My Autism

I have autism and I am uncomfortable talking about it but it is for all the reasons you might not expect. A part of my reticence to divulge that I am autistic is because the term is very broad in meaning and not well understood biologically or socially. When I tell someone I am autistic they do not know what that means about me nor do they know what response I expect of them in return for my revelation.

The other part of my discomfort with the subject is that I feel like a fraud. While cultural perception is changing the view is still largely that autism is a disability. This is not an unfair view to have as for many that is exactly what autism is, however there are the lucky few to whom autism is a gift. I count myself among the lucky ones and feel as if I am being disrespectful to those who struggle with autism when I say that I have it also. It is confusing for others as well when they see people requiring life long care due to autism and then are confronted with someone like me using the same descriptive term to describe themselves and so I don't often bother.

Better terminology would be a great help in this matter. I have tried using phrases like “a little bit autistic”, “high functioning autistic”, or “on the spectrum” to better describe my condition but these feel just as ambiguous as well as attention seeking and pompous, and so I gave up trying. Mostly now my friends and family will break the news to any new person on my behalf which saves me the awkwardness. Usually however they are doing so in an attempt to calm down some social faux pas I have made! “Oh, don't mind Nick, he isn't being an arsehole, he is actually autistic.” Once you know me a little bit it is much easier to put the term “autistic” in an appropriate context and not have it either be meaningless or misleading as it is when you have no knowledge of my character.

I only discovered I had autism in my early twenties (about ten years ago) and have not since bothered to get diagnosed, both of which facts exacerbate my feelings of being a fraudulent autistic person. A diagnosis is only needed if you wish to get care, indeed the fact that I don't need any care means I wouldn't get a clinical diagnosis. This is all well and good, I don't need care and so not being able to get a diagnosis so as to obtain care implies that the system is working as intended. The problem is that while I don't require any care I do require understanding. By having the system not really recognize those who don't need any care they perpetuate the social perception that autism is exclusively a disability.

As the general aim seems to be getting autistic people out of care and into society it seems a little odd that most of the studies into autism overlook those who have managed to avoid needing care themselves. I have been very lucky in a number of ways, all of which have greatly helped me to get along in society. I can easily imagine that by changing the conditions of my life very little and nothing about my autism at all that I could have wound up being a far greater burden on society. I hope that by writing my experiences of growing up with autism and finding my place in the world I might help those without autism to understand it a little better and those with autism to perhaps find some idea as to how they might cope better.

I am overly confident, indeed arrogant in many ways. So much so that a teacher told my parents this at a parents evening when I was about eight. They didn't like her or care very much but did relay the message to me none the less. I was oblivious to my arrogance or its affect on others at that time. I really benefit from being told things, they are not obvious to me. I knew that arrogance was not socially acceptable but couldn't make the link to my behaviour. Once pointed out that I was arrogant I could observe that trend in myself and rein it in. I am no less arrogant now that I was then but I have learned how to filter it out or counter it with humility in the few things I don't still think I am amazing at. This is typically how I have learned to fit in with others, by someone eventually disliking me enough to honestly point out my flaws so that I can realise them and address them.

I spoke of filtering things out, this is something I think neuro-typical people do automatically. My filter is manually operated and requires a lot of effort to work, not to mention a lot of mental engineering over the years to craft it. I find that now meeting new people or formal social affairs very draining as those are the occasions I am operating my filter at full. When I am relaxed around people I know and am comfortable with my filter is off and I speak my mind. I am very good with animals and attribute a large part of that to having the default state of no mental filter. I find both animals and people trust me readily and again I attribute this to being able to operate while fully expressing what is one the inside.

The day that I learned I was arrogant was the day that I started to build my filter. I was only really aware I had been doing this when I learned that I was autistic and therefore probably not alike to other people in how I saw the world. I figured everyone consciously had to work at not saying something offensive or inappropriate. It is like having to check down a list of things in your memory every time you use a new word or phrase in a situation. I am fully aware that I can come across as very stupid if I am caught off guard by a question or comment. If I have no past experience of how to respond to something that I can draw from, or even if I'm not very mentally astute due to something like just having woken up and thus am unable to recall those experiences I have had that would help then I can flounder for words and appear to shut down.

My filter is greatly refined compared to how it was by the time I discovered I had autism. My better understanding of myself has aided me in being able to compensate and improve my filter however it is the help of others, mainly my partner, in informing me of the way they perceive things and me that has helped. Essentially the most helpful thing in my being able to get along in society was having someone by my side to tell me not only when I am being an arsehole, but also why and their “normal” perspective on my actions.

Socially I am still rather clumsy and the further you go back in time the worse I get at an increasing pace. Oddly my arrogance to the rescue again as it provided an unusual defence mechanism for my poor social skills. I was quite able to loudly take control of a social situation and become the centre of attention. This is a trait I very much acquired from my mother. The trick is that by controlling the whole situation you never have to interact with anyone. If you are disrupting the whole class by putting on a clown show or playing up you become an actor or entertainer to be watched. It gives the appearance of interaction but is devoid of any complex things that I didn't understand or required too much effort to master. As soon as dealing with other people become too much I was off doing something unorthodox or radical taking the attention away from me and onto my actions. I fall back into this habit quite readily when drunk but otherwise tend to take a more recluse approach to not having enough energy to deal with a social situation these days.

