Are You an Analytopath?

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Analytopathy may seem bizarre to most, but I feel a description of it may be right at home for many people who have Asperger's syndrome:

• Attention to detail while neglecting overall purpose
• Rigid set of beliefs about right and wrong conduct
• Strict adherence to rules, policies, and procedures
• Consistent and predictable
• Gratification delayed indefinitely to do work instead
• Stubbornness and uncompromising attitude, a refuseal to consider that other people may have different perspectives that are equally correct
• Tightly controlled emotions and a lack of spontaneity
• Systemization, atomization, and analysis of everything while taking no time to pause and appreciate
• Need to control others to ensure that correct standards and rules are followed
  

Analytopaths are prone to worry, doubt themselves, and find themselves not "measuring up." To ward off these feelings, they are compelled to obey an internalized set of rules that is extremely confining and stifling of innovation. They tend to have a rigid posture and limited facial expression, and their language usage is pedantic and may contain hypercorrections. They will often try to correct other people's apparent mistakes, sometimes incorrectly, showing their ignorance and at the same time their arrogance. They frequently suffer from depression, anxiety, alcohol addiction, prescription drug addiction, anger issues, and control issues. Their personality disorder has also been called obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, anankastic personality disorder, the anal character, and the compulsive personality.

Analytopaths find themselves at home in bureaucracy, formality, ritual, rule, and routine. They are particularly adapted to work as managers, lawyers, secretaries, judges, soldiers, priests and religious ministers, office workers, systems analysts, computer programmers, mathematicians, and so on. Analytopathy, in fact, seems to be a distribution of autistic traits in the NeuroTypical population.

Do you think you might be an analytopath? Do you think analytopathy has much to do with Asperger's syndrome?

My initial response to this is that the "analytopath" was described earlier than AS, and that some of the characteristics can apply but not all. It's all very negative and old-DSM-speak, almost Freudian. Yuck.

Well, I do tend to have an attention to detail while neglecting the overall purpose, and I do doubt myself often. But other than that, this doesn't really apply to me, although I do see how some aspies could be seen as such. If anything, it sounds more like my uncle, who has what I like to call a "military" personality type.

No, I'm away from the norm (See rows about "normal" elsewhere)
but this doesn't hit the spot.

Friend: "Your trouble is, you think too much."
Me: "That's an interesting idea. I'll give it some thought."*

I do think a lot, but the problem is less that it's rigid, than that it's forever switched on. So I can think about whether rules can be flexible, or have exceptions, and how other persepectives fit in....

But if you start thinking about thought, then recursive difficulties start appearing, or ascending levels of contemplation: "Going Meta", in my own jargon.

One saving grace, perhaps not available to an analytopath (unless the rule was very firmly established?) comes from Douglas Adams's "Clearly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty". A very useful idea.
An engineer might also get there from a different direction,
with the concept of "within tolerance".
That involves flexibility, but rigidly defined flexibility!

I'm anything but that.

Sounds like an Enneagram personality type 1.

The stick up my ass is more like a twig really.

Actuallly this appears to describe the beaucratic nitpick I tend to hate and find extremely alienating. These are the people who, like the the description says, tend to be in positions of authority which they misuse. They often have that "middle management syndrome." They're petty and myopic and I loath that. Every job that I quit in haste or anger was due to a person like this.



[*] Attention to detail while neglecting overall purpose - I can one without neglecting the other

[*] Rigid set of beliefs about right and wrong conduct - I have firm convictions about principles but not conduct.

[*] Strict adherence to rules, policies, and procedures - No, actually I'm very laid back on these. Principles, yes; rules, no.

[*] Consistent and predictable - Heeeell NO. My friends say I'm "predictably unpredictable."

[*] Gratification delayed indefinitely to do work instead - I do show this to some extent, but I also am easily tempted

[*] Stubbornness and uncompromising attitude, a refuseal to consider that other people may have different perspectives that are equally correct - I cna be very stubborn, but I'm not that bad, even if I appear that way to others

[*] Tightly controlled emotions and a lack of spontaneity - I can be very spontaneous (see above, regarding predictability)

[*] Systemization, atomization, and analysis of everything while taking no time to pause and appreciate - oh no, I do appreciate things. That's the whole point of doing all the systematizing and so forth.

