Hey Russel, thanks, I really enjoyed this. Three things it does that I rarely see done together.
The refusal of individual blame is correct and unfashionable.
Most writing on this either blames a demographic or blames nobody. Holding "the system is sick" while still taking the grievances seriously is harder than either, and you do it.
You document the group breakdown honestly, including your own part in it.
That account has value beyond your argument. Purges and ostracism in autistic spaces are a known pattern, and first-person records of them are thin on the ground.
Naming the politics of resentment as spanning the whole spectrum, not one wing of it, is the right call, and you apply it to your own side first.
Where I think the argument works against itself:
1. Systemic analysis loses its point if it also dissolves accountability. The policing passage is where this shows. Officers enforce law, the law is racist, therefore blaming individuals "doesn't help anything". That structure means no participant in any system is ever answerable, which exempts FGB, and exempts you and me. It also removes the mechanism by which systems change, since systems only ever change through people inside them refusing something. Crenshaw's frame is "an account of power as much as it was an account of identities" (https://stimpunks.org/glossary/intersectionality), which is a tool for locating responsibility, not for dispersing it. The workable distinction is between someone acting badly who is open to change and someone who is not (https://neuroclastic.com/our-movement-needs-mediators-not-leaders), and neither is answered by pointing at the system.
2. You drop a named system while arguing systems must be named. You decline "capitalism" and substitute Western European Enlightenment worldviews. Talila Lewis's working definition names both: ableism as a system "deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism" (https://stimpunks.org/glossary/ableism). Colonialism sits beside capitalism there, it does not replace it.
3. Systemic does not mean evenly distributed. Misogyny being a system rather than a thing men do is compatible with it landing unequally. Autistic women are around thirteen times more likely to die by suicide than average, and autistic accounts repeatedly document "no" being ignored. A systemic frame with no account of who absorbs the cost is the frame minus its evidence.
4. The strongest support for your point about autistic men sits inside the gender analysis, not outside it. Bell Hooks, "Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity", and the reading that emotional detachment is what turns boys into lonely, angry, broken people (https://stimpunks.org/glossary/toxic-masculinity). That gets you the recruitment mechanism without dissolving the category.
5. Double empathy applies in both directions here. Milton's point is that the incomprehension is mutual and "not a singular problem located in any one person" (https://stimpunks.org/glossary/empathy). The piece assigns motive to FGB throughout and resolves that mutuality in your favour. The pattern is documented: both sides carry the same narrative, each accusing the other of projecting, and both are partly right.
The mediators piece also offers a better prescription than "stop finger-pointing", which is itself a demand on other people's speech. Its version is "our movement needs more mediators, not more leaders", a role someone takes up rather than a rule imposed on others. That reads to me like what you were actually trying to do in that thread, and it is worth more than the conclusion you reached. Related, and relevant given you are describing harm inside a support space: there is an argument that traumatic rejection in autistic support settings is a health assault as worth preventing as corrupt services, made specifically in a Scottish policy context (https://neuroclastic.com/tying-down-a-duty-to-protections-for-fairness).
I hope you don’t mind that I continue by trying to keep some short (as I can make them) comments to each of your points.
“1. Systemic analysis loses its point if it also dissolves accountability.”
I have seen this response regularly, and I have had a hard time understanding it. My experience of individualism is that individualism itself dissolves accountability, as it seems to find individuals or superficial groups of individuals for problems where the origins are systemic.
My “thin blue line” article is part of my response, which is that I don’t blame individual officers for enforcing racist laws but the organizations and institutions that are responsible for the laws. In the case of that article, I pointed to the British Columbia New Democratic party and the British Columbian parliament as the organization responsible. However, the problem is deeper than that as racism is so deep into the identity, culture and values of Canada that an Antiracist government would quickly be voted out.
That means that rather than pointing away from ourselves, there needs to be a recognition that anyone loyal to the systems of Canada (regardless of other individual demographic traits) are responsible.
Is there a SYSTEM to hold the institutions of Canada to account? No, and that is part of the definition of the problem. The United Nations may call out Canada for violations of human rights and international law, but there is no possibility that any enforcement can be done (outside the court of public opinion) given the Anglosphere specifically and WEOG generally have multiple permanent security council members with vetos.
Here is a video discussing an article that makes the point better than I could:
“2. You drop a named system while arguing systems must be named.”
I believe naming “Capitalism” is redundant, as all the flaws I am concerned with are embedded within “Capitalism”. Using the word “Capitalism”, however, within the Western lens often leads to the assumption that I therefore must support what Western worldviews call “Socialism”, “Marxism” or “Communism”. These systems contain the same concerns, so mentioning “Capitalism” merely generates confusion as I then need to say “Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Communism” each time when I am actually referencing ideologies embedded within what many commonly call Western Worldviews.
