7:42am February 5, 2012

Unsettling social forces

I get really nervous when I see this.

At least two people, or groups of people. Where they always seem to take opposite sides no matter what the issue.

I wish that I had good words for what I sense when I see stuff like this going on. Unfortunately, it’s almost all a weird sort of tactile thing. Or tactile is the closest word I can find. Possibly kinesthetic? More like gravitational or magnetic forces. Except inside my head. It’s extremely hard to put words to the experience, because English doesn’t seem to have good words for that type of sensory experience in general, let alone a sensory experience taking place entirely inside my head.

If I see these forces at work, I try to keep my distance. If I don’t manage to keep my distance, some really unpleasant things start happening.

It almost feels like a line drawn between me and the person on the supposedly opposing side. It exerts pressure on me, like the pushing and pulling of magnets, in ways that guide me to only voice disagreement, and fail to voice agreement. (If I try to voice agreement, my brain will just fall to pieces or something.) Or to just “happen to” be always talking about subjects we seem to disagree on. It’s seriously hard to explain, but I watch other people being clearly affected by it too, whether they know what’s going on or not.

I also see something that happens within groups of people, rather than just between them. There’s this effect that reminds me of the way that the sides of a horse race course limit the movement of the horses to one area, one direction. Suddenly everyone knows What To Think (whether they know why or not). What words to use, and not use. What ideas are good and what ones are bad. What things “everyone knows is true, idiot”. And there’s an entire minefield of things that people are constantly having to figure out how to avoid doing.

I don’t care if my ideas match, or appear to match, the ideas of the group. It scares me. It bothers me. It makes me incredibly nervous.

If I’m not watching out, then I can get sucked in. At which point, even though deep down I know something very wrong is going on, it takes me a little while to realize that there is no good reason at all for me to be in this racetrack trying to dodge all the bad spots like a shoot-em-up video game.

A lot of autistic people seem to think that social impairments make them invulnerable to this stuff. But honestly all I’ve watched happen over the years says otherwise. In fact thinking you’re incapable of being affected by this only seems to make people more affected. Not less.

I don’t know what else to say. Only that I’m not the only person who sees this happening. My descriptions and sensory analogies may be a little weird but I’m certain I’m describing real things here. And they make me very nervous.

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