At school I was not popular, the unusual things I did, coupled with repugnant arrogance, awkward social skills and an alarming tendency to speak my mind even when I thought little of things all contributing to my popularity. To say I was bullied would be misleading, being fairly big and growing up in a fairly nice area meant there was basically nothing physical that came my way I can recall. There was plenty of verbal abuse and exclusion however this was something most kids get at some stage and something I thought I largely brought on myself, even at the time. I gave as good as I got and the difference was I sincerely believed what I was saying which tended to give it more weight. I vividly recall getting some grief from my peers and the teacher for replying to one of the less intelligent people who was calling me a boffin that I would rather that than be thick like him. I was surprised at the condemning response of everyone else, I thought I had replied in kind and was being as fair as one can be in an insult slinging contest. It was experiences like this where people actually informed me of when my actions are unacceptable that gave me a reference frame or check-list of how to go about acting in future.

The abuse I got made me fairly thick skinned but it rarely bothered me that much. The other kids didn't like me very much but then I didn't like them very much so that all felt good and reasonable. I have always been perfectly happy entertaining myself and in my own company with just my thoughts. I didn't really form any proper friendships until I was about 13 or 14 with anyone my own age. There were a few older kids who I found fascinating that I hung around with but at school in my own year I didn't have friends as I would define it. I found I naturally ended up with whoever the next least desirable person in the room was and sort of out of expectation I would find myself doing things one does at school with them. These relationships were volatile, there was little understanding between us and I am sure I was very mean to many of those people I spent time with in my earlier school years. I think I attracted other outcast types at school because I seemed to revel in the abuse, if I was with someone else then I would be getting the abuse and who ever I was with was getting respite. Another fantastic irony that my greatly dislikeable nature made me attractive to certain kinds of people. Even when I started to get what were more ordinary friendships I still got loads of abuse from other kids. I likely brought it on myself more as I felt more secure in having real friends. What I didn't realize so clearly was that people didn't always see things like me, I assumed my friends felt like me and I was generally surprised to find them unimpressed with me giving abuse to people they were friendly with. This mostly caused problems in group situations, which I still struggle with to this day. One on one I can interact fairly well with people but in a group, particularly one with unfamiliar people I am inexperienced and prone to doing awkward things.

As well as older children I found I got on well with girls when I was younger and had more kindly relationships with them. Girls mature faster and although I was very immature I was drawn to the mature. I also think that girls are less mean to boys than boys are to boys which meant that there was less often abuse to start escalating and reciprocating. I attribute a large part of being able to form friendships with my peers to having shared interests. Before I had any real interests of my own I was only drawn to people who I found interesting and this was typically the different, the mature and the experienced. It was not until I had my own interests in things that I had any common ground to interact with people and it was not until I was old enough to be afforded enough independence that I could really acquire my own interests.

Interests are hugely important to me even now as a mechanism to interact with people. I can talk to complete strangers about some topics indefinitely however I struggle with small talk and basic interactions with people I know well. I am a massive gamer, I always have been and probably always will be. Games have rules and are highly specific. I can easily describe, discuss, analogize, break down and explain things like games. This gives me a firm bedrock by which to interact with people who share an interest in one of these kinds of thing. Science is another example of an interest I have that I have little difficulty using as a tool for discourse.

My first proper equal friend was also a gamer and a scientist. I learned from him that your interests converge on a focus when you have someone to share and expand on them with. Broadly we both just liked games but because we were friends and played them together we wound up liking and playing a lot of the same games. This further helps interaction as you will be more likely to share more interests with more other people via this sharing and focusing process. Also as you age more and learn more about the world while gaining ever more independence you gain access to greater pools of people who share your more obscure interests.

The main game in my life has been the trading card game Magic the Gathering, or as large portions of my peers would call it “Tragic, the Saddening”, some jokingly, others more seriously. It was one of my older friends that first showed it to me and at first it was just a game much like any other. Unlike the others however I discovered a somewhat small and underground community of players. Basically none of my school peers played Magic and so I had these two separate worlds. Of these worlds the Magic one had some strong appeals and I would periodically plunge myself into it when the other was not so pleasing.

