Humanity's Worst Invention

I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday. It occurred to me that hate was a somewhat unique attribute to humans. Significant parts of the emotional pallet are palpable in intelligent mammals but hatred and anger do not feature in the same way in the non-humans as they do with the humans. It is hard enough explaining ones own emotions so trying to explain how a dog or cat feels differently will not be a seamless process!

The widest gap between humans and other mammals is of course languange. This allows us to create a much more real mental construct for past and future. Most mammals have a "two dimensional" emotional pallet where all the shades are rooted in the present. Humans manage to have warped their emotions over a three dimensional canvass where by things can be past, present or future. While you may get nervous dogs as much as you do nervous people you will not find a dog worrying in the absence of a thing to worry about. A dog will learn not to walk in front of a car as a result of its memory from previously getting run over and loosing a leg. It will not however spend its days regretting getting run over in the first place or indeed worrying about the next car that is going to hit it. Dogs are aware of past and present, cause and effect but they do not house their emotions. Emotions relating to experiences with cars are almost entirely confined to situations containing cars in this example. The dog does not carry those things with it in quite the same way people are inclined too.

Fight or flight is a practical survival mechanism when faced with danger. The issue is that past and future dangers still elicit bastardizations of fight or flight emotions in humans. You can't run from something that has happened, nor can you fight it. All their is to do is accept it and learn from it but that is not often how humans behave as a result of past fight or flight moments. I think that it is the structuring of time aspects within our emotional range that has resulted in hate and anger being such significant emotions in the human range.

Anger and hate are not practical or useful emotions. They are a damaging side product of an emotional construct that hasn't caught up with our intellectual capacities (or indeed our modern way of life). I have always felt like emotions where a blend of things, like mixing paint. You have your general positive paints and your negative ones. Then you have your personal paints that relate to feelings about yourself and ones that relate outwards to things, other people and so forth. Mix a positive paint with another persons paint and you have affection, mix the positive paint with your own and you have pride. There is another set of shades/tints or whatever you want to consider them as in your own analogous understanding of things. That is more the context of the thing or being. Each different mix results in a new colour of emotion. While humans many have the broadest range of possible emotional colours they can mix it seems as if many of them are redundant or even counterproductive. Their are shades and gaps on our large three dimensional canvass that have no productive value but none the less need filling in.

The purpose of emotions from an evolutionary perspective is simply a way of quickly aiding an animal in decision making. For simple creatures with simple lives it is a pretty good system. It allows creatures with fairly little understanding of their environment or the mechanisms by which things work to function very effectively within those systems. Humans have broken out of this blissful bubble of ignorance enjoyed by the rest of the living world. We shouldn't need emotion to guide us in our day to day as we understand how things function. We can plan, organize and arrange things. We can consider potential different outcomes and prevent bad ones occurring. While all this extra knowledge of our environment is fantastic for technology and science it poses problems for our poor sensibilities!

When we come across something we dislike in the world we generate the fight or flight emotional paint mixer. When that thing is far away in time or space there is no action to be taken. You are left with this nasty shade of hate that directs you to act but has no proper outlet. As such it lingers, like a heavy metal trapped in the body. There are lots of people out there who are building up unhealthy levels of hate for which there is no proper outlet or useful way to enact.

If you mistreat and beat a dog it will dislike you. Depending on the dog in question it will either cower in fear when it thinks it sees you or it will try and attack you. What the dog will not do is brood on that fear and grow it out of proportion. It will not machinate in the absence of your presence ways to hurt you back or eradicate your potential threat. Revenge is entirely a human trait. It is something we like to think of as an outlet for our buildup of hate. Animals don't do revenge because it is a completely stupid endeavor. It is a risk and a waste of time and resources. If animals bothered with revenge they would not fare so well in the big game of evolution!

