Abstract: All children are born with individual identities, but almost all of them undergo social conditioning and are forced to take on collective identities instead. Human progress is driven by people who resist social conditioning (or are not subjected to it in the first place) and retain their individual identities at the cost of being ostracised and pathologised.
Society would have us believe that the desire to fit in is the innate urge of every human being. This is not the case.
Our innate urge is that to be accepted. However, almost all societies only grant acceptance to those who conform and comply, and thus the desire to fit in becomes the secondary urge for most.
So far the psychological term deindividuation, describing the loss of a person's sense of individuality in group settings, has only been applied to people who entered the radical stage.
I argue that deindividuation is a process the vast majority of people undergo from the moment they are born.
We all have to navigate between our desires to be our authentic selves and to be accepted, but the vast majority of people have been successfully conditioned to prioritise the latter. Therefore they take on collective identities (group identities) in order to be accepted and out of fear of rejection by the other group members (a process called social conditioning) while very few people hold on to their individual identities despite the repercussions. I think that social conditioning causes psychological trauma to every affected child and is the springboard for many mental illnesses and personality disorders.
Collective identities are built on two pillars: conformity and compliance, i.e. unquestioning loyalty to both the group and its leaders.
Collective identities don't even have to have a commonality or purpose; just being assigned to a group creates a group identity.
When group members act in conformity with other group members or on the orders of their leaders, they generally refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions because they only followed the crowd or orders.
Collective identities can change a person's perception and often lead to replacing the reality they see with their own eyes with what the group perceives as reality.
When the group majority or someone in a position of authority changes direction, the vast majority of the other group members will follow uncritically, no matter how radical the new position is. This is called groupshift. For example, when the leader of a conservative party that had denounced fascism in the past openly promotes fascism, fascism will become the mainstream ideology, and it will no longer be considered extreme within that party and amongst their voters.
In order to cling to power, conservative parties and politicians successfully appeal to the voters' collective identities, convincing them that their woes are caused by immigrants, the unemployed and other minorities rather than conservative policies, a technique known as divide and conquer.
Collective identities create a sense of superiority and tend to lead to the ostracisation, discrimination, terrorisation, dehumanisation and even elimination of other groups, outsiders, dissenters and misfits. Genocides are driven by collective identities.
Collective identities tend to be frequently reinforced in group settings by means of shouting chants, reciting prayers, singing anthems etc. Another example is the Pledge of Allegiance which is used to condition children in most of the United States.
Group members also tend to consider the group to be more important than its individual members, including themselves, such as people who volunteer for the army of their country.
Collective identities can easily lead to collective punishments. For someone who identifies collectively, an attack on a group member by a member of another group is usually interpreted as an attack on their own group by the other group, and therefore the entire group is targeted in retaliation which has caused uncountable massacres throughout history. Just to give you an example, hundred years ago a young black man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, slipped in an elevator and grabbed the arm of the white female lift operator to catch his fall. She screamed, and someone jumped to a conclusion and called the authorities. Shortly afterwards local police and media told white people to kill black people, and so they did. Most whites didn't identify individually but by their skin colour, so the incident was not considered a (presumed) assault on a white woman by a black man but as an attack on the white community by the black community, and therefore they reacted as a whole and targeted every member of the black community. Estimates say that up to 200 blacks were murdered, and a prosperous black district was erased from the landscape.
The collective identities behind collective punishments resulting in massacres are predominantly, but not exclusively, religion and ethnicity.
A newborn child is already aware of their self and identifies individually (after all, at the time of birth they have undergone eight months of neurological development already, developed likes and dislikes regarding sensory input such as sounds and tastes and explored their bodies), therefore regarding everybody else as an equal individual, regardless of their differences.
But from the moment they are born, they are - in the vast majority of cases - forced to take on the collective identities of their parents or caregivers (such as religion, ethnicity, nationality, social class, culture and family), and developing a sense of us also means developing a sense of them.
