The Autistic Society: Individual Disorder and Collective Order

During lunch at Fortune Centre, I told a friend about your idea of this country as an ‘autistic’ society. This topic was raised after a security guard from the building came by and quibbled with the tenants, of mostly food businesses, occupying the ground floor. It was over how many inches beyond the yellow line, the tables and chairs are placed outside, along the sidewalk (you know, our version of al fresco). As if the day-to-day woes of having a low-budget lunch in town (the crowd, the uptight hunt for a table…) are not enough, this ‘lunchtime entertainment’ made it all the more pathetic – pathetic to even those who have to witness it, human beings fighting over problems marked by dirty yellow tapes on the floor

It does not really matter if the friend fully appreciated or understood it, but it was a good exercise for me to revisit our earlier conversation on autism. (I elaborated my point of view to him while we went through the usual process of what every supposed thinking person would do: seeing things from another angle [how else?] and picturing this problem in contrast to other scenarios [what else?]).

So, what were the similarities between autistic and bureaucratic behaviours that made you deployed the word ‘autistic’, as a metaphor to describe our society?

Could the reason be, like the bureaucrats, the autistics seem to possess certain rationale behind each of their act; that there is a sense of regularity or order – even though autism is classified as a form of psychological disorder? With the exception of God and James Dean, of course, is not every act, everything in existence, rooted in a cause, if not a reason? (This area is rather complex for me, such as the distinction between reason and cause, rational and irrational causes etc. – my logic is really weak.)

Or was it because despite having different motivations, causes, intentions or rationales, these two categories somehow produced the same effect of rigid and inflexible behaviours?

A fire safety officer would be able to justify, with sufficient practical reasons, the necessity of clear corridors in residential area because of the fire safety guidelines. The objects misplaced are fire safety hazards, disrupting emergency evacuation… An autistic person, have enough reasons to convince themselves to move from one point to another in a peculiar way. This perturbs us as much as the bureaucratic inconveniences we are tolerating on a daily basis. And we are just as much of a nuisance and the source of discomfort when we contradict the principles of these two groups. Forcing an autistic child to talk or walk the ‘normal’ way is fundamentally similar to not filling up a registration form properly.

Then what is the difference between the two? An obvious aspect would be their quantitative difference. Does it mean we can say the difference is solely a matter of degree and not type? In these two extreme cases of inflexibility we see the tension between the one and the multiple, of an individual against the collective, of Universal vs. Particular (Hegel)… sure they are numbers one/few against many etc. but the quantitative difference, here, has brought about qualitative changes. Therefore, this is rather a difference of type in the guise of degree, where we witness how subjective order (of the autistics) is classified as a disorder. And how the general will to have an ordered world is very much the source of many minor disorders in our lives – the situation where the railings along the road, for road safety, perhaps, obstructing the way of a wheelchair-bound person.