I think there is this misconception that evolution is perfect and that emotions are a pure and righteous natural response to things. People don't perceive hate and anger as pernicious problems as they imagine we have them for a good reason. I propose the reason we have such things is the evolutionary equivalent of growing pains. When your bones grow too fast for your tendons and they hurt! Our intelligence has outpaced our emotions and as a species we are hurting. Anger and hate are the toxic appendix we could really do with finding a good way to remove. By all means, dislike something. Have preferences and opinions. Just don't let those things turn into anger and hate. Fantastic advice in theory but all too akin to me suggesting you simply stop some other natural bodily function like digestion.

Normally I like to propose solutions when I highlight problems. I am not exactly sure what a sensible solution is for this one. Evolution won't now fix it for us so we can't just wait and hope it will solve itself. I am not sure that a medical, genetic or technological solution is a good idea either. It sounds like it would touch on some serious moral issues and would likely have some scary unpredicted side effects at least in the development stage. Probably the best route to easing the tensions caused by hate and anger in society is cultural change. If people are made more aware of the issue and if the viewpoint shifted from emotions all being pure and natural then it would certainly be a big step in the right direction.

Evolutionary Selective Breeding

I have a theory regarding evolution. It makes some sense logically but as ever I only have anecdotal evidence and have no plan to obtain any scientific evidence on the matter. My first premise is that members within a species, or a not insignificant proportion of those members, have a predisposition to being attracted to similar features to those they have themselves. While I have seen this plenty enough with people it was actually the occurrence of it in dogs that was the real tip off. Cultural effects could very easily be the driving force in humans pairing off but that seems like it would be a much weaker force in dogs. When out and about with a pack of assorted dogs and we come across another dog it is always those closest in breeds to it that get most excited. The Labradors want to get frisky with the other Labs, the Terriers prefer the Terriers and so on and so forth. It is clearly just a trend as well, it is like a filter that applies to a more abstract notion of attractiveness. There are lots of big handsome dogs that all the bitches have the eye for regardless of their breed. The overall attractiveness of a dog is modified by the closeness in breed to the bitch evaluating him. A medium looking Lab looks better to another Lab on average than it does to a Schnauzer. They say there is no accounting for taste however I propose that there is some accounting for taste, certainly statistically when it comes to what we find attractive.

They say opposites attract, that is also true to a degree but I don't think it is the predominant factor. For one, differences stand out more than similarities in a pair. Couples are more alike than they are different although the areas in which they are different typically are very polar. These polar attributes in human couples are more to do with character and skills than they are with looks but there are some trends there too. Now, this is all conjecture but it would make good evolutionary sense in the way that good science involves controls. If you are predisposed to traits that are either similar or opposite in regards finding a mate and producing offspring then that will have the best and quickest results overall for your species. You still get good genetic variation by encouraging both opposite and like attributes however you focus your results so to speak. A bad trait will become more localized and have more chance of failing to reproduce in further generations, it will be removed from the gene pool more rapidly. Equally a good trait will be adopted more rapidly. If you purely mix genetic material at random evolution will be slow. If you are able to focus on a mix of more of the same genetic material with fewer yet more extreme differences then your species will evolve quicker and more suitably. It is like selective breeding but done with sensible logic and maths as nature loves to do rather than by design as we humans understand and practice it.

That is basically it, a theory on how we select mates based on how it would best advance the evolution of a species on the whole. I assume this occurs quite a long way down the tree of life among species that reproduce sexually. So this is good for evolution in the wilds of nature but what does it mean for humans?

The spread of human traits should be increasing and it seems like it is. Humans are the second (first? pretty sure dogs is first) most diverse species on the planet. With dogs it is down to the selective breeding we have imposed on them. With humans it is for a different reason. Our technology and society is the main thing aiding us in our capacity to survive. Being short or tall, fat or thin, stupid or smart, now has very little baring on your ability to reproduce compared to really any point in our history, it being increasingly important the further you go back in time. Most health issues now affect people later in life. Without nature ruthlessly plucking off any imperfect design humanity has become incredibly diverse. Technology has given the design space of humans a lot of wiggle room. Our predisposition towards mates with some significant number of similar physical attributes combined with this large wiggle room has lead to a very diverse species in what seems like a pretty short space of time on the evolutionary time scale. There are both pros and cons to an increasingly diverse population and discussion of that seems like like it would be best left for another time.