For example, newborn children have no racial preference regarding the people around them while 3-month-old infants already prefer the company of people of their own ethnicity.
In the early years children learn to identify with physically discernible groups, such as ethnicity, and the older they get, the more they identify with abstract groups such as nationality. And while younger children tend to unconditionally favour ingroup members, older children already learn to discriminate against group members who fail to conform. This is when the bullying starts.
Traditional fairytales and religious beliefs assist in suppressing children's individual identities by decreasing their self-esteem, introducing them to stereotypes, instilling fear of the unknown and the dread of supernatural punishment and teaching total obedience over critical thinking and conformity over individual expression.
Rewards, punishments, praise, reprimand and behaviour charts teach them that their value depends on how well they fulfil the expectations of those in positions of authority. They also replace the children's innate intrinsic motivation to learn with a dependency on external motivators which makes it easier to manipulate them.
I imagine that children who grow up in reward cultures are far more likely to participate in bribery cultures as adults.
Individual thinking is unique, original and creative while group member thinking stays within the accepted parameters and therefore is far less constructive. This is called groupthink.
Public education is the most important tool to eliminate individual thinking.
Education systems worldwide, with the exception of very few institutions, enforce compliance and conformity and extinguish critical thinking and individual expression in order to turn children into unquestioning subjects of their respective political systems. Because they are taught to suppress their own thoughts and ideas, the children's ability to think creatively declines rapidly.
Beginning in 1968 George Land who had developed a creativity test for NASA decided to conduct a longitudinal study on the creativity of children using the same test. The results clearly demonstrate the extent of this deindividuation process.
This is the percentage of children who scored at genius level:
Age 3-5 - 98%
Age 10 - 30%
Age 15 - 12%
Adults - 2%
Ironically, after they leave the educational system, creativity is the main criterion a potential employer will be looking for.
The educational system is focussed on what is called rote learning, both at school and in homework assignments. Rote learning is actually a contradiction in terms since it is not a learning but a memorisation process, just like someone who keeps copying a Harappan inscription will eventually be able to write it from memory yet never understand its meaning.
Rote learning is unreflective, extremely boring and, in most cases, extremely short-lived.
Getting the pupils to mindlessly parrot what others present as undeniable truths is an important part of the deindividuation process. It teaches children that any frequently repeated claims must be true and thus makes it easy to manipulate them and creates the breeding ground for authoritarianism.
Deindividuation leads to group members condemning the atrocities of other groups while celebrating those of their own, demanding privileges they deny to others, justifying the persecution of other groups as well as dissenters and misfits, holding outsiders to higher standards than group members and refusing to hold their leaders and other group members accountable, amongst many other symptoms. And the growing success of society's deindividuation efforts is reflected in the rise of authoritarianism all over the world.
Most children, to varying degrees, manage the gradual transformation from individual to collective identity, and for many the 'rebellious teen years' are the death throes of their individuality. But there will always be children who are unwilling to let go of their individual identities.
How children who resist the deindividuation process fare depends mostly on the environment and the parenting style. A child like this growing up in a liberal society, with parents who practise gentle parenting and tolerate or even encourage individual expression, will usually thrive. The same child, growing up in a conservative environment revolving around collective identities and with strict authoritarian parents, will face a constant struggle by having to fight demands to conform and comply and give up their personality, and therefore they are most likely to receive an autism diagnosis.
Society and many parents try to break these children by demanding the display of certain behaviours and the suppression of others. This can take the form of social sanctions, authoritarian parenting or structures or behavioural conversion 'therapies' such as ABA. There are three possible outcomes to these attempts:
1. The child is successfully broken and strives to suppress their individual identity, copy the behaviours and opinions of others and comply with demands from those in authority in order to achieve acceptance. This comes at the cost of their mental and physical health (since they are prone to develop stress-related conditions such as PTSD, gastrointestinal problems, self-harming behaviour and suicidality). It also destroys their intellectual potential by teaching them that their way of thinking is incorrect.
