Autism: Superpower or Disability?

this is a video about autism autism
spectrum disorders including Asperger's and it's an incredibly depressing topic to do research on and maybe that's the fundamental problem we're facing in the 21st century is that research of this kind has become easier and easier to do but most people live their lives in a soup of highly emotionally moving propaganda on these issues so they never do the Google search they never look up peer-reviewed scientific articles even though it's so easy to do compared to the effort of going to a library or getting an encyclopedia on paper how hard it was to do research at this time 20 years ago let's say it's become so easy but people are disincentivized because they're given powerful propaganda messages in Hollywood movies in YouTube videos in stirring stories on the news and they don't question where their sense of certainty comes from they don't think through how do I know the things that I think I know there's gonna pause here I know for some people this is the first video you've ever seen on my channel a lot of people have a misconception about me that I'm an egomaniac or that I think of myself as brilliant or that I think of myself as a genius and I don't I'm actually very very aware of the limits of my intelligence partly because I've lived a life where I really pushed against the limits of my village I've tried to do things at the upper limits of my intelligence and then you find out what you can't do and partly because now I'm more than 40 years old and I really feel how limited my cognitive capacity is now compared to what it was in my early 20s okay that is an incredibly humbling thing to live with is the awareness having limited cognitive capacity now compared to what you were capable of when you were younger and I live with that every day I also engage in the incredibly humbling process of studying foreign languages and let me tell you there is absolutely no evidence that I'm a linguistic genius if there is any such thing as linguistic genius I have my doubts about that the advantage I have over my contemporaries the quality I have that sometimes makes me seem a brilliant that makes me seem like a genius when I'm in the company of other people my same age when I'm in the company of other people younger than myself is that I'm intensely aware of the limits of my own knowledge of the limits of my own expertise I don't forget how I came to learn something I never stopped questioning with myself and others how do we know what we think we know and the answer very often is propaganda all right had a conversation now a couple months ago with people and they were presenting as facts ideas they had about gun control in Switzerland in Israel wait wait wait wait a minute wait a minute let's Google that what why do you think that's the case about gun control in Israel 5-minute google search turns out this idea you had about gun ownership in Israel it's not the case legalization of drugs in Portugal legalization of drugs in Colombia and so wait wait a minute wait a minute very often the people I'm talking to they have a fixed notion in their minds of the way the world is and the way the world ought to be and they cling to it for highly emotionally charged reasons and they don't have the detachment to loosen up and think wait a minute how did I form this opinion how did I come to regard this as fact what were my sources of information a really brief example there's a war most nobody has heard of war that took place between Thailand and France and I remember talking to a guy and he was supposedly more of an expert than I was I knew a lot more than he did as it turned out and I remember a challenging I said wait a minute where did you get this claim that the French won these land battles because I've been over all the evidence that's available and the French lost the French lost the war and they lost these particular battles and he talked me for awhile and there was a pause in the email and he got back to me and he had to realize he really had been reading French propaganda oh the forms of propaganda we encounter are not always that obvious they're not always that blatant but people get deeply attached to a stereotyped notion of what it means to have asperger's of what it means to have high functioning autism and then it seems they're not willing to face up to the reality of what the condition is not even when you show them a quotation from a peer-reviewed medical journal that's really clearly telling you impaired cognitive function lacking gray matter and crucial parts of the brain etc etc [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] calm it is not coming off so you can beat your head no so you when you are safe it comes on [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and in this video I would like to talk about a bra lacy ow you are a right-wing neoliberal you are a propagandist you are a grifter you are a liar and for the record yes Apple SEL I know that you are in fact a liar not just not just someone who gets who gets bags and you and the more radical elements the vegan community to which you claim to go on I know that you deliberately lie about these elements to to get profit from from right we need politicians and neoliberal capitalist organizations I don't have the evidence on me however a tremendous number of people who consider themselves intelligent and well-informed wrote into me to tell me how wrong I was to describe autism and Asperger's syndrome as really serious mental disabilities to describe them as a mental disability at all at some in some cases people wrote in to say that they did not believe it was an intellectual disability at all and that therefore it was inappropriate to refer to it as mental retardation let me ask you something how do I know that broccoli is healthy scientifically I looked up what broccoli is made of I found out the constituent material components of broccoli and broccoli has a certain amount of various vitamins and various minerals it has a certain amount of protein a certain amount of calories a certain amount of fat you can look at those constituent elements and feel reasonably certain that you know what broccoli is when I've had debates with people who subscribe to highly eccentric views on nutritional science I found that they actually had no answer to this line of reasoning whereas they may be committed to a very spiritual way of thinking about what food is there's a material sense in which we can answer what something is and then start to understand its function in the body and come to conclusions none of these people writing to me to defend the glorified propaganda notion of autism of Asperger's of the other spectrum disorders none of them had ever looked into the question of what autism is what are the structural abnormalities in the brain that show up on an MRI scan what are the types of cognitive deficit what are the types of impairment what are the types of disability none of them ever showed any interest in the opinions and experiences of nurses who have to take care of these people for eight hours a day or 10 hours a day and what their perspective is they're the ones who really know much less would they challenge the propaganda function of presenting the tiny tiny minority of so-called savants with this condition people who are brilliant in ethics they wouldn't check into what percentage of people with