Philosopher Kings

I consider Plato's Republic to be a cornerstone of right wing thought. Despite considering myself a lefty I have never disagreed with his assertion that the Philosopher King is the optimal form of rule when you have it. I also entirely agree with him that it is not sustainable nor is it something you can aim for, it is just luck when you get one and that luck will assuredly run out. This is why I have always favoured democracy, a less optimal but more consistent and entirely sustainable method of governance.

To this end I have always been an advocated of John Stuart Mill's approach towards liberty and society. For democracy to work you need to trust in the good judgement of people. John Stuart Mill is a man who advocates liberty and education as a means towards ensuring people can make good judgement.  I had chosen to believe him as his ideas fit with mine regarding a social view and therefore a way of maximising the effectiveness of democracy.

What I have recently realized is that there is every chance that John Stuart Mill was just a Philosopher King himself, it was he who made his people great and not so much the environments he created. It is impossible to say which is which or even really separate those two things however it does serve as an ominous reminder that my political beliefs are potentially misguided.

If Plato is right and the only way to have the people of John Stuart Mill is by having an actual John Stuart Mill in the first place then right wing politics are probably more on the money than the left in a theoretical sense. This is sad, it means society works best when people are told what to do, when they are given less choice and less freedom when it comes to running things.

I have always been a strong supporter of referendum votes. Single issues are much clearer and purer than voting for people or parties and their complete set of opinions and stances on all matters. Recent events with the British EU referendum vote has completely shaken this view I once held. I felt entirely unqualified to hold an opinion on the matter and would much rather an executive had been in charge of the outcome.

Further to this I found the single issue to be incredibly divisive. The country seems incredibly split with far too much vitriol held for the other side. Given that I had no factual basis to cast my vote upon I used social premises to guide me. The status quo was fine as far as I could and voting to leave a union is never going to have the effect of increasing your foreign relations. As such I was part of the remain camp. I am not angry to have lost, I am sad about it but far from devastated. This is the only public comment I have made on the matter thus far.

Change and upheaval can be very good things for society, leaving the EU might have been the right thing to do in lots of ways. I didn't know before and I still don't now. We are where we are and so all there is to do is make the best of things going forward. Getting angry at those who got us here will only make things worse.

The significant aspect to me of all these recent events is how it has shaken up my belief system and not at all the potential economic ramifications. A little like losing ones faith. I thought I knew where I stood politically and now I have far less idea. I was a left wing democrat, now I am just confused. It is perhaps back to the drawing board for a Utopian form of governance. Referendums seem fair but is fairness worth all the conflict that comes with it?

The issue might not be with referendums and democracy as such and could be to do with the present difficulty in establishing truths and facts within current society. There is so much information, so many voices and such short attention spans that truth is often just the group shouting the loudest. I have a lot of rethinking to do and society has a lot of rebuilding to do but none of that has to be a bad thing. Questioning things, especially those you thought you knew, is a healthy way to go about things.

For now the main thing I can take from this is that I am far more likely to cast my votes towards potential Philosopher Kings and far less towards political ideals. I can also fairly comfortably state that none of the prospective replacements for David Cameron we have give even the slightest wiff of the complete Plato package. Can we just have a referendum to put David Attenborough or perhaps Steven Fry in charge for a bit?

Google Truth

There is no such thing is bad publicity is far too simple a statement to be accurate. There are reasonable sentiments behind it that apply in certain situations at least. It may well be good for promoting a circus act but BP and Volkswagen I am sure feel differently about negative press. I want to look at how the internet is affecting information, perception and publicity. Broadly my conclusions are that, although it is still far from a unanimous fact, bad publicity is seeming to have some more notable positive effects in certain areas. I also am beginning to wonder about the notion of truth and how that seems to be changing.

The internet is fantastic, it is the mos significant human advance since the printing press and is still in its infancy. It is an exciting time to be alive.While there is still much more positive change to come as a result of the internet there are issues with any new technology. We take a while to adapt, to learn what is acceptable and what is not. We need to adjust as a species and work out new etiquette surrounding our new technological capabilities.

