I work with a few kids with autism, and we tend to get along better than the kids who are more neurotypical. I joke with my supervisors that this is because I am likely a high functioning autistic myself.
But even outside and beyond these patients I work with, for reasons unknown to me 'autism' has been coming up a lot in my life.
"I have autism which means I don't like social situations, which means I spend a lot of time alone in my room and am smart enough to avoid risks - I was practically built to survive this COVID virus!" - High functioning autistic child to me at my mother's wake, March 2021
"When I described you to my therapist he said it sounds like you could have undiagnosed high functioning autism" - My estranged father to me at my mother's funeral, March 2021
"I think I probably have undiagnosed sociopathy, or perhaps autism or something. I'm smart, social situations require more energy of me than they should - I used to be terrible at them, now I am quite good and most people like me, find me charming - I have difficulties with feelings, used to be easily overwhelmed by stimuli - now constant noise just tires me out - and I get into niche interests, really get into them"- me to my analyst earlier this month, March 2021
"...no one who isn't autistic can be trusted" - Nick Land on Twitter, March 2021
"Anything without either autism or particle accelerators sucks." - Nick Land on Twitter, December 2020
For a reason that remains uncertain as the original Tweet he was replying to is now deleted, in January of 2018 Nick Land took to Twitter and wrote "It's the autism century."
"Autism is becoming a point of obsession with Hollywood lately. In recent years we’ve had an explosion of stories where high-functioning autism plays a role...The Accountant...The Good Doctor ...Atypical...That’s not counting shows and films where the word “autism” is never mentioned but the implication is obvious, such as The Big Bang Theory and Ramin Barani’s take on Fahrenheit 451...In most cases, when a character has autism, it’s balanced out with savantry"
The 2018 film 'The Predator' - an installment in the iconic long running 80s horror-action series - utilizes 'autism' as a significant plot device.
To be short, in the end it is a young autistic boy whose autism is the key to both endangering the Earth by tempting the Predators and also defeating the super-predatory alien.
The Predators, being a warrior culture, search the universe, hunting and killing only the most worthy and powerful creatures to prove themselves and collect a trophy. In this case it is not a trophy, and not merely an honor kill, but to harvest genetic material from the boy for the purposes of breeding a super Predator. This is because the autistic boy on Earth is of course one of these powerful warriors precisely because of his autistic traits.
His intelligence and coldness; his ability to understand abstract symbology, anticipate others' behaviors, and his lack of 'appropriate' fear response; these all allow him to overcome the alien and save humanity.
The message is clear - to have autism is to be on top of the food pyramid, alpha, apex-predator (Similar themes in the 2012 film Chronicle where a crashed alien ship gives high school students superpowers, leading one student interested in evolutionary biology to refer to himself as 'the apex predator' as he rampages through the city).
Nearly all reviews of the film critiqued it for this message. Winters mentions it in the above linked article, Cassidy Ward focuses solely on this message in his Science Behind the Fiction: Predator Suggests Autism is Human Evolution Is that True?, and Johny Olekenski sums it all simply in his piece as "a plot line involving autism and a dubious scientific theory that will leave parents fuming."
So what is this 'dubious scientific theory?' Mainly evolutionary psychology studies concerning 'the dark triad' - people who test high in narcissism, sociopath, and Machiavellianism. You don't need to accept psychological-realism, or read the studies, you just need to know that people high in these test categories tend to be cold, manipulative, intelligent. The Dark Triad - narcissistic self-withdrawal and anti-social behavior - overlap with basic diagnostic or descriptive aspects of autism. This creates a person who is sort of inhuman and predatory, and therefore evolutionary psychologists attribute evolutionary advantage to these traits.
The autistic boy at my mother's wake would agree. As he so eloquently put it, his anti-social tendencies- his tendency to avoid other people - and his high intelligence - his ability to anticipate risks in a cold, logical manner - have undoubtedly had an advantageous survival benefit in the face of what is essentially the prime example of nature itself - a virus, a random genetic variation inhospitable to the human.
Nick Land, being the Social Darwinist Gnontologist he is, agrees.
In addition to the comments he made above, in his 2013 text The Dark Enlightenment, Nick gives 'autism' significant consideration.
He explains that people who are not likely to accept humanist or politically correct myths that function to enforce politeness, etiquette, or social harmony and are in turn likely to critique what others will otherwise overlook to avoid stirring the pot - this population of people are "stubborn.. awkward... socially retarded."
To use an analogy - the autistic boy at my mother's wake makes what we might consider an insensitive comment about my mother's death; he makes a comment that breaks the unsaid agreement that permeates the social situation that is a wake. He does not respect the social etiquette that is clearly derived from theological myth - that the dead should be honored, and that the living should act in such and such a way. He brings the profane into the sacred (of course I laugh, and assure everyone his comment is fine - needed even...).
These people, Land writes, have
"low verbal inhibition, low empathy, and low social integration, resulting in chronic maladaptation to group expectations...Mild autism is typical, sufficient to approach their fellow beings in a spirit of detached, natural-scientific curiosity, but not so advanced as to compel total cosmic disengagement. These traits, which they themselves consider – on the basis of copious technical information — to be substantially heritable..."
Going against contemporary ethics in science (see this book for more on this matter), for Land - not unlike the early Freud of The Scientific Project and Studies on Hysteria or Nietzsche who emphasize that moral, social, and theological imperatives should not impede thought - scientific curiosity should not take into account the possible unintended social effects - i.e. damages - of scientific research, and that human feelings, moral obligations, etc., should not prevent the exploration of truth. This is inherently anti-social and therefore cold and maximizing of intelligence which moves in a direction away from human(ist) values, and is therefore autistic.
As Land has said before, the NRx movement of which The Dark Enlightenment is most notably associated with 'has always been about pursuing epistemic rigor at whatever cost' (interesting to note that this fits with the hyper-capitalism of Land: X at any cost often means 'do whatever it takes' which usually means lowest consideration for others to maximize profit, which means that 'X at any cost' really means 'X at lowest possible cost').
For the humanist, it is altruism that drives socially positive science; For Land, it is autism. Autism as a scientific vehicle to the Outside - the alien, the xeno.
Regardless of the science we subscribe to - I tend to respect norms when I can and seek to make people feel unthreatened - this is what the 2018 film The Predator attempts to capture. That autism is an 'alien gene' within the human population; a little piece of the God of Coldness, the outside, trapped on the inside.
