More Selfish Altrusim

When I was turning ten a family friend, who had moved to Colorado, came to Pennsylvania to visit us. The friend offered to buy me something for my birthday, and what I wanted the most was Super Mario Brothers 3 for Nintendo. When we got to the store and found the game, the friend insisted that she was going to pay for the game herself. My mother told her, no, that she would not allow her to buy it for me unless she, too, contributed something. This silly argument went on for a couple minutes. I began to notice yet another absurdity in adult interaction.


At this past year's Christmas party, my mother insisted on giving the guests food to take home. The guests kept saying things like, "I don't want it," and "You don't have to," but my mother kept insisting they take it. Eventually, the guests took the food. While this exchange was not nearly as protracted as the "Super Mario Brothers 3" one, it still reeked of ritual: social ritual.


Now, to be fair, my mother probably did not want the food because she is trying to watch her weight. But what about the episode involving Super Mario Brothers 3? Throughout my childhood, I watched my my mother participate in lengthy exchanges involving phrases such as "You don't have to," "I can't let you do that," and so forth. Despite having Asperger's Syndrome, even as a kid I knew that this was some kind of social ritual to make oneself look selfless. I thought it was ridiculous then, and I think it's ridiculous now.


Today I wonder if this is another example of reciprocal altruism. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in evolutionary psychology, but to me the protracted, "You don't have to" and "I can't let you do that" exchanges reek of reciprocal altruism. This is an evolutionary strategy observed in social species: If one being does something else for another member of his species-- usually a genetic relative or (in the case of humans) a close friend-- then that other being will eventually reciprocate. If someone tells their friend, "You don't have to do that," I suspect it translates into, "I am showing you how selfless I am so that when I desperately need help, you will offer it." The more protracted version of this exchange, perhaps, translates into, "I'm less selfish than you."/"No, I'm less selfish than you." 


Whatever the case, I think it's a silly ritual and an example of how absurd certain social rituals are. Additionally, from what I've observed, women do it more than men. Why? Possibly because women evolved to be more social beings in order to form close-knit groups to protect their offspring from predators. Either way, it's a ritual I don't participate in. If I had a child and my friend offered to buy her a video game, I might say, "Are you sure you can afford that?" ONCE and then when the person said, "Yes," I would accept their offer and thank them. This is just about to the extent I've seen men do it, incidentally. 


By the way, on a recent episode of The Simpsons, Bart and Lisa asked Marge why they were flying clear across the country to a wedding. Marge explained, "Cousin Cathy invited us so our feelings wouldn't be hurt, and we're going so her feelings won't be hurt." Homer even said, "I just don't understand the world of grownups."
.


In the end, it comes back to what I said in "I'm Honest and Your Baby Is Ugly": There is no such thing as true altruism. 

New Article Published in "Autism/Asperger's Digest"

My new article, "An Aspie's View of Death," has just been published in THE PRINT EDITION of Autism/Asperger's Digest. I just got my magazine on December 23rd. However, it may be a bit longer before the issue is released to the general public. Keep checking for updates here!: http://www.autismdigest.com/

How Fiction Reflects the Human Mind

This post isn't related to Asperger's Syndrome per se, but I think people with AS are more likely to identify with it.

Children's fiction is imaginative. The sky's the limit. Dinosaurs talk. Kids have super powers or can cast spells. Monsters are friends with children. And so forth. The scope of fiction narrows as you head into the intermediate and young adult section of bookstores and libraries. You won't see talking dinosaurs or friendly monsters, but a lot of imagination is still there, even in popular fiction. Harry Potter, need I say more? I actually really enjoy teen fiction. Even when a large focus of the story is centered on "high school drama," I've found that characters often have unique voices. Additionally, lots of teen fiction deals with issues such as challenging authority and "coming out of the closet." Sometimes these themes are presented in unique ways, such as in The Hunger Games.

Now walk into the adult section. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough or in the right places, but imagination seems mostly gone. So much adult fiction seems to be midlife drama, and very little of it has any kind of unique twist. As I stated, even "high school drama" books have a level of creativity. But seriously, it is so difficult to find an adult book that isn't about some woman having a mid-life crisis, or a man having an affair, or a woman feeling like dirt because she can't pop a baby out. Even in books advertised with unique storylines, these storylines take a backseat to mid-life drama. I am almost finished reading Mercy by Jodi Picoult. The book is allegedly about a mercy killing. However, the majority of it is about a man having an affair with another woman. False advertising! About 3/4 of this book would have to be cut if it were to be entirely about a mercy killing. If I read one more time about how Cam "pulls out of Mia at the last minute," and "spills," I'll mercy kill myself!

For this reason, I stick to YA fiction and the adult books I read are largely non-fiction.