Furthermore, learning to unquestioningly obey authority figures leaves them vulnerable to abuse.
2. The child refuses to renounce their identity and defends it vehemently and sometimes violently.
3. The child mentally withdraws from a world refusing to accept them for who they are.
While resistance to the deindividuation process comes naturally to autistic people, it drains a lot of our energy as it requires us to confront the pressures from mainstream society and authorities. But renouncing our identities takes an even greater mental effort and therefore ruins our mental health.
If your child resists the deindividuation process and holds on to their individual identity, let them. They are not defective; on the contrary, human progress is the result of individuals who don't go with the crowd, who don't 'just follow orders' and who are able to think originally.
But it appears that traits associated with autism are not unique to deindividuation resisters.
Long before I realised that I'm autistic, I watched a documentary called Born Dropped Out. It described how former children of hippie parents fared in adulthood. What struck me was that these people's profiles were similar to my own, even though we had been raised in entirely opposite ways. I had a strict authoritarian upbringing revolving around collective identities while these people were free to develop individually and not forced to take on any collective identities.
I recently watched that documentary again, and suddenly it all made sense. While I had resisted the deindividuation process that was forced on me, these people had never been subjected to it in the first place, leading to similar outcomes. Just like me they had difficulties fulfilling the social expectations of others as well as accepting authority based on social constructs and hierarchies. In other words, just like me they were wanting in conformity and compliance, the two pillars of collective identities.
As they had been spared the deindividuation process, I will refer to them as deindividuation exempts.
In general, as they grow older, children undergo a neurological process known as synaptic pruning, and over the years roughly half of their synapses disappear as a result of inactivity since they are not relevant to their collective identities. However, this process does not occur in deindividuation resisters (and probably not in deindividuation exempts) who hold on to most of their synapses, which can cause reduced habituation and sensory overload but also explains their ability to logically connect facts, information and observations that appear unrelated to others ('connecting the dots on different sheets', as I call it).
Their resistance to collective identities also explains their tendency to be rational, unbiased and incorruptible.
Synaptic pruning is often compared to tree pruning and therefore argued to be essential for functionality. However, most trees grow in the wild without ever being pruned, and they are still fully functional, even if their appearance doesn't appeal to the taste of mainstream gardeners.
In history and literature you will find that in many cases a person's perceived inner struggle between good and evil is, in fact, a struggle between their individual judgment and external pressure, i.e. others' social expectations or the orders of their superiors.
Probably the most influential, albeit little-known, person whose individual judgment made him a hero was Vasily Arkhipov, a navy officer of the Soviet Union whose disobedience prevented a nuclear world war. After the United States had unsuccessfully attempted to invade Cuba, the Cuban government requested to have nuclear missiles stationed on the island by the USSR for protection. When the missiles were detected, WW III already seemed inevitable. US Navy dropped bombs around one of the Soviet submarines to force it to surface which the captain interpreted as an attack. He ordered the launch of a nuclear missile which required the keys of all three commanding officers; the captain and the other officer inserted their keys into the launch panel while Arkhipov swallowed his.
Other examples of people whose individual judgment triumphed over their deindividuation include General Joseph E Johnston of the Confederate Army who, after hearing of Robert E Lee's surrender, saw the pointlessness of continuing the American Civil War and surrendered the largest Confederate army to the Union, significantly shortening the war by defying President Davis' orders and henceforth being considered a traitor, and three US troops who, at the risk of being court-martialled and executed, unsuccessfully tried to halt the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War in which the US Army butchered an entire village, and who were subsequently ostracised by the other soldiers.
But for most people, even when they are ordered or expected to commit the most atrocious acts of violence, the struggle between individual judgment and deindividuation is an easy victory for the latter. They may feel uncomfortable committing these acts, and they may regret them at a later stage, but they don't have the intellectual strength to do what they know to be the right thing.
And some don't even face this struggle at all since they have been so successfully deindividuated that not the slightest trace of individual judgment is left in their minds. These include Adolf Eichmann and others who orchestrated the Holocaust on Hitler's orders, the pilots who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and William Calley who perpetrated the aforementioned My Lai Massacre on the orders of his superior.
