How do you live in a cruel world ?

...and I love Longman's historical information too.  You can tell you have been in education Longman, thanks for the snippets of information.  Like any Aspie, I love picking up information along the way.

Longman, loved your overview of small minded society "nonconforming interlopers" .., that made me laugh out loud ! Thank you

Human history has been entirely about coalscing into groups with common internal codes and some kind of hostility to outsiders or nonconforming interlopers.  These take the form of tribes, cultures, clubs and societies, music preferences, sports preferences, schools.

Through the 17th to 20th century there were a lot of religious schisms in Britain. It is hard to imagine nowadays as no-one seems that bothered, but most towns and many villages had multiple churches and chapels with quite extraordinary hostility between them, preventing intermarriage or even just social association. Some churches divided purely over a fundamental disagreement over the wording of oaths of association (like a society consitution) so you would end up with tiny little congregations often with not enough funds to afford a meeting house, or meeting houses being swopped between rising and falling groups. We have all got so much more relaxed about it, except some strife between major denominations, but many people's ancestors would have had their lives embittered by families being split between "churches".

Nowadays we are more multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-cultural. But it does make me wonder whether that hides deeper schisms that don't get readily expressed. So it enhances the rearion to "outsiders" such as someone on the spectrum must appear to NTs.

It does worry me that if Einstien really was Aspergers, as some people suggest he was, whether he would have got as far as he did with the current way of addressing the needs of people on the spectrum, which is putting up barriers, compared to society in his day, which had more social division, but also had greater acceptance of eccentricity (just because there were so many differences).

You are correct, the world is full of selfish, thoughtless, aggressive people.  And it's no good anyone saying that the odds of something happening to you are so low compared to whatever, because that's not true.  I have had several physical assaults on me since childhood through into adulthood.  Unwarranted attacks where I did nothing to deserve it and actually in all cases was minding my own business.  There are a lot of people out there who will seek to hurt you.  NTs seem to be full of a desire to punish anyone they instinctively feel is different.  Just by being separate from the crowd, you make yourself a target.  Just by not partaking in gossip and underhandedness you become a threat to them and they seem to feel judged and will make you a target.  Just by not sharing the same opinion as the crowd, will make you a target.  Just by being oblivious to the mind-games that NTs play will make you a target.  Like chocolatebuttons I too want to just stay indoors and away from it all.

Only a few weeks ago I was verbally accosted in a car park by a car load of middle aged people with a young child with them, for not moving out of the way quickly enough whilst I got my autistic daughter out of the car.  I was subjected to a barrel of abuse and swearwords which shocked and upset me to the core for the rest of the day.

People will hate you for any reason they can come up with and in some cases invent a reason to attack you.

Those that aren't busy physically attacking you will verbally attack you or just ostracise and sideline you.

And if that fails, they will just make your life difficult and deliberately misunderstand your meaning.  At every level they will find a way to punish you for not being like them.

It's such a depressing existence, and yet there is a part of me that clings to hope.  Although that has taken a battering also, when recently, a place I thought I was protected from that sort of behaviour, an Aspie forum called Wrong Planet which most of you will have heard of, I was bullied and victimised by a small group of fellow Aspies and had my account terminated, despite not having broken site rules because that group had a couple of moderators in their pockets (all involved parties happened to be male other than myself).  That depressed me most of all, because I had this idealised view of an Aspie world where my fellow Aspies would be the answer to all the problems of this one.  Being an Aspie doesn't guarantee a decent personality sadly.  There are Aspie bullies, and lack of empathy can cause selfishness in Aspies too.  I score very low on empathy myself but I am a kind person and I will defend others, but standing your ground against some Aspies makes you a target for them too.

Human beings are so depressing to me that I hardly feel one of them.  This world has so much beauty in it, but it is spoiled by human nature.

I like the sound of that! I don't watch the news anymore - it is too depressing, and it just serves to increase my already high state of anxiety.

Hi, Openheart.

                    I understand completely how you feel although I am not autistic, in fact because I am not autistic ( but my family is full of it) I am aware that from an empathic point of view the world is full of pain.

Using logic take a realistic, documented, factual look at the world around you.

Were things better in other times?

Is there more war now than at any other time or has our www. shown us things we would never have seen?

Subscribe to Positive News, it is specifically targetted at highlighting positive things that people AND GOVERNMENTS (!) around the world are doing.

Mike.

Yes, I feel like this most of the time.

I think our general impression of the world as a whole is formed through long-distance elements, i.e. the media, but that as an autistic, just being around my family gives me anxiety to the extent of paranoia.

That is to say, being detached from the non-verbal component of communication, any interaction involving this (i.e. being around other people) makes such so distressing and open to interpretation that when you're feeling panicky (as I am all the time) it feels agressive and domineering; even if not out-right physically violent, then at-least emotionally/verbally threatening and so-on.

When that is the day-to-day reality you encounter in your normal routine, then it is hard not to deeply alarmed by the attention-grabbing headlines relating to war, crime, injustice and so-on which saturate media, not without logical cause, but perhaps in a fashion which is easy to distort until you feel as though the world is overwhelmingly brutal and that humanity should be kind of written off as hopelessly evil.

The common experience for autistics is that the people around them are volatile, and that they having a distinctly limited sense of control, combine those two and it's difficult not to feel very threatened.

Yes i also think that human beings are unkind, uncaring, cruel and rude and agressive around me. It makes me want to stay indoors and not face the human race. My faith has not been restored of the human race. If i go out i dont feel like looking at anybody as they all look so angry and push you out of the way. I cannot be like them maybe thats why i dont have a lot of friends.

Reflecting,, maybe ,, being kind and non-judgement allows you to "not partake" off the cruel world but live,,, hard to do...