I am reluctant to bring my tastes and opinions into evidence but I have no other recourse to explain myself on these observations. Without wishing to name and shame I will simply say that a larger number of the top artists, performers and "celebrities" of the day seem to be quite unpleasant people than in previous decades. Extreme to the point of being interesting but not at all good examples of people. There seems this morbid interest in what horrific thing some of these people will do next and so they generate quite a lot of extra media interest. I am shocked to find such people with some of the highest followings on Twitter and other such social media outlets. Dim as my view is of humanity I can still only conclude that at least half of the followers of such characters are simply doing it for the same reasons one cannot avoid looking at a road accident as they pass by.

We measured things like popularity on sales prior to the internet. For record companies I am sure this is still the driving force behind most of their choices however the rest of us seem to now measure popularity based on internet traffic. The more internet traffic you get the more you are being advertised for free and the more you have data to support your popularity. It is one of those works both ways thing. You can be good and so people will hear about you or you can have people just hear about you and assume you are good. Either way you will end up with some sales. Twenty years ago there was a lot more success based on merit and far less based on appearances and character.

Put another way, you might hate a lot of the music being produced at present. You might hate the people doing it and watch their moves so as to relish in their falls, If this describes you then you are part of the reason these characters exist. We now have two types of celebrities, those we love for who they are and what they do and that are examples of how to be a good person. Then we have the anti celebrities which serve as a reminder of how not to be and what the troubles are with society.

There is a new currency in town, we used to have just money and votes and between those two things most political power was found. Now we also have hits, little votes we make all the time telling the web what we want to see and do.

This concept of the political power of internet hits leads to the concept I call Google Truth. It doesn't really have anything much to do with Google but I couldn't find a better word to summarise the mechanism at work and so I stuck with it. The way Google Translate works was explained to me as something that looks at as many copies of the same text in the two languages in question as possible and simply takes the most common translation as the right one. It was a breakthrough in automatic translation software and was only possible with vast amounts of data. I am sure search engines work similarly and use records of other peoples searches and most common hits to provide results for new searches.

Twenty years ago if I wanted to know something I would look in a text book or an encyclopedia. Now I ask Google, often it points me towards Wikipedia. Although it took a lot longer to find information before the internet I only needed to find it once. Now I find I am much more wary of the information I get. I will find several sources and compare them or I will go to places I can place in a known context of trust. When I know a little about a subject I am looking at I am a lot more aware of who I can ask, which sites are reliable and so forth. Finding out that kind of information is easy and feels reliable. When I am treading new waters am have no idea where to look or who has credible opinions and knowledge I am clueless and find the internet far less helpful. Yes, there is lots and lots of information but without context or sufficient other relevant information I find it to be less use than before in a lot of ways.

There are areas in which the internet seems to be a shouting contest rather than a vast encyclopedia. If  you are looking for information supporting anti-vaccination it is out there regardless of the truth of what a terrible idea it is to not get vaccinated. The more anti-vax content there is on the internet and the more people looking at it the more it will increase its online credibility all regardless of the facts.

The internet feels like it has the capacity to spread misinformation. It can reinforce your biases and opinions with no need of evidence to support doing so. This is the basis for the concept of Google Truth, it says that the position with the most hits is the truth and that is not necessarily the actual truth. It is good in that it forces me to analyse the information I find rather than accepting it as fact as I did last century.

Leaders have been creating false truths to propagate in society for centuries, this is nothing new. The change is that the mechanisms driving the internet mean that it is a naturally evolving thing rather than a specific planned thing. You don't need money or votes to affect the truth now, we all just slightly affect the various truths found online in our day to day browsing. Some naturally evolving things are good, the economy, evolution! My hope is that the actual truth has a survival advantage over a false Google Truth as it were in an evolutionary analogy. As such over time the truth will out as they say. Given the similarities with evolving systems it implies that there are environmental niches where false Google Truths will flourish. While we can assume the truth will out it will be a slow undulating process.