I know in the Western Overton window that “Capitalism” and “Communism” are regularly presented as opposites (with Socialism and Marxism in between), when in my mind that is merely a family feud within a family I’m not interested in being friends with.
Similar to my views on the Abrahamic family feuds between Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc.
“3. Systemic does not mean evenly distributed.”
Agreed, but the goal isn’t to point out who is most harmed, but to try to make more visible the systems which are causing the harm. So much of what I see in Western politics is pointing away from oneself.
In Autistic communities I see people claiming that bigotry against neurodivergences is the most important political issue, and that it is “universal” (IE: ignoring intersectionality, where racialization and genderization has massive impacts). I see the same in pretty much every community I have seen.
I believe that focusing on the victims rather than the source of the problems creates a culture of victim hood rather than a culture of accountability. This culture of victim hood is a massive barrier to change, and regularly becomes campaign material for political opponents of any useful change.
“4. The strongest support for your point about autistic men sits inside the gender analysis, not outside it. Bell Hooks, "Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity"“
This is where I believe a Western lens generates confusion.
I do not believe the disconnection is “masculinity” (a word lacking a required qualifier), but Western masculinity (specific interpretations of the Hebrew bible which induces Androcentrism, Roman derived concepts of property which includes members of the household that aren’t the head male, etc, etc).
If we wanted to talk about Haudenosaunee masculinity, we would be talking about an entirely different concept. The word “masculinity” alone (even the phrase “toxic masculinity”) includes a Western universalism that I fundamentally disagree with.
“5. Double empathy applies in both directions here.”
Agreed, except I wasn’t focusing on that individual but the systems that individual was performing. I had to assign some name/identifier because that is what the English language requires of me to convey stories.
This was an informal social group run by volunteers, not what could be thought of as a “support group”. So I wanted to write the story of what I saw without suggesting there was an organization at fault as there was no organization.
Its version is "our movement needs more mediators, not more leaders"
I recently read another great article on that topic.
I posted a comment to that. The reality is that with my specific Autism profile, I have the skills for some of these but not others. I need to be working within a team that shares goals in order to participate in achieving those goals.
Hey Russel, thanks, I really enjoyed this. Three things it does that I rarely see done together.
The refusal of individual blame is correct and unfashionable.
Most writing on this either blames a demographic or blames nobody. Holding "the system is sick" while still taking the grievances seriously is harder than either, and you do it.
You document the group breakdown honestly, including your own part in it.
That account has value beyond your argument. Purges and ostracism in autistic spaces are a known pattern, and first-person records of them are thin on the ground.
Naming the politics of resentment as spanning the whole spectrum, not one wing of it, is the right call, and you apply it to your own side first.
Where I think the argument works against itself:
1. Systemic analysis loses its point if it also dissolves accountability. The policing passage is where this shows. Officers enforce law, the law is racist, therefore blaming individuals "doesn't help anything". That structure means no participant in any system is ever answerable, which exempts FGB, and exempts you and me. It also removes the mechanism by which systems change, since systems only ever change through people inside them refusing something. Crenshaw's frame is "an account of power as much as it was an account of identities" (https://stimpunks.org/glossary/intersectionality), which is a tool for locating responsibility, not for dispersing it. The workable distinction is between someone acting badly who is open to change and someone who is not (https://neuroclastic.com/our-movement-needs-mediators-not-leaders), and neither is answered by pointing at the system.
2. You drop a named system while arguing systems must be named. You decline "capitalism" and substitute Western European Enlightenment worldviews. Talila Lewis's working definition names both: ableism as a system "deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism" (https://stimpunks.org/glossary/ableism). Colonialism sits beside capitalism there, it does not replace it.
3. Systemic does not mean evenly distributed. Misogyny being a system rather than a thing men do is compatible with it landing unequally. Autistic women are around thirteen times more likely to die by suicide than average, and autistic accounts repeatedly document "no" being ignored. A systemic frame with no account of who absorbs the cost is the frame minus its evidence.
4. The strongest support for your point about autistic men sits inside the gender analysis, not outside it. Bell Hooks, "Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity", and the reading that emotional detachment is what turns boys into lonely, angry, broken people (https://stimpunks.org/glossary/toxic-masculinity). That gets you the recruitment mechanism without dissolving the category.
5. Double empathy applies in both directions here. Milton's point is that the incomprehension is mutual and "not a singular problem located in any one person" (https://stimpunks.org/glossary/empathy). The piece assigns motive to FGB throughout and resolves that mutuality in your favour. The pattern is documented: both sides carry the same narrative, each accusing the other of projecting, and both are partly right.
