Autism's Vulnerability to Extremist Recruitment Part 3:

You Know The Rules And So Do I.

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In my last paper on autistic people’s vulnerability to extremist recruitment I talked about how our inability to read people is a huge factor in how we can be radicalized by people who are more than willing to exploit people who may not fully understand what they are getting into. This post is about how we can find ideologies appealing because of our need for structure and rules.

I myself have misread situations and misplaced my sense of moral obligation in a few movements, albeit very briefly, that appealed to my moral code. I found myself believing that the ideas that were being promulgated were in line with my own ethics when they weren’t.

Red Means Stop, Green Means Go.

The rules of the road establish clear boundaries and laws that govern how people behave. The street networks map out where our journey begins, where it ends, and many paths we can take to get there. It allows us to meander but in predictable ways. Traffic lights and lane markers make for a nearly predictable environment to enjoy a nice calming journey.

For those of us who can drive, it can serve as a stim. It is one of my stims.

https://www.research.chop.edu/car-autism-roadmap/stimming-what-is-it-and-does-it-matter

By applying that expectation to political movements we fall victim to expecting something that is fundamentally unable to behave within well defined boundaries. Being in a metaphoric Mad Max world when we were looking for a relaxing Sunday drive is upsetting for normal people, for those of us on the spectrum that can be a devastating emotional trigger.

Having the rules of the road change, having what our elected officials value shift out of defined norms, are far from emotionally stabilizing even to NT people. Cultures change and we are able to deal with the changes even if they are negative. People with ASD are often less able to cope and will seek potential stability more than their NT counterparts.

Political actors can act unpredictably, the ground is more quicksand than concrete. Moral authorities can reverse themselves unexpectedly and for reasons we may not fully realize. Sometimes it is to reflect a shift in culture, others to adapt to a new social reality, and some are to address where they were previously wrong.

Recently news broke that Ozzy Osbourne was being given the Congressional honor of having his biography entered into the official record.

To those of us who have studied Rock N’ Roll history and the moral panics of the 1980s and 1990s this is a huge shock. Congress has never appreciated metal and suddenly this is a 180˚ shift. Even though it is a very pleasant surprise it is a fantastic illustration of how the established status quo can shift radically.

We would prefer things to be consistent. We would prefer things to be understandable, like normal people, unlike them, however we rely on structures. If those structures are chaotic they immediately become emotionally threatening if they suddenly behave in an unwelcome, negative, and shocking way that defies our internal model, one that looks for internal consistency and predictability.

When that model is proven to be incapable of being a sensemaker we will find another one, often almost instantly. More than NT people we need to find an epistemology that serves that end.

That Wasn’t On The List.

Moral gray areas exist, they may have a good reason to exist. Having some flexibility allows for mercy helps when it is needed, for others, it allows for fairness. Autistic people can have real trouble adapting to that. If we lack the same social intuition that normal people do then we also lack the capacity to easily roll with the punches.

It is very much like knowing the chords to a song then trying to play it with a virtuoso who assumes we can improvise when we cannot. We know how to play the song because we memorized how to play the song that way.

We are looking for a reliable distinction between good and bad more intently than most NTs because we rely on those definitions differently. We are looking for a concrete structure. Predictability may be more of a baseline requirement. We have a tendency to put things into mental categories, imaginary bins, and virtual boxes. Having clear boundaries between ideas, guidelines, behaviours, and many other areas is how we cope.

We are more than capable of dealing with nuance, understanding it, and working out all the fun little details, however that can be scary and uncomfortable. That discomfort may trigger a fight or flight response and make us retreat from it. It reads like dissonance and a major system failure and system failures are scary.

In a very unpredictable world that is what we rely on rules to predict outcomes. Because we can struggle to understand motives, both good and bad we can freak out when rules aren’t followed. There are some times when a surprise comes from a good place with a good outcome and gives us a gift. There are others when a surprise is just awful and takes away something we value, unfairly.

Checklists don’t have implied meanings, don’t have fluid expectations, don’t deal in double standards, don’t have unwritten hierarchies, don’t rely on emotional signaling, and don’t rely on contextual exceptions.

If someone has adapted life to operate as a checklist, one that they rely on to stay safe and emotionally centered in day to day life with a mechanical understanding of why it works, and something happens outside that checklist, it is an immediate cause for alarm. A checklist feels safe, it feels fair, it feels honest, and most of all it feels understandable.