The Magic community is more like a weird family unit than a group of peers. It has a range of ages and people look out for each other and support each other. The local games shop people will all lend each other cards and organize a car pool to go to tournaments. The older people will look out for the younger ones, the experienced players will mentor the newer ones. It is not all happy families but it is far more noticeably a community than anything school or working life ever offered. The main thing about the Magic community is that they all speak Magic and are interested in Magic. This meant I could go to a huge social even full of loads of strangers yet have no anxiety about the required social interactions. I could go to new places and meet new people with guaranteed common interests and I could do so relaxed and as myself. I did not have to act up or become the centre of attention to avoid interaction. I did not need to go over in my head every possible iteration of events that could transpire over the day non-stop beforehand because I knew I would be able to wing it so to speak. Because of the older maturer elements of the community I would frequently be told how to act better rather than simply being ostracised by the group. It so many ways Magic has helped me find my feet in the world. I still tend to relate real life situations to potential in game Magic situations simply because I understand things so much more clearly in those pure logic terms.

Gradually through a process of trial and error as well as seriously taking on board any genuine criticisms of my person from others combined with a diversifying range of types of social interaction I became a more socially acceptable person. By about sixteen I was starting to get a little interest from the ladies and by about eighteen I had managed to stop rubbing people up the wrong way as a matter of course should we not have much in common. I was fairly reasonable in one on one situations from quite young but had been so bad in groups that I was politically very toxic to be attracted to or be friends with. I often felt let down or betrayed by people I liked when they wouldn't back me up in my disputes with others. This was my fault for failing to realize my own confidence in conflict and comfort in being disliked by others was a not something many people shared. I am not sure if it is a result of receiving much hatred and abuse over the years or part of the autism that has made me not care what people think of me if I don't like or respect them. If I actively dislike someone it seems logical to me that their dislike of you is a complement of sorts.

So at eighteen off I went to university because that is what all the people my age that I knew were doing. Armed with my new ability to not offend and given a clean sheet in regards what people thought about me after having gone to school with me for the past twelve years I was fairly adept at making new friends. What I soon discovered was that most of these friends were just so because of civility and circumstance. All we had in common was age and location and for a short while this is enough. I had fun, I learned about people and things and places and I made and lost a lot of friends. None of them were painful or sudden loses but gradual drifting out of each others lives. Shared interests are important in a friendship as they offer activities to pass the time together after all that is to be said at that time has been said. Shared interests are not enough alone, they allow you to be with someone for long periods of time but they don't (presumably obviously to most of you) necessarily make for good friends.

What I found more and more as I lost friends that those that I was keeping were those who shared more that just interests with. They shared the same sorts of values and perspectives as I did and they were those who I would call genuine or true to themselves. I spoke of filters and how I manufactured one to keep all the offensive thoughts from getting out. This may make it seem like I am not a very genuine person however I would contest that this is about as far from the truth as possible. I am very much the same on the outside as on the inside regardless of the level at which my filter is operating. While I filter many things out I am manufacturing nothing new, all of what comes through the filter is real pure unadulterated me. When I am at formal situations and my filter is working at full capacity it is not that I am not myself, I am just an overly restricted and confined me that I do not much enjoy being. I am less able to express myself while the filter is at full.

All people have filters that they use in varying degrees however some people have masks as well. A mask is like a filter except that it also manufactures output that is not true to what the conscious feels. These masks are used for a wide range of things from coping with and or hiding from insecurity to being more effective in certain job roles. Not all masks are bad however none of what I would call my good friends ever wear one when they are with me. I struggle enough with working out what people think, want and feel when they are being honest to me. When people are disguising these things by use of personality masks then I really struggle to know how to interact. I can now recognize many kinds of mask people wear and the reasons they are doing so and although that helps me understand their motives it does not help me interact with them in a way I can generate any affection with.

Although I have been able to curtail many of the annoying things I might say through experience I have been less able to do the same for all of my actions. I am hypersensitive to things, it seems like a ludicrous thing to say because I have absolutely no idea how anyone else feels about their sensory inputs. I am exactly as sensitive to things as the only experience I have of how sensitive one can be towards things! Tapping, dripping, poking, flashing, beeping, ticking, loud, bright all have strong negative connotations for me. It is not uncommon to find that I have buried a ticking clock in a huge pile of clothes to muffle it. I usually wear a hood up while I am out and about and mostly it is to shut out much of the light, noise and visual spread so that I have less to process. Simply going a place I have not been to before I a draining experience as I am hoovering up all these new senses and committing them to memory.

Although they seem like quite different kinds of filter I lack not only the one to stop things coming out of me but also the one to stop things coming in to me. I have an eidetic memory which is sort of like what most people think a photographic memory is. My brain doesn't seem to bother filtering out the irrelevant data from the senses and just saves it all to hard disk. I can fairly vividly picture in my mind, much like a film reel, any place or event I have been to. I can draw reasonably accurate floor plans of buildings I have been in (each room). I cannot glance at a page in a book and then read that page in my head with my eyes closed. What I can do is return to a place in a book for some quote or detail with great ease just based on the shape of the words on the page. I can picture exactly in my mind where the thing I read is located and find it again.