The consistent results of the Milgram Experiment in which subjects are ordered to administer potentially lethal 450-volt shocks to others demonstrate that two thirds of all people are too deindividuated to use their individual judgment.
All the people who drove human progress have been deindividuation resisters or deindividuation exempts who refused to uncritically conform to their groups and unquestioningly obey authorities, the very quality that is pathologised in autism, and were therefore able to develop their intellectual potential.
Until quite recently even deindividuation resisters had to subscribe to a religion, at least outwardly, if they wanted to survive, but you will find that many of them amended the teachings of their religions to fit their worldviews.
Galileo Galilei's father had planned for his son to become a doctor and sent him to medical school, but Galileo secretly attended geometry lectures.
On one occasion a member of Italy's most powerful family approached him with the design for a machine, expecting to be praised for his ingenuity. Even at the prospect of turning the family against him, he correctly informed him that the machine wouldn't work. When the humiliated man pulled strings to have Galileo removed from his post as chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa, he resigned of his own accord.
He supported Copernicus' theory that the sun and not the earth was the centre of our planetary system which went against the teachings of the Catholic Church. The pope ordered him to abandon the theory and never promote it again; after Galileo disobeyed the order, he was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.
At the age of 16 Isaac Newton defied his mother who wanted him to become a farmer like his late father and rather continued his education.
He became the second person to be appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. At that time all fellows of the University of Cambridge were obliged to take holy orders and become ordained Anglican priests. Despite being an Anglican, Newton secretly rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and therefore couldn't in good conscience take the orders. So he appealed to Charles II to exempt him from the requirement since Lucasian professors were expected to be inactive in the church, anyway. The king agreed and permanently removed the requirement for the post.
As a child Ludwig van Beethoven was forced to practice the piano. But repeating the same pieces over and over bored him, and he rather improvised or made up his own tunes for which he was severely punished by his abusive father who asked him, 'What silly trash are you scratching together now? You know I can't bear that!'
In his early thirties he was already one of the world's leading composers who so far had largely conformed to the norms of the profession. But now he claimed he was dissatisfied with his past work and intended to take a new way.
And so he did, bringing the Classical period to an end and ringing in the Romantic era.
He began breaking with traditions and rules and defying conventions and started experimenting. His audience was divided, and while some hailed him as the greatest musical genius of all times, others described his compositions as bizarre, overly complex, unnecessarily long and often as unplayable; to those critics he replied that this was ‘music for a later age’.
He did things that were unheard of, such as having a female lead in an opera or a chorus in a symphony, and introduced new or long-forgotten elements.
Once he took a walk with the poet Goethe during which they encountered the empress and her entourage. And while Goethe, who was a sucker for etiquette, stepped aside and doffed his hat in deference, Beethoven claimed that the others had to step aside and kept on walking.
Charles Darwin's father had planned for him to become a doctor like himself and sent him to medical school, but his son neglected his studies in order to pursue his interest in natural history. Subsequently his father sent him to Christ's College with a view to becoming a parson.
Darwin had developed his theory of evolution in 1838 and worked on it for over 20 years. He was still tying up loose ends when he received an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace, outlining a similar theory. Both agreed on a joint publication, and the following year Darwin published On the Origin of Species, well aware of the vitriolic backlash he would receive from the outraged Christian world around him, including most other scientists.
Susan B Anthony first broke the law when she became part of the Underground Railroad that smuggled escaped slaves from the United States to Canada.
She became a popular advocate for women's rights, but she turned a multitude against her when at a national women's rights convention she introduced a resolution for more lenient divorce laws, comparing divorce as a refuge from abusive husbands to Canada as the refuge for escaped slaves.
After illegally voting in the presidential election of 1872 as part of her campaign for women's suffrage, she was arrested. During her trial the judge ordered the jury to deliver a guilty verdict.