[*] Need to control others to ensure that correct standards and rules are followed - oh lordy no. I can't be bothered with all that. I've got my own life to live.

I'm not very O/C, anal, or controlling, especially of other people. I do not feel comfortable in positions of authority. I'm actually fairly anti-authority and anarchistic. I can see the overlap, but that overlap doesn't make me so inflexible, predictable or unspontaneous. This sound more like the "Guardian" or SJ type of Myer-Briggs, teh type I have the hardest time getting along with, since I'm an INTP in spadeds (which is the most common type among Aspies).

How eloquent! I'd say mine's more like a wet noodle - irritating, yet defintiely flexible.

We should form a club: "Non-Analytopathic Aspies United." Of course it could only be in name, since I doubt either of us would bother to show up for the meetiings, let alone want to take charge and run it.

I'm INTJ...

And I get people to stare at blank graph paper...
(It's a professional thing)

It's been a while since I took the test, but I think I'm borderline INTJ and INTP, and I still am unsure as to the difference because I feel like I do both.

Actually, analytopaths seem to conform to rules and traditions to avoid thinking for themselves. A good example is the patently absurd behavior of the analytopath's blind obedience to rules can be found in the Vogon extraterrestrial race from the movie the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They are like computers in that they can be programmed to follow a sequence of commands and if-then clauses but cannot think independently.

I actually find these people to be a nuisance more often than not. What's really funny is when they make well-meaning spelling or grammatical corrections that are actually incorrect! However, they really can pose problems when they feel compelled to make you follow rules, procedure, and policy to the letter when it just doesn't make sense to.

In many ways, the analytopath's opposite is the psychopath.

I don't fit this at all being a analythopath Myself.

No wonder the word doesn't suit me, I'm only a few steps away from being a psychopath.

Well, that seals the case. I'm not one. And I have the battle scars to prove it. I'm dissenter on many things in our society. One of my principles I so rigously adhere to is that people don't have to think like each other to live in society together.

That we all must think like each other is something the religious right and our president seem to believe in to the point of absurdity. Perhaps they're analytopaths.



In philosophy that's called legal positivism - the law is the law because it's the law. And you should adhere to the law because it's the law. It's a fallacious, absurd and wildly unconstructive position. I have seen this a lot among other Catholic theologians, especially ones that are priests. I have a bad habit of calling them on it when the opportunity arises, which sends them into a dizzy, I tell you. One of these priest I confronted about his legal positivist thinking was at the time the president of my university. He's now an archibishop in the Vatican, and is very close to Ratzinger, which mean he as pope potential (big surprised - we all knew he was gunning for this).

These people can be annoying, but they can also really get to me. I'm so "outside the curve" that they are easily threatened by me and response with a lot of hostility. I'm an agent of chaos to them. I don't cope with that well, especially since the grounds for their hostility is so irrational. In the workplace this is unbareable. In other places I just try to keep my distance from them. At best I'll speak my mind and then walk away.

I admit also that I notice other people's grammar mistakes. But I know I make many myself. I just don't see the point of hassle them over this, especially when I'm no better! That's why if someone corrects me incorrectly, it tends to p*ss me off.

As for getting others to follow rules: hey, when they say Aspies prefer objects over people, they're talking about me. As snobbish as it sounds, I can't be bothered to care what other people do, as long as they don't hassle me or hurting other people. I'm a "Live and Let Live" person first and foremost. I really hate unfairness and think rules and laws ought to encourage fairness in our society, but that is different from not adhering to every rule in prefect conformity.



I don't know about that. Psychopathy doesn't apply to just the anti-social, as the word is popluarly used, but to any disorder psychological in nature. This actually fits the bill for psychopathy: it disrupts volition, arrests personal development and diminishes the capacity for the person to be rational and/or feel joy or happiness. So I'd dare to say an analytopath would be a type of psychopath.