There are some perks to this kind of sensory set up as well as some drawbacks. I don't get lost but wind chimes make me want to do bad things! I am used to living as me and so both perks and drawbacks are just normal to me. The important thing to do is find suitable ways to exploit the perks and to circumvent the drawbacks. Again, finding out I was autistic made me realise that there were some more fundamental differences in my perception of things which allowed me to better use and/or compensate for them. Had I been diagnosed earlier then perhaps I would have been able to start adapting sooner. Perhaps I would not have been mature or self aware enough to use that information wisely any earlier than I got it.

The biggest drawback to taking on all this information is that you fell like you are an old computer with too many programs running. You can freeze up every now and again, you can become intolerably slow at certain tasks. I feel like I am a vast database with huge hard disk storage capacity but only accessible via a cruddy slow old processor. It is very nice to have a great memory, it makes learning all the more rewarding but it is also tedious becoming tired just visiting some place new or being rendered incompetent by something as simple as a beep. Again, I am used to these things and so the thing I struggle most with is explaining this about me to others. It even sounds ridiculous to me when I give the reasons I do or don't want to do something.

I often wonder if my not knowing I was autistic all throughout my childhood and education was actually a great aid in my coping with it. Obviously I do not suffer the more prohibitive aspects of autism strongly which is the main factor in my being able to get along in society autonomously. If I had not been measuring myself against normal people while growing up then I might not have bothered learning many of the interactive tricks that I did. I might have just used my condition as an excuse to act differently and be a more difficult person as a result. I think the exclusion based on being labelled as autistic would have been worse to endure in my school years than simply that of being disliked as an equal. I am sure people would have been nicer to me but it would have been less of a useful training ground for later life. Having both the period of not knowing I was autistic and the period where I now do in my life have had strongly positive effects on my character but it is not the sort of thing you can plan to do. It was a lucky and happy coincidence that it occurred as it did for me and that both experiences have helped me rather than hinder as they easily could.

While I coped fine with school I was almost certainly a hindrance on everyone else, teachers and pupils alike. Several of my teachers went on extended leave due to breakdowns. There is certainly the argument that it would have likely been better for everyone else at school had I been diagnosed younger even if it might then not have been so helpful for me. Sadly this is all far too full of ifs and maybes to be of any real insight or use. Likely the best thing to have done in a utilitarian sense was have some social service autism expert spend a little time with my teachers and myself informing us and preparing us. The problem with that is each case of autism seems to be entirely interwoven with the character of the person, their circumstances and the extent to which they are along the spectrum. As such, the said expert would have to know me at the time to some extent to be able to help anyone out at all.

Even with my greatly increased self understanding it was entering the working world that I found the hardest. Getting autistic people into work so that they can be productive and autonomous members of society is the main objectives of support given to autistic people. It is hard to describe why I have struggled in several lines of work concisely or in an on point way. Typically I do things very well or very badly, very fast or very slow, I don't do middle ground much. I find it hard to do things not my way and I find it even harder to explain why I want to do things my way. I found I was winding up employers much like I wound up teachers despite my slightly increased maturity. Any job I had that did not engage the brain I would find so boring that I would become miserable. Most jobs that did engage the brain required a complete package of skills of which I was missing a chunk. I have done a variety of rather different things and have settled into one of only a handful of things that I could see myself being happy doing. I have been a shelf stacker at a supermarket, a professional card player, a production manager (I am a truly terrible manager and suspect that would be a strong trend among autistic people), a lab worker and now I am a very content dog walker.

There are a lot of things I could do very well in a lot of different avenues of employment. The thing is that in most of those roles I would usually be required to perform tasks I would be shocking at, basic things like not appearing to be a moron on the telephone. In order to utilize my potential in any given industry I would need a great deal of extra support from the employer. I don't know if that would be an economically sound investment in my skills but I should like to think so! There are certainly an increasing number of employers specifically seeking autistic employees so as to take advantage of their unique perspectives and creative problem solving. Socially speaking again I would suggest that the best return on investment would be to encourage employers to take on that extra cost and work with autistic people directly. Certain industries are much more suited to autistic peoples talents such as architecture, computer programming or scientific research. Any social worker helping out during childhood with education and teachers should go on to help out with careers advisor meetings, job applications and interviews in more extreme cases.

While I think we could do specific things like my afore mentioned vague social policies to help society get the most from its autistic people, and they to get the most out of life, I think the most generally helpful thing is information and understanding. It is my close friends understanding my quirks that allows them not to hate me. It was the lack of understanding of employers that made many of my previous jobs so all round unrewarding and it is my own understanding of my differences that has helped me to find a way of living that works for me. I hope this whistle stop tour of the autistic attractions of my life has helped spread some understanding on the subject.

The Fallacy of Democracy

While many nations call themselves democracies none so far as I can tell hit the mark. Democracy gets some bad press for being an imperfect system but that is only speculative to my mind as we have never put it to the test due to never having a real democracy exist in society. Certainly the manner of voting, governing and so forth used by most so called democracies have their shortcomings however the problem goes deeper than that.