Mahatma Gandhi had been brought up as a Hindu and remained one throughout his life. Yet he always denounced the caste system and the concept of untouchability which went against his strong sense of equality, despite their fundamental role in Hinduism.
When his mother allowed him to study in London, he was called before a meeting of his caste and told by the leader that leaving his country was against their religion. Gandhi remained determined, and when he was asked if he would disregard the orders of the caste, he replied that the caste should not interfere in the matter. In response the leader told the other caste members to henceforth treat him as an outcaste. He was, however, readmitted upon his return.
In London he was a member of the Vegetarian Society. When another member was expelled for teaching birth control which all other members considered immoral, he was the only one to, unsuccessfully, come to his defence and thus alienate the other members. Even though Gandhi himself opposed birth control, he felt that the issue was irrelevant to the society's objective of promoting vegetarianism.
As a lawyer in South Africa he once refused the court's order to take off his turban and rather left the proceedings. On a later occasion, though, he grudgingly obeyed - he still felt that the order was unjustified but decided to reserve his strength for fighting bigger battles.
In South Africa he also experienced racial discrimination and was repeatedly beaten up by police and others for insisting on what he considered his rights, such as walking on the footpath or travelling first class.
As a child Albert Einstein broke out in tears watching a military parade. He couldn't fathom that people could act uniformly and mindlessly on the orders of someone else. He developed a hatred of everything related to the military, and when the time came for him, he moved to Switzerland and renounced his German citizenship to avoid conscription.
As a celebrity, rather than keeping his political opinions to himself in order to appease his fan base and keep authorities off his back, he used his status to promote what were considered fringe views at that time, such as equal rights for blacks and gays, and called racism 'America's worst disease'. By the time of his death his FBI file contained over 1,400 pages.
When the regent of his tribe, who was also his guardian, arranged marriages for Nelson Mandela and his own son, both of them disobeyed and rather fled to Johannesburg.
Throughout his campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, he repeatedly defied authorities by ignoring bans on public appearances they had placed on him.
He unlawfully burned his passport, incited strikes, left the country and committed acts of sabotage; he was convicted and imprisoned for the latter three crimes.
By distributing flyers against the Nazi regime, Hans and Sophie Scholl knowingly committed a capital crime and turned the vast majority of Germans and fellow students against them.
Martin Luther King first broke the law at the age of 15 when he refused to give up his bus seat for a white passenger, but in the end his teacher, who was travelling with him, managed to pressure him into complying.
Following the Montgomery Bus Boycott a few years later, he was arrested for illegally protesting. This was the first of at least 29 times that he was arrested and jailed or fined.
Like many other blacks in the civil rights movement he initially remained silent regarding the Vietnam War in order not to endanger civil rights legislation and alienate white allies, but eventually he felt the need to openly speak out against it, estranging many of his fellow campaigners and supporters instead.
Against the wishes of his aunt who was his legal guardian at that time and who frequently told him that he'd never make a living with his music, John Lennon accepted a residency for his band, the Beatles, in Hamburg.
In 1965 the Beatles were appointed Members of the British Empire by the queen, but four years later Lennon became the first MBE to return his insignia in protest of the UK's stance in the Nigerian Civil War, its support of the Vietnam War and his latest single slipping in the charts.
When his son Sean was born, he decided to take a career break and raise his child in a reversal of traditional gender roles, disappointing millions of his fans who had much preferred the younger chauvinistic John Lennon.
Julian Assange enjoyed a liberal upbringing with a mother who homeschooled him and encouraged his interests. He wasn't pressured to take on any collective identities and was therefore able to retain his individual identity throughout his childhood and youth, and with it his sense of fairness and justice.
As a young man he became a computer expert, hacked into other systems, offered self-developed programmes and advice for free and technically assisted police in two cases of internet paedophilia.
Aware that he would make the world's most powerful his enemies, he published classified documents exposing corruption and war crimes worldwide, especially regarding the United States' War on Islam.
