How do you live in a cruel world ?

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).

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).