Capitalism undermines democracy in that it is more powerful, more natural and more effective at doing what democracy attempts. Capitalism has a kind of inherent momentum, it drives itself and has the ability to correct its direction while democracy needs to be actively maintained. Capitalism is the result of peoples actions and directly serves their desire while democracy requires people to take extra actions and then only indirectly serves those people.

I could go on extensively about how capitalism is a more perfect system than even the most ironed out utopian democracy, let alone any of the shambles we have today. I will spare the reader the monologue as it is so obvious, not just in theory but also if you consider your day to day life. How little the government actually impact anything while the effects of capitalism are all around us, always changing and improving and yet deeply ingrained within our lives.

The problem is not with capitalism, nor with democracy, both are useful systems for society. The issue is with how capitalism makes democracy fairly impotent while somewhat super-seeding one of the integral moral components of democracy. With capitalism, your vote is your money and where you chose to spend it, in democracy your vote counts the same as everyone else. These two ideas are at odds and with capitalism being the far more powerful system we end up living in a weird meritocracy where your opinion is worth one vote plus your spending power. A true democracy could only really exist under an economic system that ensured each person has the same amount of money, which we know from experience takes most of the wind out of capitalism's sails.

The problem is not even anything to do with having meritocratic properties. As the name might suggest, a meritocracy is in principle a good thing. The issue, as ever is the imbalance of power between the systems and between individuals. The quality of a meritocracy is dependant on how well the merit of a person is assessed and therefore the proportion of how much impact their actions and opinions should count for. In countries like the UK and USA the poorer people make up the majority of voters yet no government comes close to enacting their view of appropriate wealth redistribution due to a rational fear of the economic fallout. Much of this fallout would be retaliatory things from the wealthy minority, both individuals and companies more inclined to emigrate, evade tax or commit some other antisocial act.

In other essays I have discussed how the one flaw in capitalism is how it has a positive feedback that tends towards wealth aggregating. The main drawback from this is the widening of the wealth gap which in turn has many undesirable social ramifications. In this context however it simply ensures that the richest people have more monetary voting power than a perfect meritocracy would afford them. I do not have a problem with higher earners having slightly more political sway than other people. I do take issue with those that think it should be in proportion to the unchecked results of present day wealth distribution.

The USA saw the importance of trying to separate religion and state right from the outset and despite this aim have failed spectacularly to achieve it. For a true democracy to work in a capitalist nation there would need to be the separation of economy and state, a task that would be far harder than the separation of religion. This impossible task combined with the strength and utility of capitalism imply we should be aiming for a modified form of government. Most in terms of how we understand our government and what we should expect from them. Democracy tells us we are equals while capitalism plainly refutes that claim. Each somewhat represents the main virtues of a state, democracy representing equality and capitalism representing freedom. The hope being that the power struggle between the two mechanisms results in the maximum possible freedom and equality within the society.

Although there is much that can be said to be working well as a result of the capitalist democratic power balance there are the issues mentioned earlier in the aggregating properties of capital and the raw efficiency and dedication to purpose of capitalism. Combine this with rapidly improving technology and capacity for work within society and you find that over time you would expect the power of spending and capital to increase relative to that of a democratic vote as well as finding that more and more voting power was localized within a smaller demographic of society. This trend is already observable over our recent past however little is being done to turn the tide and little thought is being given to the end result of this problem.

With the internet and cost of shipping globally the mechanisms of trade are changing. Amazon and ebay are in their infancy yet already play a huge part in trade worldwide. The power of this kind of company will increasingly lead to them dictating the conditions for trade to governments and not the other way around. I suspect this in itself will lead to a higher degree of free trade and a global economy which are good things however these are not the only ramifications. When companies dictate the terms of global trade rather than democratic governments we are no longer in a meritocratic blend but an oligarchy whose motivations are not implicitly aligned with society.

Various recent studies have come out supporting these trends, observations and logical conclusions. An American PhD student looked at voting patterns and legislation over the last few decades in the USA and concluded that it was already an oligarchy. Thomas Pikkety went much further back with his recent book “Capital” and looked at the aggregation of wealth over a couple of centuries, showing that it was always greater than the rate of the total accumulation of wealth. Put in Pikkety's simple terms, the most elegant solution is to make the rate of aggregation of wealth roughly equal the rate of the growth of wealth. Ideally it would have minor fluctuations either side so as to allow gradual movement of wealth where most appropriate rather than a forced flow in one direction only. Assuming you started from some a point close to the ideal equilibrium between democratic power and economic power or left the situation long enough to reach that equilibrium then you would have a pretty reasonable meritocratic society.

The problem with stating the solution in terms of a logical premise is that is misses all of the subtleties and context of the problem. First and foremost the fact that the only means society has to restrain the aggregation of wealth is democratically. Capitalism necessarily encourages it and mechanically loses much of its virtue if you try and set up a variation of it that would not have that property. Realising democracy is the only way to alter the rate of wealth aggregation you see that the solution to obtaining an effective democracies relies on you already having an effective democracy. The appropriate analogy is like trying to give yourself a leg up.