Knowing we love rules and love having specific maps to help navigate a complicated and scary world is one component of how we can gravitate toward structured philosophies. It is very important to address how they establish that authority because this is one area in which we can radicalize ourselves.

It’s Your Moral Imperative

Our minds can also be very regimented and inflexible as a response to our emotional unease with nuanced thinking. That can be a good thing if it helps us avoid some pitfalls that can lead us astray. It can also doom us to fall victim to our own structures, especially if it influences our decision to seek out political movements with very strict and rigid rulesets, to prefer locked in moral states.

Newer generations have largely experienced a period of highly contentious American elections. Those who came of age in the 1990s remember the Clinton administration and subsequent impeachment proceedings, as well as the two impeachments of Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021, none of which resulted in removal from office. This reflects the rarity of conviction and removal within the constitutional impeachment process. It also highlights how this builds a perception that our elected officials are not operating on the same legal framework we are. This helps those who want to play on our distrust.

These have led to major constitutional crises. From an autistic point of view a political system that has no respect for the compact it has with its own people is fundamentally unfair, ignoring that other movements have suffered the same fate and that may be universal across all governments, that chaos may reign.

To people who are desperate for well defined predictable order, this moves us towards preferring regimented systems of government. Reducing unpredictability is a potentially higher priority to a person who is hardwired to panic at any unwelcome development or change. People run to stability during unstable times. People cope with it their own way, for NT people they prefer incremental tweaks, some ASD people find comfort in a total system restore or rewrite.

“They Say They Want A Revolution.”

Almost everyone is vulnerable to being radicalized, so this is not just people on the spectrum but we may come at it through different pathways.

Neurotypical people may operate more heavily off intuition and socially heuristic thinking because that is fast and efficient. That isn’t to say that people with ASD don’t, it is to say that because we lack some capacities that NT people have we may prefer to find our morality in different ways.

People with ASD may have to arrive at their ethics through manual processing. One of the main problems with this is how political groups deal with moral sensemaking language. We may feel a need to reject a system rife with contradictory language and ideas and substitute them with another. We may seek to escape to a system we perceive as internally consistent, especially those with a coherent closed means of explaining the world.

Political actors are experts in framing events and philosophies, both good and bad, in moral terms. “Silence is violence” and “It is good to be loyal to your race” are great examples of how that can be deranged.

Communism is fundamentally established as a moral social movement dedicated to fair outcomes for working people. History has shown that as far from the truth. To a person with ASD that the moral failings of a movement that is arguably a cult can be alluring in a few ways.

Firstly it has a defined sense of fairness, that people have equal outcomes levels the playing field in a way that doesn’t rely on social understanding and interpersonal dynamics. Things automatically happen. It offers a coherent philosophy that is easily understood, with contradictions that are easily overlooked. It is a totalizing and holistic movement.

This creates a vulnerability because autistic people already gravitate toward systems and hobbies that pander to our need for order. Trains and planes have stations and airports. They operate on a rough schedule that we can predict. The train or plane departs the station at a fixed time. Having a government that goes beyond having uniform driving rules and operates more like a locomotive on rails can be a comforting prospect if it reflects that need.

Because modern society can appear fractured, contradictory, morally unstable, and inconsistent, this can lead to identifying with the Catholic Integralist and Groyper movements. They offer a moral structure that is centered around a stable figurehead, namely the Pope or a dictator who promises to govern based on principles found in the Christian Bible (With no mechanism of accountability).

The Pope is elected by an orderly process with no ambiguity and he issues definitive decisions. An absolute dictator does the same. Both offer a coherent power structure with well defined tenets. Integralists can cite an ancient, continuous, morally fixed order that transcends the current chaotic world.

The ruler, whoever it is, can rule absolutely in a way that his believers or subjects can’t deviate from lest they fall afoul of them. Integralism even adds religious structure, with concrete rituals, like confession, to the mix which further appeals to an autistic need for order and guidance. If liturgy, ceremony, repetition, routine, symbolic order, and predictable hierarchy are deranged they still perform the same function at least at surface level. This concrete structure is helpful to the radicalized mind because it is way easier to define.

If a faith or secular movement reduces the need for endless social negotiation, interpreting shifting norms, and improvising ethics and replaces them with a system of prescriptive doctrine, authority, procedure, and their own version of truth then it becomes welcome cognitive relief.

