Autists Seek Patterns, Not Cope

The Light Switch and the Skinsuit

Sebastian Jensen recently observed that ‘Most 4chan/twitter right wingers aren’t actually autistic’; rather, he sees ‘antisocial/ADHD/narc personality types more often.’ Autism has become a trendy label for cruel reactionaries to evade more fitting diagnoses for their ‘neurodiversity.’ But why would psychopaths choose to wear autism as a skinsuit? And if that glove doesn’t fit, then what is autism really?

A common phrase that clinicians will use when diagnosing children with autism is ‘RRBI.’ This acronym stands for ‘repetitive and restrictive behavior and interests.’ To outsiders, autism does look ‘repetitive’ and ‘restrictive.’ That’s because the normie assumption is that playing with objects is wasted time. According to this view, children should spend time socializing, learning not just what to say, but how you say it.

Wikipedia’s illustration: ‘a young autistic boy who has arranged his toys in a row’

Simon Baron-Cohen (SBC), a leading expert on autism, sees something else. When an autistic child flicks a light switch, then another, he isn’t just stuck in a loop—he’s running an experiment. In The Pattern Seekers (2020), Baron-Cohen argues that autistic minds don’t just crave order—they hunger for truth, expressed in consistent patterns. But social life outside religious or military hierarchies rarely offers such clear rules.

I look down at my phone. “The headcount today is going to be 8. I wanted to give you a heads up 😃” Four more than usual. I start to count: somebody’s probably got a new boyfriend, and… another part of my inner monologue shouts, ‘STOP.’ I used to have social anxiety, but nowadays I don’t. A long night of homemade potstickers, espresso martinis, and Magdalena Bay loomed ahead. Being gay is so exhausting.

Prometheus Learns to Play Mario Kart

A common but reductive criticism of Simon Baron-Cohen’s work is that it represents autists as more ‘male-brained,’ such that Aspergirls might be less ‘feminine.’ In SBC’s UK Brain Types Study, 62% of autistic males had a brain type that was at least mildly more systemizing¹ than empathizing,² compared to 44% of typical males. For women, it was 50% versus 27%. A third of both men and women were equally balanced.³

As with many psychological traits, both empathy and systemizing fall on bell curves within the population. While we can easily conjure up examples of people who are extremely bad at one and good at the other, most people are balanced or just have a slight tilt. He might enjoy teaching and writing novels with elaborate worldbuilding. She might work as a nurse or in a charity, but balance time between herself and others.

The D-score shows how much one’s systemizing exceeds his or her empathy.

Between empathizing and systemizing, the latter is the newcomer in human evolution. We know Homo erectus, which had already developed empathy as part of a cognitive arms race, used fire, but only opportunistically—like after a lightning strike—or by imitation. But the clearest examples of systematic use of fire, as a tool, come from the archaeological evidence of ovens and kilns, seen from just 40,000 years ago.

The generative power of if-and-then experiments can’t be overstated. Agriculture, or the domestication of plants and animals, needed what SBC calls ‘the Systemizing Mechanism’; likewise, the wheel (“if I take a piece of wood, and cut it in a circular shape, then it will rotate”), writing, and mathematics. A dog may associate swiping a door handle with its opening, but this isn’t real if-then reasoning—it lacks causality.

“Are you overwhelmed by all the lights and sounds?” Oh, right, they had just gotten LED backlights for the TV, but I had barely noticed. “No, it’s ok… I’m just trying to figure out the mechanics of Mario Kart.” Maybe my friend was concerned that I wasn’t contributing to the ‘David Boreanaz: hot or not?’ conversation. I’d learned that, in this setting, my opinions mostly provoked annoyed glances or blank stares.

Autists as the Inverse of Psychopaths

On the surface, some autistic and psychopathic behaviors may look similar. Although autists will acknowledge the ‘13/50’ crime statistics pattern, it takes a psychopath to wield these facts as a weapon in pursuit of policies that increase suffering. Psychopaths read emotions really well but ‘don’t really care, Margaret.’ Autists may struggle to ‘get it’ right away, but they care deeply about alleviating suffering.