We can theorize that in a society with minimal or “natural” variance of wealth any democratic system would be near its maximum effectiveness. This is all well and good but helps us in no way to get us to the society with the lower wealth gap. The state of western democracies is not so hopeless or impotent that change cannot come from them however it will be slow, heavily resisted and a back and forth process. In my more cynical musings I wonder if the present UK focus on immigration is not just a good way to deflect the political attentions of the poorer people in society. Parties such as UKIP would not have been acknowledged or allowed to join the debate by the major parties if it were not for the social focus on the economic side of things resulting from the recent financial crisis and the involvement on the financial sector in that crash. More public pressure is on financial reforms which puts the political parties under more pressure from the industry lobbyists. The fact that democracies are underpowered compared to what they should be in theory means that it is easier to deflect social pressures than it is to address them.

To conquer the more powerful foe one must exploit it's weaknesses. The most effective manner in which the poorer people have to reduce the wealth gap is not voting for the most socialist party on offer but changing their spending habits. Each time we shop at Walmart or Tesco, each time we eat McDonalds or stop at Starbuck's for coffee we are casting a more powerful vote in contradiction to our political stance. Certainly this is less convenient and/or more expensive. It is not an option in certain areas to buy products not produced by giant companies and it is not an option at all for the poorest in society. The wonderful thing about capitalism is that it is adaptive, as spending patterns start to shift it will respond accordingly. If people want to buy more local products produced by smaller local companies that keep the flow of wealth more contained and less syphoned by the capitalists then those services and goods will become more available and cheaper.

The weakness of capitalism is not that it responds to our demands, that is its strength. It's weakness is that it only understands and responds to cost and profit. It relies for the most part on our greed to get the thing we want cheapest so that we can obtain more of other things we want. In terms of cost and profit there is no room to understand happiness, empowerment and other human factors. If we, as a society learn to think in terms of the democratic vote affixed to the price of each thing we buy then we would change the world for the better quicker than any purely democratic method could manage.

A large problem is that we now have a capitalist culture where by we equate success to money in too many areas. We now educate ourselves not to make us better people or live in a better society but as a means of investing in our own economic potential. We do well at school to get a better job so as to have more money in later life. The more society becomes conscious of the fact that money cannot buy fulfilment nor happiness the more we will be able to use it so as to force through desirable social change. It is empowering to chose to pay a little more for the service you support, be it the local baker over the supermarket, the bookshop with its friendly staff over Amazon.

The capitalists so to speak may have the coordination and the money but the people still hold all the real power we just lack the knowledge of how to use it, the direction in which to use it, nor the organization to do so effectively. We do most of the work, we do most of the real spending and consuming of all the most important things. We create most of the demand for the things that are then brought to market.

We are an inconceivably long way off being able to get our oil from the local refinery or our medication from the little family run pharmaceutical company, nor is it a pragmatic end game for those kinds of industry. The hope is that a gradual improvement in the wealth gap would subsequently empower democratic government to more effectively control those industries that need to be vast to work without falling subservient to them or crippling them by trying to make them publicly operated. Knowing that when buying a product you are doing a lot more than just getting something for some money, certainly more than you do when you head out to vote on election day, is a big part of the battle. It is the kind of thing that education should be comprised of. Choosing not to go into debt or buy the cheapest product when you can get the same without contradicting your beliefs elsewhere. Choosing to support those who are not well off with your custom rather than your charity. Realising it is the fact you condone paying minimum wage to people by supporting those companies with your custom is the reason there are lots of people paid minimum wage. All these things we have the power over and should we start to spend more with our humanity and political sway than with our capitalist cultural way of thinking. In doing so we would further empower ourselves by making our forms of democracies start to function more as intended.

*Disclaimer

I have nothing against any of the large companies mentioned in this essay. I am ignorant of any wrong doing they may or may not have done and am not picking on them in any way specifically. My intent was just to paint a picture of the kinds of large company we endorse each and every day. My objection to large companies in this essay is purely in regards to how they naturally assist in the aggregating of wealth and how they are able to influence politics due to their economic power and importance. The more profit the company has the more it is aggregating wealth and so by capitalist definitions it is at its best when being most damaging to society. The bigger it gets overall is a another key measure of success for a company and is the main factor in political influence. As such the better a company is by traditional capitalist aims the more damaging it is towards democratic ends.

Innocence and Experience

The pair of concepts William Blake illustrates in his Songs of Innocence and Experience have become an embedded part of western culture. While they retain their poetic mystical quality there appears to be more than just literary appeal to the notion. There is some palpable truth to the poetic innocence and experience and a clear distinction between the poetic notion and the common use of the words. I use these two words in this essay not as the dictionary would define them but in the way that Blake paints them. Innocence and experience are states of being rather than a descriptive term based on a specific context.

