AUTISM: The Assburger Excuse
by Professor U. d'Guru

I'll start out by saying that the assburger finger has been pointed at me and after prolonged due consideration, I rejected the label and carried on with my life as an individual. The rest of this diatribe will not be about me, as such, except that I am highly qualified to have an opinion about the so-called 'autism' diagnosis in its current status.

I should also mention that while RFK Jr. is one of my idols and my main impetus for actually starting to listen to Donald Trump back in 2024, I disagree with part of RFK's thrust on autism and I think my point will be made clear as you continue to read.

The epidemic of autism is not caused by genes or vaccines. It's a fad. It's a social disease, a mind virus, not of physical origin.

Real autism exists, as dramatized in the famous movie Rain Man starring Dustin Hoffman, who based his characterization in part on a truly autistic man named Kim Peek. Other well-known autistic people include a set of twins, two woman named Flo and Kay Lyman who idolized the TV show host Dick Clark. This story is interesting because Mr. Clark actually befriended these women and helped them by doing so. I am not against helping people who are really autistic.

I'm not even opposed to helping notably useless and even annoying people who have contributed to society (we call it 'working', resulting in 'social security'). Some find that due to obstinate personality traits, they reach late middle age without a useful resume and can no longer convince anyone to hire them. But I am opposed to the so-called 'autistic spectrum' as a medical diagnosis. If you need a 'spectrum' to claim you're autistic, what you really need is to take a hard look at your personality, your motivations, and your upbringing. You're either autistic or you're not. And if you're reading this, you probably are not.

Which brings us to the topic no one wants to discuss: the refrigerator parent.

The description 'refrigerator mother' was useful to a certain degree but as terminology it was not consistently accurate, nor was it good marketing for a therapist to tell the lady writing him a big check that she doesn't love her child right.

Without claiming that we should bring back the 'refrigerator parent' description, I must still reiterate that real autism is not what the spectrum people or assburgers people are experiencing, and then I must go on to assert that the asperger folk or aspies are in fact victims of good-old-fashioned imperfect parenting, not genes and not even vaccines. Let's not even get into what 'love' is except to say that no one agrees with anyone on this so forget about hashing that one out.

Let's say that it's not useful to say that the job of parents is to 'love' children properly or raise them 'right' or make them 'happy', because the dust will never settle from the ensuing melee of debaters who will never agree on what those words even mean. Instead, let's try to stay neutral and useful by saying that it's the job of parents to raise children to become adults who are able to care for themselves when the parents are unable or unwilling to do so, to not get too much attention from law enforcement in the process, and to be able to raise families of their own according to the same principles. The rest has to be up to the individual. While this is not a perfect description of the parents' job, I feel I'm trying to be fair here to most people.

The corollary of this description is that people who suck at life were usually not raised very well. And the problem with the autism spectrum description is that it has created a fake minority who are able to use the excuse, "I am autistic," thereby avoiding responsibility for their own behavior patterns. "My brain is wired differently, excuse me while I rock."

There are extreme versions of not being raised very well, but let's focus on the borderline cases where the family seemed functional but one or more children had more than their share of serious problems with social behavior. This is where the family "seeming" functional didn't quite cut the mustard. Such families put on a good show for the world, but in private they have a situation on their hands which they generally have no idea how to handle. The black sheep of the family becomes a sort of safety valve, and in cases of even worse parenting, more than one child can have obvious glaring defects in terms of dealing with other human beings and society's expectations.

