Evolvement of My Thinking on Society and Autism (© Frank L. Ludwig)

Evolvement of My Thinking on Society and Autism

When I was born, the fall of the Third Reich lay less than two decades in the past, and society hadn't changed that much since then. Many of the conservative politicians who had been members of the NSDAP still shaped the political landscape, many of the teachers who had indoctrinated their pupils still taught children to unquestioningly conform and comply, many law enforcement officers who had executed the Nazi laws still enforced laws against progressives, and many of the people who had denounced their neighbours for their political views or sexual orientations still spied on others' activities, and hardly anyone had a problem with that.
Growing up, I felt that I was surrounded by herd animals who did as they were told, went along with the crowd and were easily manipulated by advertisements and propaganda.
Taking Germany's past into account, I initially believed that this mentality was a distinct German trait, one that had brought the country to its knees once and might do so again. But as I grew older and saw what was going on in the world, especially during the Vietnam War, I realised that this herd mentality was not a German but a human trait. I felt vindicated in this view when I learned of the Milgram Experiment whose consistent results demonstrate that two thirds of all humans unquestioningly comply with authority.

In school I detested the authoritarian way of teaching, and I particularly hated the element of repetition. I considered learning by rote unnatural and couldn't understand that it seemed no problem for the other children. Likewise, while I enjoyed the piano lessons I got, I hated practising and found it easier to learn by improvising and composing.

When I realised that I'm autistic in 2013, I tried to figure out what exactly autism is and looked for something all of us have in common. However, I soon realised that all autistic people are entirely different from each other - in fact, autistic people are more different from each other than mainstream people are from each other, which led me to the conclusion that we have a predominantly individual nature as opposed to others' predominantly social nature. At that time I considered autism a social impairment with a distinct intellectual advantage and accepted that, as has been said, our brains are wired differently, causing me to revisit my attitude towards education and conceding that mainstream children may indeed learn better by repetition.

Following some recent discoveries that showed how intellectually advanced Neanderthals were, I started comparing them to their Homo sapiens contemporaries (while everybody else compares them to modern humans) and found that they couldn't hold a candle to them. My research suggested that it was Neanderthal assimilation that led to the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution and created modern humans. At a later stage the similarities between Neanderthals and autistic people (such as individual nature, original thinking etc) caused me to believe that Neanderthal genes may play a part in autism, culminating in my Autistic Neanderthal Theory in 2017.
Around that time I already thought of the possibility of individuality being the natural state of modern humans and wrote the children's story When the Smoke Clears.

When I attended psychology lectures at university as a young man, I kept hearing 'everybody does this' when it came to group dynamics and peer pressure and thought, 'I don't.' The more I looked into group psychology, the more I realised that our immunity to group dynamics, including our scepticism of authority, is an important part of our intellectual advantage and wrote about it in 2018.

By 2019 I had realised that our perceived social deficits are merely our inability or unwillingness to fulfil others' pesky social expectations and that it is this inability or unwillingness that drives human progress, and therefore dropped my view of autism as an impairment altogether. As I wrote in The Necessity of Autism, '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.'

Still based on the assumption that our brains are wired differently from birth, I wrote The Autistic Classroom in 2020 in which I laid out how the autistic way of learning could be supported in mainstream schools and suggested that non-autistic children may benefit from this approach as well. Later that year I studied Ken Robinson's model of Organic Education which caused me to revert to my original view that mainstream education, especially the use of repetition, is detrimental to the learning process of all children. In The Case for Organic Education I demonstrate that his model would be ideal for all children.

Around the same time I pondered on the question why autistic people who embrace their neurological orientation are almost exclusively progressives while those who consider their autism a disorder and try to be more mainstream are more likely to be conservatives. I once again looked at the Neanderthals who came up with new ideas and looked after their old and sick while there is no indication that pre-assimilation Homo sapiens did the same. This resulted in my Progressive Neanderthal v Conservative Homo sapiens Hypothesis.
Further reflection on this topic led me to develop the model of the Neurological Spectrum in early 2021 according to which everybody is on a spectrum between individual and collective identity, with progressives and autistic people at its far individual end. (I also toyed with the idea of writing a poem contrasting two persons on the extreme individual and collective ends but then realised that I had already done so in 2012.)
A few months later it dawned on me that nobody could possibly be born with a collective identity and that ending up on the collective end of this spectrum must be the result of social conditioning. I came to the conclusion that all children are born with individual identities but are forced by society to take on collective identities instead. Those who resist this deindividuation process retain their intellectual potential at the cost of being ostracised and pathologised. I consequently developed the Deindividuation Resister Hypothesis which argues, with plenty of examples from Galileo to Thunberg, that human progress is driven by deindividuation resisters who refuse to unquestioningly conform and comply, the very quality that is pathologised in autism. I therefore consider autism a social construct to describe people who exceed the level of individuality tolerated by society.