The Blackberry Walk

The word autism originates in auto - oneself. The force which breaks you out from your cultural milieu - the pneumatic wind from within overpowers the great geist, the zeigeist, of society. Autism breaks you out from cultural norms and expectation - it makes you a little different from those around you. But to see beyond the confines of the Platonic cave and look inside to find what the genome wants you to manifest in the world - that is the role of the autist. The autist takes us out of the cave to make huts, to plant new foods, to create civilisations, to enter space. To see beyond tradition and norms is the autists goal. But so too is it his gaol. Many autists struggle to see beyond their view of the world and feel the societal winds flow around them. It can be a cage, isolating you from the rest of the world. The successful autist, therefore, must alloy their autism with norms and common sense if they wish to propel their vision successfully into the tribe. Else the autist is sidelined and isolated. In many ways, the ancient Gnostic-Christian tradition was all about autism. Gnosticism, from the ancient Greek, >gnosis meaning a kind of experiential knowledge, originated in the alloying of Christ with Plato to form the view that the material world was evil - an imperfect creation of the Demiurge. The Demiurge, who was the abortion of a goddess Sophia who tried to fall pregnant alone, created the material world of rot and decay, as an imperfect facsimile of the 'pleroma', the ideal world of pure thought. The Gnostics went on to say that some people had a divine spark inside of them from the pleroma, others were just men made of mud - normies, NPCs. Clearly, the people who the Gnostics talk of are autists. They find the divine spark within themselves, rather than in the culture. They produce novelty for themselves, rather than simply conforming to others'. In some respects, Gnosticism represents the proto-myth of the Newtype. Oh wait I'm rambling. I did in fact have an intention with writing this. As the title suggests, the topic is primitive autism. The answer for why autism exists has hopefully been made apparent: the autist looks outside of culture and inside themself to progress the tribe. But some aspects of autism remain puzzling. Why do autists like numbers? Databases? Categories? As a self-diagnosed autist, I love nothing more than to gleefully look over MAL and look at charts on MAL graph. But why? Being such a widespread phenomenon, what is the origin in the genome, the origin from our ancestors - why would the 2,000,000 year old soul inside of us want to do this? Primitive man was just as autistic, albeit about different things. How many plants are there in the bush and the jungle? How many animals, fungi and soils, rocks, trees, and places? The hunter-gatherer was a nature autist - they obsessed over and categorised nature. In our monocultured world, we have a far more restrictive diet. Corn, rice, broccoli, wheat, carrots, etc... We farm these crops - they're popular so we make boat-loads of them. But in the wild, when you're just hunting and gathering, such liberties are not on offer. There are innumerable different plants you can gather, and never too many of the same kind. So you've gotta know where each and every one of those crops is growing, when it grows, when to harvest them, how to prepare them, what does it look like, are there any similar plants which are poisonous, etc. For hundreds of different food-stuffs, many more hundreds of dishes must be known. Many foods, like the Papuan Sago, is notoriously complex to prepare safely, and you have to wonder, who figured this one out? Must've been an autist. The history of man is a process of greater and greater abstraction from nature. We started off as pure animalian instinct. Beyond which, we found gods, to account for these abstractions whirring around our heads. These principles, like goodness and justness, were later secularised by Plato who turned them into ideas. And ever since, as we retreat more and more into society and away from nature, our primitive instincts leave the gold standard and become free-floating in its abstract world. Forgetting nature, society becomes the new mother. Autism becomes much the same. These primitive instincts, once oh so necessary for survival, are now exapted - given a new outlet - just as the tongue, once designed solely to clean our teeth, become an instrument of speech. Instead of categorising plants we've seen in the jungle, we now categorise anime - and so much more. Categorisation of the essences of the animal kingdom in species, in the mind with archetypes, in history through epochs and eras, certainly tick my autistic boxes. All of these, perhaps misdirected, uses of libidinal energy (as in élan vital) originate from this primordial need to create categories, to analyse the world. And as the world becomes ever more complex, the instinct to categorise the world grows ever more; the will to impose order upon the world to consciously understand it becomes ever stronger. As we climb into the future, the autistic instinct grows ever stronger.