To me, this progression of children's fiction to adult fiction represents the evolution of the neurotypical human mind. Children are largely imaginative. In the teenage years, some imagination is lost in favor of romantic relationships, but relationships are only one part of life. In adults, it's all about marriage and procreating. I know I'm making a generalization here, but that's how it seems, and fiction seems to represent this. We Aspies get tired of everything being about romance. We want books that make us think and that have a unique story from a unique perspective. Alas, publishers obviously realize that unless a story has at least a subplot with a romance in it, it won't sell. Adult fiction often has to be Adult fiction to sell.

"How About if I Set You Up With Someone?"

Whoops, over two months since my last post. Sorry about that!


Today I was thinking about when I was a teenager and told some of my friends from camp that I wasn't really interested in dating. Every once in a while, the question, "How about if I set you up with someone?" came up. Today, I might easily dismiss that question as a response to the possible confusion they might have felt knowing that I had a prolonged crush on one of our counselors from my first year there and yet wasn't interested in an actual date with somebody more "realistic." However, I encountered this same question from my "friends" (put in quotes because they were terrible at living up to the title) in middle school even before I got my first crush. In both cases, the question freaked me out. If you are a kid with Asperger's Syndrome and people keep offering to set you up with someone, what you hear is this, "It is not normal to not be interested in dating." Some people with AS are asexual. Some just rarely get interested in anybody and think it's silly to actively look for someone (as in my case). So everybody, please, stop asking us. If we want you to set us up with someone, we'll let you know! Promise!

I'm Honest and Your Baby is Ugly

Lately on Facebook I have seen babies, babies, babies, and more babies. As far as I'm concerned-- and at the risk of, perhaps, alienating half my audience-- newborn babies generally look the same and look ugly (And no, I was not exempt from this rule as an infant). Inevitably, when somebody posts a million pictures of his/her newborn on Facebook, a flurry of "He's so cute," or "She's perfect!" dominates the comments sections of these pictures. I seriously wonder how many people genuinely are honest when they post these comments. Maybe a few, maybe even most, but not all. In fact, it's largely a social grace, a lie-- and presumably the new parents know that they're merely hearing a social grace rather than an honest opinion-- and perhaps a form of reciprocal altruism that is prevalent in social species.


Don't let the title of the blog entry fool you-- I'm not going to write, "Your baby is ugly" when I see pictures of babies posted on Facebook. But I'm not going to tell a boldfaced lie and say that s/he's "perfect" or "cute." If I want to be supportive, I'll say things that I really mean, such as, "I know you'll be a good mom/dad." 


Quite frankly, routine social graces feel phony to me, and I hate small talk. Dr. Jack Kevorkian once commented that he disliked small talk and also said that he hated how people routinely lie to each other in ways that I just described; these complaints are common among people with Asperger's syndrome which is one of many reasons why I think Dr. Kevorkian had AS. Call me cold, but when I go to work and bump into someone I barely know, I don't care how they are. No, that doesn't  mean I wish them ill, but I am really ambivalent to how they're doing, and I think if people were more honest with themselves they would agree. If somebody I barely know asks me how I am, I say, "Hey, what's going on?" That more casual greeting feels less phony to me than, "How are you?" At a job interview, I do say, "How are you?" because, unfortunately, successful job interviews are laced with phoniness. 


Is it cold for me to say that I am ambivalent that a casual acquaintance's mother is in the hospital? Here, I do conform to this social grace by saying, "Is she going to be okay?" because it is a profound situation, but I forget about it two seconds later. Does that sound insensitive?


It occurred to me recently that if I managed to do something to change the world for the better, ultimately my happiness about this would be in sheer pride more than, "I'm glad that other people are doing better," or "I'm glad that they are suffering less." Although I would be glad about these things, ultimately it would be a real boost for my ego. What about that? Does that sound selfish? I'm reminded of another Dr. Kevorkian moment. In 1998, when Dr. Kevorkian was on 60 Minutes after he injected one of his patients directly, he told the host, Mike Wallace, "I'm fighting for me, Mike. Me. This is a right I want. I'm 71... I'll be 71. You don't know what'll happen when you get older. I may end up terribly suffering. I want some colleague to be free to come help me [to die] when I say the time has come. That's why I'm fighting, for me. Now that sounds selfish. And if it helps everybody else, so be it." Mike Wallace, and many other interviewers, also said that when they talked to Kevorkian privately, they found him to be a very compassionate man. So why would he say something brazen like that if he didn't care about his patients? Obviously I can't get inside his mind, but I think in those four sentences he summed up what I'm saying here-- You may care about other people, but in the end you're the person you care about the most. He cared about his patients, but ultimately he wanted the right to die for himself. I think he was just more honest about his motives than most people in his situation would be.