Due to our lack of scientific understanding as to the difference of these poetic definitions of innocence and experience we make lazy linguistic assumptions as to their properties based much more on the dictionary definitions of innocence and experience than any potential physical cause. There is also a strong trend between the obtaining of real life experience and losing ones innocence, and vice-versa, those without much experience of life tend to be those we would describe as innocents in the general poetic sense. Most human adults have lost their innocence, most young children still have it.

The more I probe these concepts however the more I find that the simple gaining of life experience is insufficient alone to cause the effect of becoming experienced in the poetic sense. Certainly the gaining of life experience is a help to the transition from innocence to experience in humans but it is not the route cause of the change. The two main observations I would use to demonstrate the separation of poetic experience and of dictionary experience are the characteristics of animals and the characters of people with conditions that affect the brain in a certain way such as autism or Down's syndrome. The complex workings of the brain and my somewhat limited data sample mean I cannot make any assured sweeping claims however I have found that these two groups of beings are resistant to the loss of innocence. The gaining of life experience has little to no effect on their qualities which make them innocents.

The reason that I find these concepts so fascinating is that they are so ambiguous yet so palpable. I can fairly easily categorize a being as an innocent or as experienced after basically just meeting them. Another thing that strikes me very hard is that I am fairly inept at relating to the emotional states of most other people. This is a common facet of autism and nothing striking or unusual. What is noticeable and unusual is that I am excellent at relating to animals and far better than usual with mentally atypical people who I seem to more intuitively understand. Obviously being somewhat atypical myself, the ease of relating to similar people is fairly understandable however the fact that it extends to cover animals as well makes it more interesting. All the groups that are made up of innocents are the groups I am above average at empathizing with yet those I classify as experienced I am intuitively poor at relating to.

There is a certain simplicity and honesty to the actions of innocents that in many contexts the experienced person doesn't accept because they are no longer able to operate under those conditions. The difference between an innocent and an experienced being seems to be most manifest in how they relate to other beings and to their environment. The innocents have no barrier between their thoughts and feelings and the expression of their body, while the experienced do. It is not quite as simple as that however, as innocents are capable of lying and deceit as well as the experienced. The difference goes more to the motive behind the deceit rather than the act itself as to what would distinguish an innocent from an experienced being.

Beyond the link between the words experienced and experienced another cultural misconception we seem to have about these poetic states of being is that they are linked to sex. Again, it is the fact that animals remain innocents despite growing old and having sex that rebuke this notion. You might argue that animals don't count as they cannot really become experienced in the way most humans do and as such should not be used as a way to show how the change might occur in people through what they do and don't do. My counter argument to this is that animals posses all the same identifiable and relatable properties of innocence that innocent humans do. It would be arrogant to assume that just because they don't become experienced that they are removed from the possibility of being innocents or being part of the same system. Humans are the odd ones out, we are the species breaking the mould and the most likely situation is that innocence is the norm and experience is a by-product of our advanced reflective and imaginative capabilities combined with our acute self awareness.

Thinkers and philosophers like Koestler and Schopenhauer put forward very persuasive arguments that the human condition is highly flawed. We are destined to live a life of internal conflict, paradox and contradiction. Fundamentally the problem is that we have two ways to deal with a situation, we have the emotional intuitive subconscious response which evolved first and then we have the conscious brain which is far slower but much more capable of logical deductions and reasoning. Most higher animals have both these modes as well however the latter is undeveloped compared to humans and works in harmony with the other system. For humans however our conscious reasoning is so highly developed that it stops working in harmony with the more emotional part of the brain. Certainly it is this advanced reasoning conciseness that has allowed us to conquer the planet and live in luxury however I believe it is what is costing us our innocence, in in more understandably terms, much of our potential happiness.

Humans are aware of there own mortality, we can see ourselves from the perspective of other people, we can plan and imagine and then fall victim to our own expectation. All of these difficult little problems and many many more come up in our conscious mind which does something (contort?) to our subconscious. The solutions to these imagined situations and conceptual problems are essentially in an incomprehensible language to the emotional part of the mind and as such any solutions it may have are not useful.

I mentioned before a barrier between what is inside of an experienced person and what they let come out of them which is not present in the same way for an innocent being. I believe this barrier is the result of becoming aware of mental contradictions that ultimately force people to act in discordance with how they feel.

I have used the innocence of animals to refute sex and life experience as causes of the loss of innocence and shall do so again with violence which is clearly one of the greatest accelerators of the change from innocence to experience in humans. The reason why violence between animals in the wild has no effect on their innocence yet does appear to have an affect on the rate of change in humans comes back to the motive behind the actions as I mentioned when talking about deceit. The motives for violence between animals in the wild is survival, competing for a mate, defending against attack or for feeding purposes. These are pure, honest motives behind the more extreme acts. Outside of these situations animals are very peaceful creatures which default to the nice setting much like a bubble defaults to a spherical shape – it is the the easiest thing to do.