Communism lies but it promises economic fairness, system order, historical certainty, and a universal structure. Integralism and Groyperism offer moral order, social hierarchy, theological certainty, and ritual structure. Both reduce ambiguity, totalize reality, simplify moral navigation, and subordinate the individual to systemic coherence. Both offer us phrases that we can use in a way that makes us feel included on equal footing with NT people, “Workers of the world unite” and “Christ is King.”

Movements exploit this by downplaying the atrocious and evil track record and obvious history of failure by replacing it with their own revisionist reading. They may not even know that they are doing it but if enough fake connections are made some people with ASD will make the same fake connections. If we like structures and machines and think accordingly it is way easier for us to build them wrongly than it would be for someone who is more in tune with human to human connections.

If our mindset follows those movements we have been convinced that the need for fairness of the many overrides the fairness of the individual because the individual person behaves outside the rules too much. We believe that these movements are simpler systems that just need a properly technical mind to ensure they are done right this time. It is just a debugging problem. It replaces a cognitive burden we are likely to never understand with one we have more hope to.

This can encourage the belief that human nature can be systemically corrected through structure alone. In this framework the same ones who are experts at bending the rules and manipulating the United States Constitution are the those that will manipulate any system to benefit them. Adherents may overlook the many atrocities that left many mass graves behind as mementos of the worst parts of 20th century history. They may be intentionally unwilling to entertain the self-evident capacity of Capitalism to produce more abundance, to offer more prosperity. This throws the American economy winning over the Soviet’s collapse in the dustbin.

This ignores that there have been many holy wars waged for unholy reasons. This ignores and openly mocks the antisemitism intrinsic to them. This glosses over why those holy wars were able to prop up the power of the church. This ignores that if any church obtains too much power to punish heretics, even Protestant churches, without reprisal or government accountability they too will leave behind a trail of bodies. This ignores that the USA exists as a nation because of the desperation of people who faced a violent ocean to escape a continent defined by that history and structured our nation as a counterpoint to that.

If someone with ASD arrives at the conclusion that Communism or an Theocracy is preferable then it is very easy to recruit them. It is very easy to convince someone to fight for “fairness” because they want a world that behaves a certain way. This becomes politically useful for movements that need more members.

Conclusion

The commonly used phrase, “Real Communism has never been tried,” does a lot of heavy lifting for people who are still holding out hope that the next time it is tried it will work. To normal people it may be the allure of a utopian egalitarian system. To ASD people the phrase may be more accurately modified to say, “Real tech support was never contacted.”

As a people on a spectrum we may be close to a NT like reasoning foundation, or we may be further away from it. At all points on that line, the further away from it the more we look for external means to make sense of the world and the more we trust in our own technical abilities to assist us in our daily sensemaking.

Sometimes we only need minor assistance, others we cling onto the external apparatus as an essential prosthetic. The less we understand the more desperate we can be to anchor ourselves. Having checklists to help is a great adaptation, imposing that on others is not.

We may see the issues with failed historically totalitarian ideologies or faiths that fall short of their promise as a failure to be built in a failed method by people who couldn’t see the right way to build it. We could also see it as a failure to call someone whose technical competence could have saved it.

History has repeatedly proven that given absolute power, people are absolutely corrupted, every time. The idea that centralizing power in a Communist governing body far removed from local signals will do better ignores how it has failed every time and how awful centralized power is at allocating resources. Realizing a pontiff can coronate a leader who has done nothing to establish competency or sympathy for the people they will lead and has only got that title by flattery is important too. Both of those are the ultimate end state and have always been. There is no metaphoric tech support that will solve that.

The more cars there are on a road system the more apt they are to crash, that is even ignoring that single car crashes can happen, trains can derail, and planes can fall from the sky. There is no way to make life safe or fair, rules will be broken, undeserving people will get things they haven’t earned, even under Communist authority and monarchic rule, and life can never be made internally or externally consistent.

My perspective changed when I realized that chaos was inevitable but order had already been achieved. Everything we see has been created either by a god or by processes that we cannot understand. My keyboard, my chair, me, and you are made out of matter created by the universe and ordered in such a way that I can type this post and share my ideas with you.

Occasionally things will flip in fun and unexpected ways. Things that people unjustifiably demonize are often embraced by people who end up with the power to redeem them.

Occasionally heavy metal wins and people recognize marginalized talent and ideas.

Given time, given the example outlined in the U.S. Constitution which is arguably the most egalitarian document ever created, the right kind of justice tends to win out. Autistic people like me are better served by learning how to accept that chaos is inevitable but not undesirable whenever we can be helped to understand that.

There will be another essay in this series.