this condition are represented by these these people who managed to get cleaned up and put on stage and give a lecture telling you how wonderful their lives are with autism and how does that compare to the experiences of say the specialized nurses who day in and day out have to bathe these people feed these people restrain them from hurting themselves clean their kitchens ok don't show him the food until he's sitting down hold it don't make him sit down well don't make him encourage elicit down ok now that he's sitting now he can eat there's always a you know some underlying ideology he doesn't just hit himself for no reason but some of its behavioral you see it continue continue continue or it gets to the point of crazy sim then then you know that there's some underlying etiology usually medical ear infection throat infection something and just like with an infant when the team knows me and my preferences and can help me create a routine that makes a big difference for staff and security patients on the spectrum can present a unique challenge if anyone is called into situation where a patient may be on the spectrum here are some things to remember first don't escalate the situation stay calm and be patient see if there is a caregiver nearby try to establish if the patient has a way of communicating there was no interest in looking into the Criminology of autism oh yes it may sound like propaganda for someone to point out to you that a shockingly high percentage of serial killers and mass murders have autistic spectrum disorders they're autistic or they have Asperger's etcetera shockingly high Oh to the list of 239 mass murderers and serial killers meeting certain criteria since 1985 67 out of 239 67 out of 239 had some kind of autism you can read through all 67 case studies of people with kandace condition who became mass murderers and serial killers mostly oh well well that's no more representative than the glorified image presented in Rain Man and you know what I've just now been looking at a whole stack of peer reviewed articles many of which engage in a kind of dishonest sleight of hand many of which made the claim well there is a problem with people with autistic spectrum disorders committing crimes there is a huge over representation of people with Asperger's syndrome in prisons and in the special mental hospitals for people who've committed crimes they're a mix of psychiatric care and prison that's opposed yeah there's a much higher percentage of those people behind bars then there are these people with this condition out in the gym that's true but but nevertheless the vast majority of people with autism never commit a crime in their lives I think you just saw on screen the the very very round number of 50 percent suggesting to you that 50 percent of people with autism remain nonverbal for their entire lives the vast majority of people on that spectrum never get a job as the video said never contribute to society that's debatable concept but that they do not lead normal lives much less or they this Hollywood stereotype of the slightly eccentric math genius that they wail and moan and punch themselves in the face and scratch at their skin that their lives are misery from the day they born till the day they die and they never speak a word not even in their first language that their parents try so hard to teach them could be 50% the numbers the numbers are unknown because nobody really wants to know it's a problem everyone wants to say something flattering and positive and uplifting about everyone wants to take a one-in-a-million example and show you oh don't be afraid of people with Asperger's disorder be afraid of people with autism don't feel mortified if you're a parent and this is your child don't think about this as the really crippling really serious disability that it is things will be all right things will be okay one of my brother's was born with autism one that's what the doctors told the mother and the brothers and sisters never said a word his entire life he's about 15 years older than I am he's lived his whole life his whole life being taken care of but the generous of the Canadian taxpayer and I hated my father because my father never went to visit him my father never took me to visit it and I thought that was deeply immoral of my father and it was only when I really pushed my father on him when I was getting into my early 20s when I said look why did you do why did you never take me to meet my brother my brother was in a mental hospital somewhere and my father broke down crying a little bit and he started to rant about just how mentally disabled my half-brother was and how he felt it was useless to visit him that he couldn't even recognize his own father that he couldn't communicate for appellee and so on and so forth that like some of the people you just saw in this video he was just a screaming howling mess of repetitive behaviors violent tendencies taken care of by nurses nurses who don't seem to get interviewed on the nightly news when they do uplifting upbeat stories about autism and Asperger's and you know what even that diagnosis I'm skeptical as hell about it because the propaganda has been so successful that many doctors want to give their parents want to give the parents of disabled children the diagnosis of autism or the diagnosis diagnosis of Asperger's disease instead of using of course a word like [ __ ] nobody wants to hear that word instead of just saying mentally handicapped instead of maybe using the term brain-damaged my half-brother who has that condition his mother attempted suicide during the pregnancy she attempted to kill herself with gas inhalation from a stove when I mentioned this to my sister sister who knew him better than I did she was shocked she had been told her whole life by her mother he was just born autistic he was just born that way must just be something in the DNA she had never admitted to her own daughter that she attempted suicide during pregnancy that she had inhaled gas that she had damaged her own brain and damaged the brain of the developing fetus so sometimes these diagnoses as harsh and terrible as they are are still a flattering way for people to evade the reality of the condition that they've got say again autism is a very serious disability Asperger's syndrome is a very serious disability and in part because there have been several mass shootings and mass murders carried out within our lifetimes by people who have Asperger's and autistic spectrum disorder there is a very overt media effort to reassure the public that nothing is wrong I don't want you to be reassured I want you to do the same kind of research I did about broccoli I want you to look into what the actual disability in the brain is that shows up on an MRI scan so when you're talking about autism when you're talking about Asperger's you're not just talking about something like depression you're not just talking about a mood or an attitude or an emotion you're not talking with something like PTSD a bad experience in life you're talking about an abnormality in the brain that's exhibited that can be tested against physically real criteria and that shows up on an MRI scan that shows up after the person dies of natural causes when you bisect and examine the brain it's medically real it's debilitating get to know the reality of autistic spectrum disorder and stop believing the Hollywood [ __ ] Danton [Music]