Unfortunately, as a society we've come to rely on 'experts' to such a degree that parents must become overpaid in order to support a family. Insurance companies and big pharma have driven up the cost of doctoring so much that even the psychiatrists themselves--who should be immune to insanity--have come to mistake themselves for experts. But they have insidiously allowed themselves to be converted to drug pushers. Pharmacology has swallowed up psychiatry. Psychiatry has swallowed up psychology, psychology has swallowed up common wisdom, and the insurance sindustry has gobbled everything in its path. Suburbia, the padded room of the Earthville Mental Institution, has cancelled our motivation to control the state of society, so we fall for everything labelled "compassion", eschew the merit system, and look forward to dystopia in hopes that everything will somehow repair itself if we can just get society to crumble the rest of the way. Parents are now reduced to safety monitors who work too much, have too much money and too little time, live in houses that are too big, in neighborhoods that are too safe, and raise children who have never done anything but stare at screens and go to classes.

We now wander in a dream where monsters hide behind every bush, because above all, we are lethally bored. Unchallenged, our psychic immune systems have dried up and we wait for our diagnoses. PTSD, ADHD, autism, borderline personality disorder, narcissism, all these psychotic labels do more harm than good. Besides stigmatizing people for life, they give everybody the excuses they need to stop bothering to struggle against human nature. From here on out, if it ain't easy and convenient, it ain't-a-gonna get done. Imagining a problem and a solution because, what the heck, everyone else is doing it, we trudge onward to the Lemming Leap of Dystopia.

No doubt I exaggerate. And like all exaggerations, this one is all too true part of the time and not an exaggeration at all, another part of the time. As for the obvious exceptions--children who don't grow up in too-big houses in too-safe neighborhoods, for example--I apologize for the inconvenience, but in order to make a point, I have to make some useful generalizations. And in too-small houses in not-too-safe neighborhoods, there are plenty of other influences instead of suburban hover-parenting, competing to make a child's life too-far-removed from ideal and a sponge for handy diagnoses.

Let's just say that, somewhere along the line, progress became equated with easy, convenient, shallow lifestyles. While irresponsible behavior somehow became understandable, with bored-to-tears, cause-seeking white people chomping at the bit to find a criminal to forgive.

Which would be oh-so-hunky-dory if not for the fact that it makes us lazy, stupid, and apt to get sucked into scams like the medical boys taking over the job of parents. Now we try to do parenting with diagnoses and drugs. Which leads me to conclude that we ain't doin' parenting at all. Mom and Dad both have to work, there's no time to solve problems at home, and it's been this way so long that it's now a multi-generational chain of emotional unintelligence, festering bothersomely due to the effect of alcoholism and marijuana dependency on 3rd-generation misfits with A) mortgages or B) prison records, take your pick.

There's no easy answer. I could rant on, but let me just make this one prescription. Go to YouTube and watch bodycam videos of people being arrested. Keep a tally of how many of the perpetrators claim special privilege to carry on bad behavior without repercussion, due to being "autistic", having "PTSD", "anxiety", "needing to call their mom" and the like.

Psychiatry has introduced a bug into the software of being human. You will not be able to rid society of this bug, but I am begging you to rid yourself of it. Do not call your debate opponent a "narcissist". Don't use these psychiatric labels at all, ever. Just describe actual behavior: "He can't uphold his end of a casual conversation," not, "He's autistic." Any description that can be made with one word, is not a part of a proper human dialog; it's just a "diagnosis". A cheat. A load of stigma is a most useless sort of generalization. Back in the '60s we called this "labeling" but apparently we lost and they won.

There now, you read the whole dang thing. To me, that kinda indicates you are not autistic, should not be taking any drugs that meddle with your mind, and you might even be ready to start taking responsibility for your own behavior. That doesn't mean you should be like other people. It means you should stop calling geniuses and other sore thumbs "autistic", starting with yourself.

In the absence of any biomedical explanation of autism's cause after the telltale symptoms were first described by scientists, Bettelheim and other leading psychoanalysts championed the notion that autism was the product of mothers who were cold, distant and rejecting, thus depriving their children of the chance to "bond properly". Bettelheim founded the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago as a residential treatment milieu for such children, who he felt would benefit from a "parentectomy". This marked the apex of autism viewed as a disorder of parenting.

    --Weasel Word Wikipedia