Being neurodivergent exposes you to a very evil side of capitalism.
It shows you how conditional our freedom is. It shows you just how little of a human society sees you as.
You can be a good person. You can be skilled. You can be smart. But if it’s not in the way they want, you might as well be dead.
It shows you how conditional our freedom is. It shows you just how little of a human society sees you as.
Well put.
hard CW
This is also why “Operation T4” the killings of neurodivergents are so essential to my antifascism. The usefulness can and does decide about who is allowed to life and die. The continuity of exclusion of us from after the war to today, through society, schools, “institutions” (read prisons
) is a continuity to today. A diagnosis was often the legitimization to use force to remove you more from society than you were before.It got a bit better, but just as our feathery comrade says, it still remains extremely conditional.
Imagine frequenting a bunch of “normal, orderly” places with “normal, orderly” people and seeing them with means to sustain themselves and have healthy lives. Now imagine then going out to regions with homeless people and noticing that most of them seem to be “crazy” or “weird.” It made it very clear what the default path for me was.
Besides that, being neurodivergent kinda forced me to start thinking on a social level really fast in order to be able to adapt. It’s one thing to casually learn the backwards ways of society by “normal” means, another entirely to intentionally study them in order to replicate because you just don’t get it. And being hyperfocused in history will turn any proletarian into a communist.
American education pushes the idea of meritocracy very, very hard, snd so when this great Invisible Hand has Walmart rejecting your applications and you’re despised by those around you for being a burden, you either do what capitalism wants you to do - rid the world of a useless eater - or you find some other framework that says you have an unconditional right to breathe air and take up space.
Even within a leftist framework, the valuation of “workers” over all else is still alienating when you’re part of the lumpenproletariat. The sort of interpersonal abuse of power a disabled person is expected to gi through and be thankful to lead to a real antipathy towards hierarchy, and I don’t want to create the conditions for that sort of domination - domination in the name of providing for someone’s needs can be profoundly abusive and traumatic.
So yeah, my political autism and anarchism are not really separable.