While he was stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he was granted asylum and later citizenship, he reported on a corruption scandal involving the Ecuadorian president, putting the public interest before his personal safety.
In order to draw attention to climate change, Greta Thunberg skipped school disobeying the law, her parents and her school to hold solitary protests in front of the Swedish parliament. One of her supportive teachers describes her as 'a troublemaker, she is not listening to adults'.
All these people, and many more, changed this world because when they deemed it necessary, they refused to conform and comply in the face of ostracisation, discrimination, persecution, physical violence and even murder. They did what they did because they knew it was the right thing, despite being aware that it would turn the majority or those in power against them.
The question remains why evolution so blatantly favours collective identities in humans despite their regressive, exclusionary, dehumanising and often genocidal nature. I suggest the answer lies in the networking skills of mainstream people: a person with multiple collective identities is bound to know a lot of people while someone who identifies individually is likely to have a very small circle of acquaintances.
For their works and ideas to gain attention or momentum, most deindividuation resisters and exempts rely on mainstream helpers who have the necessary connections. Since those at the far collective end of the neurological spectrum usually oppose progress in any shape or form, assistance will have to come from more moderate mainstream people. Greta Thunberg had no friends and initially couldn't convince anyone to protest with her; however, mainstream activists noticed her and shared her story, leading to the movement that emerged around her.
Basically, progress is initiated by people who identify individually while those who identify collectively provide the network to spread it; it's like using the Roman infrastructure to fight Roman oppression. This means that nature actually intends our exhausting and life-draining struggle against the savage mainstream.
Nobody knows how many great ideas, initiatives, inventions, discoveries, theories and masterpieces have never found their way to the public because their creators weren't sufficiently connected and failed to get the attention of mainstream allies (which appears to be the fate of this hypothesis as well).
Collective identities divide communities and individuals and spread distrust and fear of each other, often leading to the most atrocious crimes against humanity, committed out of hatred against anyone who is different. This world needs more people who dare to speak out and take action against injustice, inequality and corruption, who come up with new ideas, who think for themselves and who are not afraid of the backlash. Human progress is an uphill battle against the raging mainstream, and if more children were allowed to retain their individual identities, this world could become a much better place for everybody.
Our intellectual advantage and our supposed social deficits are two sides of the same coin, and any attempts at 'correcting' the latter will diminish that advantage. (In a society that has noticed the connection but refuses to see the interdependence of the two, this phenomenon has been named 'twice exceptional'.) As I pointed out in one of my speeches, The Necessity of Autism: 'It’s our failure to conform to society, it’s our failure to think the way others think, it’s our failure to subscribe to group dynamics and groupthink, it’s our failure to give in to peer pressure, it’s our failure to blindly follow tradition, it’s our failure to unquestioningly obey authority, and it’s our failure to accept the status quo that have driven human progress for tens of thousands of years, thanks to autistic individuals who successfully resisted attempts at being mainstreamed.'
In conclusion, I consider autism (as well as related neurological orientations such as ADHD) to be a social construct describing people who exceed the level of individuality tolerated by society. It is no coincidence that autism was first pathologised in Nazi-occupied Austria and the United States in the early 1940s, in countries and at a time that saw the ruthless enforcement of conformity and compliance and the perception of individual expression as an act of treason or a sign of mental illness. And the more the world slides back into authoritarianism, the more people will be diagnosed with autism.
Throughout history, those who changed the world for the better lived through a lifetime of struggle, opposition and discrimination for their refusal to uncritically conform and comply. It is time to make it easier for them; let's begin with their childhoods.
The Deindividuation Resister Hypothesis merges and elaborates on The Deindividuation Process and All Children Are Born Autistic which now redirect here. As I keep reflecting on society in general and the important role deindividuation resisters and exempts (i.e. autistic people) play in it, my thinking has evolved over the years and is likely to keep evolving in years to come. Therefore this essay may be expanded, amended or otherwise edited in the future.
My children's story Flinn Elf Grows Up is based on this hypothesis.
