I have 4 or 5 on my timeline who are either self-confessed “on the spectrum” or are living with a family member with Autism or Asperger’s. It’s a neurodiverse issue that requires care to varying degrees for the individual. No doubt. I do care.
But, I’ve been using the term Autistic as an adjective (and sometimes the abstract noun Autism) in a technical sense since 2005/6 for a much wider misunderstanding of the place of “rationality” in our socio-cultural-political “systems” context.
Caring about the former I often bite my tongue in needing to refer to the latter, but I’m finding the term more and more appropriate in 2025. (Not least because of the current prominence of Musk, but he’s just one visible consequence of a long-standing, yet largely hidden & misunderstood, iceberg confronting us.)
#AutisticEconomics
#AutisticPolitics
#AutisticSocialSciences
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And here, those original 2005/6 references:
2005 – “To be Rational is Autistic”
https://psybertron.org/archives/962
2006 – “Autistic Economics”
https://psybertron.org/archives/1252
General Autism / Autistic references in Psybertron
https://psybertron.org/?s=Autis&sort=oldest
Deirdre McCloskey, mentioned only once so far in the whole blog, but the source behind one of those earliest references to (Post)-Autistic-Economics, and yet the word isn’t mentioned in her Wikipedia profile – wonder why, there is in fact a whole post-autistic-economics “movement”?
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A random thought. Could it be that autism has become such a well-used metaphor precisely because it has become such an overused term on home ground and prime example of diagnostic creep? This is not to deny that there really *is* a disorder that corresponds to that label, but that this widening penumbra bleeding through Aspergers and being ‘on the spectrum’ may be merely a pathologising of mild eccentricity and ordinary variance? And this, in turn, leaks into the more explicitly metaphorical applications. So ‘autistic economics’, ‘autistic rationalism’, etc. may be just better described bad economics and bad rationalism based on limited assumptions.