If misinformation online is a problem going forwards then perhaps there will become some accrediting body that certifies sites for accuracy. Like the BRC or ISO9001 so that consumers of the sites information could revert to those encyclopedia years and assume some accuracy of fact in what they are reading. Not mandatory but sufficiently recognized that the majority of sites became accredited.

If we learn to think about what we read then Google Truth's will not be a problem. If we just accept what we read then we will have lots the blind leading the blind. A couple of decades is not nearly long enough to assess the outcome of the internet at all, especially given the many variable associated with something in its infancy. It does seem like cultural progress is speeding up which again implies good sense is winning out over false Google Truths. It also seems like there is a lot more noise coming from sections of society with quite shocking and antiquated views. Broadly I think this is an indication of the potency of the internet in being able to magnify everything opinion and information based and not an indication that antiquated views are on the increase as a result of Google Truths.

Am I left or right wing?

When I was younger I thought I was left wing. Certain appealing morals seemed embedded within left wing ideals. Due to my limited perspective of one I am afraid of bias and so have spent much time since coming to understand the right wing ideals to be able to better see past the bias. It is said that those who are not left wing when young lack heart and those who are not right wing when old lack brains. While too cut and dry to be accurate I can appreciate the sentiment behind the saying. Over the last hundred years or so right wing politics has done better on average for society than the left, excluding a rough patch in the late 30's and early 40's which is not something I care to try and compute the total effect of. This is another broad claim that could be discussed at length and that I have no intention of explaining or justifying. It is simply an opinion I have found that I now have. It is not so much the right that trumps the left, more that it is cohesive with capitalism and thus more naturally successful. Capitalism is the thing that has most driven improvement in society over the period in question and it has best done so under the bareback riding right than the reins clasping left. This is an economic, infrastructural and technological measure of improvement rather than a moral or happiness one. I would argue that left wing governments in democratic capitalist states do a better job of increasing the morality and content of society but this is even more subjective and harder to demonstrate than an economic difference and again, I have no intention of doing so.

The more I look at right wing policies and my theoretical ideas of how to run a perfect society the more I find that I am not left wing but right wing. Most of my methods of utopian governance would be derived from right wing economic principles. They have an air of left wing about them because I have overlaid the highly practical workings of capitalism with my moral code so that they are less open to abuse. It is always powered by capitalism but tempered by some notions of equality. The free right wing capitalism is alike to a train engine while left wing ideals are just the tracks that keep it going in the direction you want it to safely and smoothly. All the magic happens in the train, the tracks are just a dull, static necessity.

When I probe this idea even further I find that left and right distinctions lose much of their meaning. You want both, but you want them for different reasons and acting in different ways. Treating them like they are the two sides of the same thing, both fighting for the controls, simply feels inefficient. The difference between the political left and right, certainly in the democratic capitalist west, feels really rather minor in the grand scheme of things. In terms of political alliance I have typically favoured those I find morally most acceptable however the older I get the more I find I am drawn to those who seem like they would be most capable of running things.

Much much more relevant to me than a right or left wing slant on your ideas on how to run things is the idea of efficiency. Certainly there are two clear ways to divide up the pie, equally, a slice each, or not equally. The only half sensible non-equal method is upon some measure of merit and there we have the two main ideas of modern governance - communism and capitalist meritocracy. It seems pretty much over for communism and even slices of pie and the debate is all about how big the big slices should be, how small the small ones can be and who should get which slices. The main focus should not be so much on slice sizes and distribution but on making more pie. Simply put, if we make enough pie then everyone can have as much as they want! Humanity is quite a long way off the technological levels that would make Ian M Banks Culture utopia of infinite pie a possibility but we can certainly make a lot more pie than we presently do. Every wasted resource and unnecessary job done ultimately means less pie. A lot of things we commonly do or that capitalism encourages are not the most efficient way to do things, usually just the most rapid. A lot of the choices we make as people and the conflicts we have lead to a lot of inefficient things being done. Making more pie and being more efficient should be the centre issue for any political party, for any company and for that matter each and every one of us. In answer to the original question, I am right wing mechanically, left wing morally and above all I am into the idea of the efficient production and consumption of pie!

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.