The mediators piece also offers a better prescription than "stop finger-pointing", which is itself a demand on other people's speech. Its version is "our movement needs more mediators, not more leaders", a role someone takes up rather than a rule imposed on others. That reads to me like what you were actually trying to do in that thread, and it is worth more than the conclusion you reached. Related, and relevant given you are describing harm inside a support space: there is an argument that traumatic rejection in autistic support settings is a health assault as worth preventing as corrupt services, made specifically in a Scottish policy context (https://neuroclastic.com/tying-down-a-duty-to-protections-for-fairness).
Thanks so much for engaging!
I hope you don’t mind that I continue by trying to keep some short (as I can make them) comments to each of your points.
“1. Systemic analysis loses its point if it also dissolves accountability.”
I have seen this response regularly, and I have had a hard time understanding it. My experience of individualism is that individualism itself dissolves accountability, as it seems to find individuals or superficial groups of individuals for problems where the origins are systemic.
My “thin blue line” article is part of my response, which is that I don’t blame individual officers for enforcing racist laws but the organizations and institutions that are responsible for the laws. In the case of that article, I pointed to the British Columbia New Democratic party and the British Columbian parliament as the organization responsible. However, the problem is deeper than that as racism is so deep into the identity, culture and values of Canada that an Antiracist government would quickly be voted out.
That means that rather than pointing away from ourselves, there needs to be a recognition that anyone loyal to the systems of Canada (regardless of other individual demographic traits) are responsible.
Is there a SYSTEM to hold the institutions of Canada to account? No, and that is part of the definition of the problem. The United Nations may call out Canada for violations of human rights and international law, but there is no possibility that any enforcement can be done (outside the court of public opinion) given the Anglosphere specifically and WEOG generally have multiple permanent security council members with vetos.
Here is a video discussing an article that makes the point better than I could:
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/video-for-a-westerner-opposing-the
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/video-for-a-westerner-opposing-the
“2. You drop a named system while arguing systems must be named.”
I believe naming “Capitalism” is redundant, as all the flaws I am concerned with are embedded within “Capitalism”. Using the word “Capitalism”, however, within the Western lens often leads to the assumption that I therefore must support what Western worldviews call “Socialism”, “Marxism” or “Communism”. These systems contain the same concerns, so mentioning “Capitalism” merely generates confusion as I then need to say “Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Communism” each time when I am actually referencing ideologies embedded within what many commonly call Western Worldviews.
I know in the Western Overton window that “Capitalism” and “Communism” are regularly presented as opposites (with Socialism and Marxism in between), when in my mind that is merely a family feud within a family I’m not interested in being friends with.
Similar to my views on the Abrahamic family feuds between Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc.
“3. Systemic does not mean evenly distributed.”
Agreed, but the goal isn’t to point out who is most harmed, but to try to make more visible the systems which are causing the harm. So much of what I see in Western politics is pointing away from oneself.
In Autistic communities I see people claiming that bigotry against neurodivergences is the most important political issue, and that it is “universal” (IE: ignoring intersectionality, where racialization and genderization has massive impacts). I see the same in pretty much every community I have seen.
I believe that focusing on the victims rather than the source of the problems creates a culture of victim hood rather than a culture of accountability. This culture of victim hood is a massive barrier to change, and regularly becomes campaign material for political opponents of any useful change.
“4. The strongest support for your point about autistic men sits inside the gender analysis, not outside it. Bell Hooks, "Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity"“
This is where I believe a Western lens generates confusion.
I do not believe the disconnection is “masculinity” (a word lacking a required qualifier), but Western masculinity (specific interpretations of the Hebrew bible which induces Androcentrism, Roman derived concepts of property which includes members of the household that aren’t the head male, etc, etc).
If we wanted to talk about Haudenosaunee masculinity, we would be talking about an entirely different concept. The word “masculinity” alone (even the phrase “toxic masculinity”) includes a Western universalism that I fundamentally disagree with.
“5. Double empathy applies in both directions here.”
Agreed, except I wasn’t focusing on that individual but the systems that individual was performing. I had to assign some name/identifier because that is what the English language requires of me to convey stories.
This was an informal social group run by volunteers, not what could be thought of as a “support group”. So I wanted to write the story of what I saw without suggesting there was an organization at fault as there was no organization.
Its version is "our movement needs more mediators, not more leaders"
I recently read another great article on that topic.
https://thecognitiveecologist.substack.com/p/the-ten-archetypes-of-social-change
https://thecognitiveecologist.substack.com/p/the-ten-archetypes-of-social-change
I posted a comment to that. The reality is that with my specific Autism profile, I have the skills for some of these but not others. I need to be working within a team that shares goals in order to participate in achieving those goals.