You hear us speak and feel uncomfortable. Get that discomfort out of your body by pointing at the speaker. Say something about them. Their tone maybe: "abrasive!", "rude", "tone deaf". I often hear people complain about my tone at precisely the moment I’ve pointed to their unconscious violence. Autistic people are roundly critiqued for their relating style. But our substance might be your salvation. To access it, though, you’ll have to notice that your discomfort with us is the clue. It’s not a clue to WhAt’s wROnG WitH AUtisTIc PeoPLE. It’s a clue to how the things we point out are the things you don’t want to hear about yourself. And it’s not just Autistics who will show you your shadow. It’s everyone who makes you uncomfortable. You already know why a homosexual is SO uncomfortable for the most deeply conservative of the religious right, right? Or why a proud black woman is too "loud" for your average white liberal? Or why a trans woman is such a trigger for "feminists" who have over-identified with the false binary of gender. We point to your mistake by simply existing. God forbid we should be loud and visible too.
Is this uncomfortable? Are you getting ready to junk this message right now? Instead, sit in it for a while. That's where the unlearning begins.