They are mirror images of each other in the two types of empathy. Affective empathy—which even animals may possess, as dolphins aid visibly distressed humans—is more basic. It is blunted in psychopaths but fully intact in autists. Cognitive empathy, by contrast, requires accurately modeling other people’s thoughts and beliefs. Psychopaths excel at this; autists, by definition, struggle with ‘theory of mind’ abilities.

Left: a starlet in distress; Right: a disabled teen being tortured for his race

Politics runs on weaponized empathy. This week, the White House criticized Selena Gomez for posting a video of herself crying over mass deportations. The weaponization is almost always identity-based: when Selena wailed about ‘my people,’ her referent was unclear. But in 2017, no pop starlets cried for the disabled teen who was kidnapped and tortured by four African Americans screaming anti-white slurs.

Since the Chicago perpetrators of that Rassenhass live-streamed their crime, we have pictures of the bound, gagged, and beaten boy. They make me as uncomfortable as the image of Ms. Gomez crying does. But I recognize that affective empathy is not a good basis for public policy. Nowhere is this clearer than in crime and punishment, where emotional appeals actually bring us further from fairness than cost-benefit analyses.

Yes! Hit the ‘R’ button before turning, and you get a speed boost! This is what the girls meant by ‘drift.’ I see my ranking rise with each round, from #12, to #8, to #4. Nobody else seemed to care, though. In fact, the better I got at this game, the more frustrated the other players seemed to feel. “I thought I was good at this… I last played with a bunch of straight guys, and beat them every time!” What did he mean by this?

A Cognitive Revolution for Progress

Autists are often seen as childlike because they won’t stop asking ‘why?’ Curiosity is the mother of invention; while hypothesis is the guiding star of systemizing minds. The breadcrumb trail of autistic labor winds through human progress, from Thomas Edison’s relentless inventions to the public health discoveries that save lives, like when epidemiologists uncovered the causal link between smoking and lung cancer.

The reactionary loves LARPing as an autistic systemizer because he lusts after the aesthetic of logic—grand civilizational theories, the ‘natural order.’ But he isn’t driven to seek truth. He feeds on grievance and, often, sexual sadism. His entire worldview is a script written in if-and-then fallacies: If we let women vote, then society collapses. If we acknowledge racial IQ differences, then we must bring back apartheid.

How if-and-then systemizing generates inventions

But real systemizing minds don’t work like this. They hypothesize, test, and refine. The fake autist operates in reverse: he begins with a conclusion and constructs rationalizations to support it. He doesn’t study IQ to understand intelligence; he studies IQ to justify immigration cuts. And when his hypothesis fails, he doesn’t revise it. Instead, he sheds the skinsuit, revealing nothing but base tribal instincts.

My commitment to ‘facts and logic’ isn’t some Zionist 5D Chess move. I don’t push gene editing and vaccines because I see you as goyim-cattle. I’m like this because both of my parents were a bit more pedantic, a touch more obsessive, a bit more rigid than the mean. This makes me a bit better at mathematics but a lot worse at saying the right thing to be accepted by any group. So please be patient, I have autism.

It’s midnight, so I should be getting home. My friend takes me aside with a concerned look in his eyes. “You know, you’re always welcome here.” Doesn’t he know, I always come here? He has an autistic brother. I think it’s part of the reason why we get along so well. At home, I infodump the latest hot goss to my boyfriend, and then press the light switch. It’s dark now, good! I get cozy and fall fast asleep.

1. In the study, the Systemizing Quotient (SQ) asked subjects their level of interest in systems: ‘as varied as map reading, music, knitting, grammatical rules, bicycle mechanics, cooking, medicine, genealogy, train timetables, and public health. All of these systems follow if-and-then rules.’

2. In this context, the Empathy Quotient (EQ) was designed to measure how easily a subject could use cognitive empathy, which is ‘the capacity that allows humans to engage in flexible deception, flexible communication, teaching, cooperation around shared beliefs, and even spirituality.’

3. Baron-Cohen calls these individuals ‘Type B,’ for Balanced: these 31% of all men and 30% of all women ‘are equally good, or equally challenged, at using empathy or systemizing. They are as good at communication as they are at using technology.’