Reciprocal altruism is, I think, why we pretend to be incredibly upset that the mother of somebody who we barely know is in the hospital or that we think somebody's ugly baby is cute. Yes, caring about the person, even to a minimal extent (depending on your relationship with them) may be part of it, but in the end it's about you. If you pretend to be more upset than you are about an acquaintance's mother being in the hospital, that person will like you better and be more likely to help you if you need it. Same thing if you pretend to think somebody's ugly baby is cute. 


And how many of you who cry at funerals really do it because you feel badly for the person rather than that you simply miss them? I think if people were more honest they would admit that they cry at funerals for themselves, not for the deceased. 


I think people with Asperger's are just more honest about their motives and how they really feel and are more aware of it because these social graces were not something that they acquired unconsciously but something that had to be taught to them.


There is no such thing as true altruism. 

Returning to My Roots

Last week, I returned to Camp Negev (not its real name), the secular Jewish summer overnight camp that I went to from 1995-1998. It was their second annual Alumni Day, in which Negev campers from years past could return and reunite with friends for a few hours.


Nobody from my age group showed up. In fact, I think a total of two campers from the 1990s, besides me, who showed up, and I wasn't close with either of them (we were positive acquaintances, I'd say). But that's okay. It was still good to see them. It was just good to see familiar-- and not so familiar-- Negev faces. To understand why I was okay with showing up and not reuniting with anybody I had ever been close to, one has to understand my experience at Camp Negev and what a unique place it was.


Camp Negev changed my life. I was a few months shy of 15 when I started attending in the summer of '95. I had never been to overnight camp before, and all life had taught me (mostly in school) was that I could expect interaction with my peers to be one humiliation after another. I expected that to happen at Negev. I expected the girls to put on makeup and talk nonstop about Cute Boys and make fun of me. If I expected this, why did I go to Negev? Because my older brother had gone (from '91-'93) and loved it. I had outgrown my day camp and was too old to return as a camper. 


When I first came to Negev, I was paranoid. I was scared that the slightest infringement on my part would invite humiliation. I remember being terrified when I randomly announced one day that the year was exactly half over to everybody in my cabin; they responded by giggling. I see in retrospect that they giggled because it was such a random comment. They probably forgot about it five minutes later and it never came up again. At school, a comment like that generally invited months of humiliation and became something of which I would never hear the end. I cried nearly every day for the first couple weeks at camp out of stress of trying to navigate the social world. Finally, in the middle of the third week of camp, one of my counselors, Jonas (not his real name) reached out to me and became my friend and mentor. He helped me to relax and make friends. Within three days or so of beginning to get to know him, I begged my parents to let me stay second session-- and they did. And the other kids in my group were happy about this. This kind of reaction was new to me. 


I stayed all 7 weeks in the summer of '95 and, at the time, it was the best summer of my life. Jonas helped me through high school, emotionally (despite living hundreds of miles away). I haven't seen him in about 10 years and we don't talk much anymore, but I know I will always love and respect him for what he did. I don't know who I would be today if not for him. Needless to say, I did return in the summer of 1996 (which was the best summer of my life. Period.), went on the camp's Israel trip in 1997, and came back as a C.I.T. in 1998. What I found to be unique about Negev was how interesting the people were to talk to even if I barely knew them. Most of them were intelligent and had something interesting to say. Some of my fondest memories include the deep discussions-- that sometimes lasted until 3 AM-- with people, some with whom I was close, and some with whom I barely knew. It was just that kind of place. In fact, it's really the first time I can recall actually engaging in a true conversation with anyone outside of my family! Plus, its small environment (usually about 150 campers) made it more comfortable for me. Did I have social problems there? Sure, but so does every Aspie, no matter how comfortable the environment (and this was the first place I truly felt comfortable). I can tell you right now, however, that my social skills improved dramatically from going to Negev. 


So back to the reunion. Yes, last Sunday I went to the Alumni Day. I enjoyed just watching the kids experience the absolute freedom that camp offered, the acceptance of differences in place where there is a strong emphasis on social justice. I talked to some of the counselors, who seemed interesting. I even found out there are some kids with Asperger's syndrome, and education about AS was delivered to the counselors during orientation. 


So that was Negev. My roots. To which I returned for a few short hours.

You Can't Live Like That!

One of my biggest regrets of my life was the fact that I mostly kept to myself in high school. With undiagnosed Asperger's, I was too scared of screwing up socially and making myself a target and going through another living hell of bullying. So I kept quiet and barely spoke to people. I didn't open up. There were a few people I spoke to during homeroom and art class and gym, and even though I knew that we could probably be good friends, I never took the chance of letting them get to know me. I blended into the background while everyone else had, as the cliché goes, the best years of their lives. I wasn't miserable, but I wasn't particularly happy either.


You can't live like that. 


We need to create a world that is more understanding to people with Asperger's syndrome or their teenage and adult years will be, at best, limbo or, at worst, a living hell.