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Hmmm. I just read this in an unherd article by Kathleen Stock: unherd.com/2023/11/domi… unherd.com/2023/11/domi… . She's musing about how the poor Brits got saddled with Dominic Cummings as a governmental advisor.
""" It’s hard not to wonder whether his appeal was so great for his employers
because, though they personally couldn’t understa…
Hmmm. I just read this in an unherd article by Kathleen Stock: https://unherd.com/2023/11/dominic-cummings-is-no-reservoir-dog/ https://unherd.com/2023/11/dominic-cummings-is-no-reservoir-dog/ . She's musing about how the poor Brits got saddled with Dominic Cummings as a governmental advisor.
""" It’s hard not to wonder whether his appeal was so great for his employers
because, though they personally couldn’t understand what he was on about,
they were still impressed by the superficial signs of cleverness and staggering
self-belief and desperately hoped it all made sense to someone else. """
This makes me wonder if this is the secret behind the success of Critical Theory as well. Nobody had a 'this emperor has no clothes' moment?
Dominic Cummings is much, much brighter than Kathleen Stock, and that piece of hers is the sort of thing a Midwit writes about a genuinely clever person.
I mean, in Cummings's position, I'd have scruffed the feminist adviser and booted her out the door as well, because feminism is nonsense. You can see the extent to which it is nonsense if you recall how, during the pandemic, so much focus was placed on "covid virus: women most harmed", when it was clear from very early that males over 50 with comorbidities were the most at-risk group.
Being clever in the way Cummings is clever does not, however, make him a good adviser. In the last 20 or so years we as a society have given far too much leeway to people with poor social skills who do not know how to function in any office environment, let alone the pressure-cooker of the Cabinet Office.
The reason there are no historical records of people who evince the "non-neurotypical" behaviours we associate with Aspergers Syndrome is because, historically, people who behaved like Cummings does as an adult when small simply had traits like that bullied out of them in the schoolyard.
I have no doubt this was unpleasant for the children involved. They did, however, grow up to be functioning adults who could use their intelligence for wider social benefit.
Meanwhile, we have now created a situation where we've saddled ourselves with bright, badly-behaved males who do not know how to work well with others and less-bright "diversity hire" females who want to tell everyone what words to use in text messages. Such a combination is never going to end well.
"The reason there are no historical records of people who evince the "non-neurotypical" behaviours we associate with Aspergers Syndrome is because, historically, people who behaved like Cummings does as an adult when small simply had traits like that bullied out of them in the schoolyard.
I have no doubt this was unpleasant for the children involved. They did, however, grow up to be functioning adults who could use their intelligence for wider social benefit."
I'm not so sure about this one Helen.
I'm not going to touch the Dominic Cummings vs. The Establishment bit and I'd love to have Lorenzo weigh in on this, but I really think we can see a very long history of very strange men living on the fringes of society who can then come back in and use their intelligence for a wider social benefit.
Right off the top of my head I would cite Saint Francis of Assisi, who stripped naked in the public square and then walked off to live in caves in the mountains and talk to wolves, the moon and the wind.
All of that, to use modern legal euphemisms would be "grounds for seeking a compulsory treatment order".
The more I look for it the more I see it. Saint Anthony (The Great) lived in the desert for years and constantly plagued by visions of demons. It's hardly a Western Christian thing either.
The Chinese mystic Zhuang Zi lived in the mountains, most of his insights appeared as some sort of hallucination, and he was sought out for advice for advice by important government officials. He was offered political positions which he was smart enough to decline.
Baruch Spinoza was kicked out of his Jewish community for telling things that they didn't want to hear. He lived an ascetic life, declined official positions, but was sought out by some of the important people of his day.
I could go on.
The idea of a mystic weirdo living out on the fringe, who may give powerful advice to those who can find him is almost a movie & TV trope. Luke Skywalker begins his hero's journey with a quest to find Old Ben Kenobi who lives out by the dune sea. Later (because George Lucas could never resist milking an idea to death) it's Yoda in the Degoba system.
In the various versions of Bruce Wayne's quest to become The Batman, he usually has to journey to some mystic temple in the Himalayas.
Of course, if someone goes full celibate mystic, they will be totally cut off from historical (memetic) and family (genetic) history so they will never be seen again, but there could be enough of them who retain some tenuous link to human society that they could have a real effect on it.
This maybe a real "Mystic Shamen" version of the rather dubious "Gay Uncle" hypothesis. Even if it only pays off every few centuries, that might be enough evolutionary reinforcement to keep the particular genetic/memetic factors that make such men (and it's going to be 99.9% males) return in future generations.
The prize case of “may be a wee bit Aspie but productive” surely goes to Sir Isaac Newton. Who was bullied at school, so maybe that explains his quite high administrative capacity: he was a very successful Master of the Mint.
But yes, there is a long history of very eccentric men on the fringes who were intellectually creative, in various senses. They were a small proportion of very eccentric men on the fringes who passed anonymously into history.
Some of them found homes in Christian and Buddhist monastic orders, or Sufi tariqa. Many religions have traditions of hermits.
Such men were not noted for having children, so seem rather an evolutionary dead end. Of course, that may be a way of sorting them out of lineages, as I have suggested for homosexuality. (There may also be a significant overlap between the two groups.) But, as with homosexuals, us being so much the cultural species enables them to contribute memetically if not genetically.
Newton meditated in an oven I'm told, and was amongst other things an MP whose only record in Hansard apparently was to demand a window be closed "because there is a draught." Would that Hansard was graced with such today; MPs are all gas and wind these days.
And we've had at least a generation of... doubling down on being anti-bully.
My experience/default (being <4st wet thru at the time) was to channel the Aspie meltdown. Last time that happened (bullying) in school, it took three rugger props to get me off the cnut.
YMMV, but I've never met a member of my tribe (Even though I'm pretty much a recluse, I trip over A LOT of them regardless) that answers your parody discription. The rare instances have been unaware, unspotted, and undiagnosed; with sociopathy blanking anyone noticing that autism might be part of their psych make-up too.
We are attacked/bullied for baked-in difference. Long it was only noticed that we went ballistic; and never WHY. Put it this way: the "neurotypical" are Hamas and you are blaming the Jews. Give a dog a name and shoot it.