6:56pm July 4, 2014

Long live heresy

Someone on the #actuallyautistic tag seemed a little hesitant to post their opinion about something Sherlock-related, because it disagreed with something Julia wrote in Someone Who Moves Like You. And I want to say that the following post intends no disrespect to Julia at all, I’m just using this as an example. The original poster said they felt like a heretic for being uncomfortable with something said by a Popular Activist. And that makes me really uncomfortable myself.

I’m a Popular Activist within certain communities. In fact part of how I got my Popular Activist credentials involved contradicting other Popular Activists. That wasn’t all of it, but that was part of it. It’s also made me more controversial than I’ve wanted to be at times, and that bothers me deeply.

It bothers me deeply because there is nobody on this planet that it should be heresy to contradict. Whether you’re wrong or you’re right doesn’t matter, if you contradict me, I’m not going to see you as a heretic. I can’t guarantee that some other people won’t see you as a heretic for contradicting me, but I have no control over those people. If I had control over those people, they wouldn’t see me as so damned infallible, just for starters.

Unfortunately a lot of people don’t understand how these things work. They think that the Popular Activist got that way by creating minions who would follow them to hell and back if that’s where they thought they needed to go. It’s more like, you somehow become a Popular Activist (I still haven’t fully worked out how it happened to me, other than being in the right place at the right time saying the right things). And then you get a lot of people who listen to you more than they’d listen to the average person. And you get a few minions even when you want to say “please go away I don’t want minions PLEASE go away what the FUCK is this?” And then you get blamed for having minions even if you never wanted minions. Which is much more of a headache than it’s worth, especially when they do horrible things to other people in your name over real or perceived slights and then you get blamed for the aftermath.

Anyway, what is a Popular Activist? It’s you. Or me. Or anyone. It really could be anyone. It’s one human being, no different necessarily from any other human being, who just happened to be saying things at a time when other people picked up their voice and magnified it. And then people start listening to you more than they’d listen to other people. And people start wanting to follow you even if you never asked to be a leader. And all of this, this massive people-storm that grows up around you? You get blamed, for all of it, in the end. And for the most part, nobody sees you, just the person, just one person with opinions that people happen to listen to more than the listen to someone else who might have the exact same opinions but no name recognition.

Name recognition is big in the autistic community and it’s a problem. People in the highest of the leadership positions get away with things that nobody should ever get away with, that nobody else would get away with, because people put them on a pedestal. I remember a long discussion I had once about how nobody but this one autistic guy could get away with doing the things he did, because everyone knew his name and he could get away with stuff — anyone else, doing the same stuff, would have been told “Go away, asshole” a long time ago. And that’s not fair, but that’s how the autistic community appears to function.

Anyway, you are welcome to disagree with me any time.

It doesn’t mean I won’t be mad sometimes. But if I’m mad at you for what you’re saying, it’s not because you dared to disagree with a Popular Activist, it’s because what you’re saying is pissing me off. You have a right to be pissed off at me. I have a right to be pissed off at you.

And as for heresy, I think heresy is what makes the world go around. It’s not that people should be disagreeing with everything a Popular Activist says just because we say it. That is just as bad as following us blindly. In fact it really is exactly the same as following us blindly.

But having a considered opinion that happens to disagree with one of us? Fine. Great. Do it. Say it. Yeah, some people will get on your case for contradicting someone they put on a pedestal. But it’s your total right to believe whatever you want to believe about whatever people think, Popular Activists or not.

But please remember that every Popular Activist is, in fact, a human being. We have feelings. You don’t have to be nasty about it. You don’t have to blame us for the following that has grown up around us, most of us could not control that following if we tried. You don’t have to take things out on us that didn’t originate with us. Because it hurts to be blamed for things you didn’t actually do. And while I’m sure some people set out to be Big Name Activists and carefully orchestrated groups of minions and shit, most of us didn’t. Most of us landed here by accident. Most of us were exactly like you and then suddenly we looked around and people were listening to us more closely than they were listening to others and we went “Hmm, that’s weird, why is this happening?”

People shouldn’t listen to me more than they listen to other people. It makes me mad.

I try to use it for good, though. Like when something needs to get done, I hope that having so many readers helps it get done. That’s the upside of this.

But I’m just a person. I’m just as fallible as everyone else. Being a Big Name Activist happened to me because I happened to start speaking out and saying things at a time that very few people in the autistic community were saying those things. In fact, chances are that many ideas and turns of phrase that you learned in the autistic community can be traced back to me and a really tiny number of other people, and you didn’t even know it. There really were for awhile only a small number of people coming up with a huge amount of ideas.

But at any rate, the fact that I have a really amplified voice, does not make me better than you, it does not make me more worthy of being heard than you, it does not make me more right than you, and it does not make it wrong for you to contradict me whenever the hell you feel like it. Sometimes I’d rather be contradicted than treated as infallible. It doesn’t mean I’m always happy with what people say when they contradict me, it doesn’t mean I won’t argue back. But I’m seriously just a person. And so is Julia. And so are the even Bigger Name Activists like Jim Sinclair and Ari Ne’eman. We’re all just people, and while the social dynamics around us are different, we’re still just people and we’re just as fallible as anyone else. And we need people to speak whatever their truth is, whether it appears to contradict ours or not.

(I say appears to contradict ours, because I often have these bizarre confrontations with people who have worked themselves up into a rage, launch into this furious attack on what they see my position on something as, and then I go “Yeah, uh, you’re right, that’s exactly what I thought about it all along” and they don’t know how to handle it. It’s very weird.)

Notes: