Aspergers & Autism: Evolution of the Collective Human Psyche?

If anybody has read the news lately or listened to what's important from elitist celebrities, it's the rise of aspergers and autism. From what I've seen in the news lately, it seems if you're going to have a second child, it's pretty likely they're going to grow up with autism.

Aspergers and autism isn't anything new, but it looks as if it's become a lot more prominent in recent years. Why is this? Are we better at diagnosing it? Is it something in the water? Is our American diet of over-processed food causing the trend? Is that thing about inoculations actually accurate?

There's also a lot of claim that many influential people throughout history had the syndrome judging by their behavior compared to the symptoms of the syndrome. These include Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Mark Twain, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Jefferson, Carl Jung, Andy Warhol, and even Michael Jackson. Many influential people today are also speculated to have aspergers, such as Bill Gates, Woody Allen, and Al Gore.

It's been my belief for several years that it's a human evolutionary trend that causes aspergers and autism. I haven't been that vocal about this because people tend to act weird when you bring up "mental disabilities." And I believe this is because they aren't really exposed to this sort of thing in their everyday lives. At least they're not aware of it.

I have a brother with high-functioning autism. And "mental disability" is not something I would attribute to my brother. In fact, depending how you look at each individual, you could say anyone has a "mental disability." There's egotism, there's addiction, there's neuroticism, there's over-anxiousness about certain things, there's various obsessions that people take up as hobbies. When broken down to how these things affect people's personal lives, all of them could be considered "mental disabilities." Otherwise, we'd be perfect machines working perfectly together in unison. It's these quirks we find in human beings that actually brings about change and evolution.

In my experience, people tend to not understand what it means to be autistic. They read one article or hear one story about it and don't really get a broad enough picture of the whole thing. When you live with someone as close as a brother you're whole life, you don't see a "person with autism," you see a "person." Except this person tends to not go along with many of the social norms we have adapted to growing up in modern civilization. In fact, people with aspergers often tend to be the most straightforward and honest people out there.

Larry David has been lauded for his harsh honesty and straightforwardness that he has exemplified in his works such as Seinfeld and more notably, Curb Your Enthusiasm. He claims to not be like his character from Curb in real life, at least on the surface. This is the person he wishes he could be; the person he is on the inside. The character you see on Curb Your Enthusiasm doesn't hold anything back. If he notices something peculiar or if he has a problem with something, he's going to call it out without regards to anyone's feelings. He wishes he could be like this in real life, yet this is in fact what many people with aspergers and autism are like in their day-to-day lives. What Larry David has that many of these "mentally disabled" people don't have is the charm of a comedian.

But would you feel Larry David is so charming in a face-to-face meet with him if he wasn't famous for some of the most successful comedy in TV history? Depends on your sense of humor, but I reckon many wouldn't appreciate this kind of bluntness. I recall many of the family experiences I've had growing up where I've felt so much shame for my brother's honesty. Where I've just naturally understood some of the social norms that he did not, and instead of diplomatically informing him, I was vehemently critical of his behavior and tried to shame him for it. That I felt so embarrassed for something I didn't do and wanted to punish him for it some how. But looking back at many of these situations, does it really matter if he was that honest and socially unaware in the greater scheme of things? As it happens, he called out a lot of the dickheads we wanted to be closer friends with who were actually nowhere on our side to begin with. He questioned people from the get-go that weren't really going to be supportive of us as friends in the future. His brutal honesty and straightforwardness often had it right all along.

In our current situation in America, we have politician after politician who avoid questions with their talking points and their go-to sensitive issues that make people forget about the question at hand. These are democrats, republicans, tea party members, libertarians, and socialists--they all do it. They want to avoid the truth of things in order to make themselves look better in front of a large audience who probably aren't paying enough attention to realize they just avoided a question that actually has some relevance on where they stand on very real issues. We have folks so ready to fight about the little details of things just because they are divided by party line, that they avoid the straightforward questions and the honesty we need to face in order to progress as a country, or a people as a whole.

Perhaps the human race could use more people that are so blatantly straightforward and honest as those with aspergers and autism. These are vital voices who question the status quo without any worry of shame, as it's in their nature to do so. After growing up with my brother and looking back at all of my experiences with him, he's been so right about many things that were looked down upon by me and others at the time. Perhaps it's this honesty that myself and much of the human race are afraid of.

We have etiquette to protect us from too much honesty. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, except it often goes too far. There's a lot of things I have done that I was not aware of, but if people had been more straightforward with me about (like my brother), I could have saved myself a lot of confusion by being aware of these things and growing from the knowledge of them.

With Earth's growing population that is excepted to reach 7 billion soon, attached with our current global economic system and energy consumption habits, we can not sustain ourselves as a people. There are the extreme-darwinists, who many of which are in the closet, that believe we should weed out the "weak" by letting them die off. They have their plan, but that doesn't go in accordance with the majority of human beings that want to live and prosper. We're a growing population on an island that is becoming smaller and smaller, yet we don't have a plan to sustain our global community.

Yet we do have a plan. At least many of our brightest and most compassionate have come up with plans to sustain the global human race. It's our politics that are getting in the way. it's the lack of honesty and straightforwardness in our politics that are misleading the public. We leave out the facts of the situation if it doesn't support our cause. We avoid the matter at hand to make someone else look bad so we look better in comparison. I would love to see ONE mainstream politician abandon that kind of human behavior so they could actually start a new wave of collective thinking. It seems as if those with aspergers and autism were already leading in this sort of thinking from the get-go.

We've seen that evolution does a lot of strange things to species according to the environment they've been put in. It's also my belief that homosexuality is an evolutionary trend set to cut-down on population, as homosexuals tend not to have their own children. It's just natural that a population as big as the human race will destroy itself as long as it consumes the way it currently does or did in the past. No population of animal ever grows too big because there just isn't enough resources to keep it alive. We couldn't have a population of 7 billion, let alone 1 billion as hunter-gatherers.

Humans have adapted on such a sophisticated level that we have avoided food shortages with agriculture, we have avoided plagues with modern medicine, and we have avoided barbarism with education. We can also avoid our own self-destruction if we can actually address what's important for us as a species in the future and not put petty politics in the way. We can maintain such a large population just as we have for centuries with science and technology along with the compassion and humanism that has gotten us this far already. Why let trivial matters get in the way of that?

Those who speak out against homosexuality tend to have religious backing. I can see where they're coming from when looking at it scientifically, but only very simplistically. Sex between gay men is a lot more risky in spreading disease, which is dangerous for the human race. Except we have modern medicine to combat that, along with the scientific developments that will make us more impervious as long as people care enough to invest in it. And perhaps the gay community can tone down the hedonistic sexuality they often express when we have developing children "in the room," but then again, the same should be said for heterosexuals. Kids really don't need to be growing up thinking it's okay to be philandering around at their age like our TV shows illustrate, but then again, it's just a reflection of where we are right now. Philandering, whether gay or straight, is going to be unhealthy even with protection and modern medicine. Rubbers aren't keeping away herpes or genital warts, are they?

I'm not one to want to limit the actions of consenting adults or one to want to limit what's shown on TV, and I'm especially not one to want to limit those with opposing views, but perhaps we can grow in to a more sensible people to grow out of the situation we're in at the moment. Perhaps it's that brutal honesty we need to evolve as a species.