Why everything you know about autism is wrong!

While I find Jac den Houting an inspirational speaker. In fact I now want to do further academic studies in Autism after listening to her speech! I am inclined to conclude that the truth is somewhere in the middle. We should not be regarded as broken and needing to be fixed by society as a whole BUT we do suffer from symptoms as a result of our our neurotype which would still afflict us even if society wholey accommodated our social/communication/obsessive/sensory differences! 

However, I would like to end this discussion on a positive note. So, I have taken the advice of the speaker and turned to doctor google, looking for articles from the autistic perspective. Because while we do suffer from symptoms that can debilitate us to varying degrees, there are also positive aspects to being autistic!

https://autismawarenesscentre.com/the-positives-of-autism/

https://the-art-of-autism.com/positive-aspects-of-aspergers-autism/

I consider myself to be a perfectly good human being - a society of people like us would be interesting to see how it would work - but I wonder if my level of high-functioning would, in the long term, get on with others who are lower functioning and would we end up with the same situation as us vs. NTs.   Would the same divisions occur?

That's an interesting thought - and I suspect that divisions like that would occur. The reason for that suspicion (and anyone reading please not that I'm way out of my zone of expertise here and just thinking out loud) is that I've noted that people with similar needs, values, outlooks etc tend to form bonds (which is good) but unfortunately this can easily tip into a type of tribalism that acts against the interests of people outside that group. Some of it is down to simple ignorance of the needs of the "others" and some of it is a quite nasty "we're better than you" as an extension of "we're good" (which would be OK on its own).

You see this kind of thing magnified with positive feedback on social media, and not only does this cause hurt to people in all "camps", it also ruins the quality of debate because people tend to react to what they surmise that someone's tribal membership is (from which they extrapolate all kinds of potentially unfounded beliefs) rather than what a person actually *says* and this can be a million miles from what the person *intends to say* because we all fail to communicate in one way or another, either failing to listen, failing to articulate our ideas accurately, or failing to process and form conclusions from the information that we have.

So I suspect that in a world with no "NT people" there would still be groups who felt ignored, misunderstood, and positively discriminated against. In fact, there would probably emerge a new definition of "NT" that got applied to whatever was the most common expression / presentation of the people you had left. 

Same = friend, different = probably foe.

Same = friend, different = probably foe.