OK so quick heads up I’m writing this “in my own hand” and format out of respect for other people and just maybe because it’s more “authentic”. It’s my own recipe using thoughts and ideas of others as ingredients and I’ve done the research using the assistance of AI to find the info and I’ve done my best to fact check it.
So Trump's got a beating in the polls and the public have woken up to what’s going on and what the flip has this got to do with autism?
We’ve been discussing that in @b's post https://community.autism.org.uk/f/adults-on-the-autistic-spectrum/48601/trump-is-trumped/481911
My response is whether in the long term people will realise how easily they are duped.
@emmanningis has commented on it about Han’s Christian Anderson “the Emperor’s new clothes” fairy tale being repeated and that’s catalysed me to write this.
In the fairy tale it takes all the public ages to call the king out on being duped by conmen because they’ve been duped by the same con.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes
They’re duped by the same psychological trap set by the conmen that the fabric of the clothes they “make” for the emperor is invisible except to anyone who is either too stupid or unfit for their job.
The prime minister and the officials don't want to be fired or labeled incompetent, so they lie and give large about how great the king looks to protect their jobs.
The Emperor himself is so terrified that he might be a cr3p ruler so he pretends and goes along with it to protect his high and mighty “royal” status.
The public go along with it out of something I learn is called “pluralistic ignorance” - they assume everyone else sees the clothes and keep stum out of the fear that they’d be the only “fool” in the crowd.
Every single person in the crowd was pretending in order to protect their own reputation - bar the kid who had no reputation to protect and “broke the spell”...
So a bit of “deep diving” and the story is a rehash of older ones of similar cautionary tales.
There’s a 14th century medieval tale that Anderson based it on (according to the wiki page and the links there) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Count_Lucanor
Apparently this one’s more about being born out of marriage, family honour, family honour, and who gets the inheritance. Anderson flipped it and upscaled it to bring probably the best known satire on “groupthink” and vanity. I read it as a kid and maybe it’s still working thro’ me as I write this.
But then if we go back further to maybe a thousand years or so in India there’s even older versions of the story. The thing with this one tho; is that it wasn’t some single child who broke the spell. ‘Cos the social set up was different in India and they revered being naked as a sign of spiritual purity - you didn’t have to be a child to get away with it - the whole community broke the spell because they didn’t care that he was king and they expose the truth entirely by accident. They look at the king and ask him if he’s become a naked holy man - then the “penny drops” to the king about how they have been duped is busted.
So maybe let’s drop back a bit further in history and see where the story comes from maybe - roughly 2 and a half thousand years and a Greek thinker called Plato. They wrote “the Allegory of the Cave”.
In this cave prisoners are chained facing a wall, watching shadows cast by puppets behind them. ‘Cos they’ve seen nothing else they believe the shadows are reality.
So in the both emperor’s new clothes story and the cave story people believe a narrative that is entirely controlled by other people - the puppeteers or the conmen.
It’s probably pretty sh1t being chained to a wall so they play games guessing which shadows will appear next and they give prizes and prestige to whoever is best at “reading” the shadows. The “chains” that restrain the public in the emperor’s new clothes story aren’t made of iron, they're a social constraint - fear of not conforming, looking stupid and being ostracised for it.
In the cave story one of the prisoners is unchained goes outside and it’s damn painful in the sun but they realise actually what the true nature of the world is.
In the other stories I’ve mentioned the people who see “the naked truth” (the sun) have that clarity of vision because they are “unchained” from the dupe of the system's psychological traps.
Now, in the cave Plato explains that when the ex-prisoner goes back in they say he can’t see properly because his eyes have been damaged by the light and if he tries to drag him out they’ll kill him.
In Anderson’s version of the story the King initially doubles down on believing the con when he starts to hear whispers from the crowd - that they have to keep going on with the con to save face - but eventually sees things as they really are and admits to it.
The core difference to this is that in Plato's cave the people there are genuinely ignorant. In Anderson one the people are complicit - they know what the truth is they just choose not to acknowledge it for fear of social ruin. This is even more cynical - it says that even when people aren’t physically chained in darkness they fear of social ruin will lead them to physically chain themselves up.
So let’s jump forward a big old chunk of time and explorer Trump and stuff thro’ this.
Maybe he’s got a whole load of media “puppeteers” casting shadows on the wall for the chained up public to watch and keep them compliant.
Then people are trained to believe that he’s the dude who has left the cave and he’s come in and pointing out all the shadows that other “puppet masters” have been casting before him..
When he first appeared a whole load of people thought that he was like the kid calling out the emperors new clothes but guess what he makes his own set of “invisible clothes” and the public are drawn into the same con - if you can’t see them you’re a “traitor” or “unfit” for society. And if you’re one of his ministers, that's the same thing as happened to the emperor’s ministers originally. Then there’s that whole bag of pluralistic ignorance - people don’t call him out for losing their own careers and showing themselves to be stupid.
So what was the “naked truth” that exposed Trump - put simply is was the underlying reality that the severe cost of living was too great for the public to ignore https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6x29rr8djy3o
And his own ministers turned and told the truth. JD vance said “The reason we lost is the war” openly breaking the united front to protect his own political future.
And so the story continues another puppetmaster will take the strings no doubt because there’s still a cave and people are frightened for the sun - the best I personally hope for is that they treat those chained up by their own volition with greater care, compassion and generosity than the last.
So then, as the ITV news used to finish with, “and finally”: unmasking and the naked truth.
Autistic people including myself are said to have a preference for stating the clear objective fact over social scripting. Personally I’ve done the equivalent of saying “but he’s not got anything on” all my life. Maybe being autistic gives some sort of immunity to the con.
For a neurotypical person playing the game of “seeing the shadows on the wall” of the cave comes naturally. Maybe for other autistic people it’s the same for them when personally I feel like I’ve been dropped in from outside and can see the puppeteers and the strings at work. I can spot that the rules are arbitrary, constructed and often completely illogical.
Then here comes to me a painful and heartbreaking twist to all these stories. Masking. The intense, conscious suppression of natural autistic behaviors (like stimming, avoiding eye contact, or speaking bluntly) and the mimicking of neurotypical behaviors to blend in and avoid ostracisation. In the context of these stories this is “forced complicity” to join in praising the invisible clothes because if not one gets bullied or punished. And, forcing against the natural drive to say “he’s not no clothes on” is damn near exhausting if it’s not the way the brain is wired up to work.
Maybe when unmasking autistic people step into the role of the child or the escaped prisoner in these stories.
I won’t dive into the psychological risks or relieve that come with unmasking - let us save that for another day.
However I would like to remind those raiders who have got this far with me of the cultural differences in the original Indian story. In that the entire public called out the king accidentally because their society already had a respected place for people who displayed the naked truth.
So here’s the prompt: what would a society where there is a place for naked truth look like for you?