Violence in humanity is far less often for these pure honest reasons. Even when one side of the conflict is fighting for pure reasons such as survival, the other side is invariably not. The older humanity has become the more our acts of violence have deviated from pure natural motives. Most violence is now born out of hatred or greed which are both impure motives and somewhat the result of conflict between our reasoning and emotion. Animals don't really have greed or hate in the way humans do, they will fear something they feel they have some reason too but they won't hate it in a consuming manner. It is the hate behind the violence rather than the violence that contributes to the loss of innocence.

You may say that animals can be greedy but again it is different. With humans we imagine having something and generate a want based on that imagined situation. With animals they know they want food already and so given the opportunity can be prone to what we perceive as greedy eating. It is almost the complete opposite effect going on, the animal being greedy has failed to imagine what might be enough food as it is not a situation they are overly familiar with or instinctively programmed for. They are failing to use foresight and thus gorge themselves, a greedy human has imagined a want and then sets about obtaining it, often well beyond actual need.

Although a fascinating subject I am not sure quite what purpose it serves. While I find innocents easier to spend time with I would not suggest either experience or innocence as the better state. I do think there is a high chance that the loss of innocence makes many things harder for humans to cope with and as such is a strong contributing factor in things like depression. Even if this were the case though I am not sure it has a solution. Experience seems bound to what it is that makes us human and is not something easily altered. I am not even sure which I would class myself as despite claiming an ability to quickly judge others. The concepts of innocence and experience should at least help us understand a little more about the workings of the brain.

I suspect I shall be returning to this subject as this is just an introduction. It is a relatively new idea to me and my thoughts are still somewhat immature and chaotic. I have been somewhat limited in the scope of innocence and experience thus far in this essay yet have been finding glimpses of it all over the place. It was finding it in music about a year ago that first sparked the notion that there might be more to innocence and experience than simple poetic elegance.

Mozart and Beethoven are widely regarded as the two giants of classical/romantic music. I had been a lover Beethoven for a while but found Mozart to be far less engaging. My experience with this kind of thing is that it takes a little while to appreciate something and as such you have to put in some effort to be able to enjoy the greatest works of art. It is hard to put my finger on why it is the case but it was pretty clear to me when comparing the works of the two composers more directly to each other (with the aim of understanding why Mozart was so similarly revered as Beethoven yet failed to rewards me similarly) that they were the musical equivalent of Songs of Innocence and Experience with Mozart being the innocent and Beethoven being the experienced.

Mozart has a kind of immediate overbearing euphoric joy to almost all of his works, they resonate with the same kind of purity and simplicity that can be found in the languages of the innocent. Beethoven on the other hand has more sinister works that are contain more trickery and illusion. A different way to phrase it might be that the music of Mozart is correct with respect to nature and harmony as if Mozart simply saw the most pristine and perfect musics that already existed, like the laws of logic, and then copied them down. Beethoven also saw this perfect music but instead of copying it he contorted it to his own desires, breaking the rules where he could see a way. After having put the effort into getting Mozart I do fully appreciate his genius and can see why he is regarded alongside Beethoven but my preference for the latter remains unchanged. They both totally got music yet they did completely different things with that understanding.

From what I know of Mozart there is a high chance he was autistic and therefore according to my theory was likely to be an innocent himself. This muddies the waters rather than pointing towards anything insightful, as does the fact that I relate better to innocents yet prefer the taint of experience in my music. There is speculation Beethoven was also autistic, as I am sure there is for most historic figures, and I very much doubt it is as simple as innocents create innocent art etc. even assuming he wasn't autistic. I have discussed the presence of innocence and experience imprinted on music just as a tangible example of the kinds of place they can be found and not to make any deductions. While it may make the subject more interesting it also makes it that much more complicated and mysterious.

All I can really say on the matter at the moment is that there does seem to be something real and tangible that can differentiate between two general states of being. These states of being can be seen in the actions, expressions and communications of all kinds of higher animal. Such is the nature of the distinction between the two types of being that we can assign these states to abstracts and inanimates. Perhaps this ability to assign states of being to things like music is a fallacy and part of the human urge to find patterns. Perhaps it is little more than languages like French assigning a gender to each word. Even if this link is spurious it does at least give weight to the notion that the concepts of innocence and experience are recognizable, a little like how we are inclined to see faces in clouds and other random formations.

I think it is possible to alternate between occupying an innocent state and an experienced one but I think for the most part you are in one state or the other with fleeting moments outside of the norm. I think this is the case because the difference between innocence and experience is distinct yet has some characteristics of a spectrum. This again may be a linguistic bias with the links to the dictionary definitions of innocence and experience where you are easily able to be more or less of one than another being.

I have little evidence for the key distinction between innocence and experience being based on internal contradictions unique to the advanced human brain and self awareness. I spent much of my time musing the subject with no theory on this matter at all, simply driven by the feeling they were real properties. My belief in this theory simply comes from how well it fits with what little I do know of the brain and my various observations while investigating the matter. I have a need to explain what I encounter and observe and I find my explanation thus far on the matter of innocence and experience to be satisfactory, if not complete nor even necessarily correct.