AS people = Beta males/females?

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I realize I have not accepted how bad it in fact is for one's survival ability to have the personality one has when one has Aspergers Syndrome. Not because one is stupid, but because everyone else are so different from oneself that it becomes a very severe disability.

Fully accepting this would mean giving in to NT-society and not respecting my true self. Because my true self does not judge people on their ability to survive, but their ability to treat others well. All this judgement of people's ability to survive is something that is and has been forced upon me because I am being forced to socialize the neurotypical way in order to survive (keep a job for instance).

I see that is why I struggle to accept how much of a disability Aspergers Syndrome is, and how LOW-ranking the condition makes you, despite your intelligence. Accepting it would be handing my former bullies all self-respect I have left, and acknowledge that their hurtful actions were justified because I was low-ranked enough for them to be allowed to bully me. That, I cannot do.

But the problems surfaces everytime I get too involved with the NT world, that means in jobs and in dating. That is truly an issue.

qawer, I'm really worried that this could affect your mental health in a negative way, and might ruin some potentially great relationships. You need to stop fixating on your current worldview. You probably need to spend some time socialising with NTs who aren't jerks.

There is no one "neurotypical way of socialising", and certainly most people do not view the world you imply that they do (that trampling on "the low ranked" is justified).

I just watched this yesterday lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQgU8I7PgT0

I like his view.

Great vid, he is speaking the truth.

But he misses an important point, imo. Aspies are only capable of being the "strong individual who just do not want to talk to people, not a beta" if he can be truly independent, i.e. not forced to socialize to survive.

But in todays society that is just not the case. You have to conform if you want to earn money and if you do not want your social assets (perhaps good looks, perhaps intelligence, perhaps special skills etc.) to deteriorate on the dating scene.

So aspies are, per se, strong individuals, in fact stronger than the alphas, seeing that aspies are tough enough to deal with life without a group to support them. But the current environment does not allow such behaviour, which eventually forces the aspie to become the gamma in the NT group.

(Unless be betrays his own nature and acts NT the way many of us try to, in order to not attain the gamma position - I find doing this for too long can be mentally damaging).

Alphas and betas aside for a moment, it helps me to think of society in terms that help us understand social behaviors among other species.

I consider relationships to be a form of social cooperative behavior, defined as an organism's tendency to do something that benefits another to some (varying degree of) cost to themselves. In a general sense, interpersonal interactions can be considered cooperative or not. Two major ways these seemingly detrimental behaviors can evolve due to selection in a species are: 1. kinship, and 2. reciprocal altruism. Number 1 explains why your parents, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers give you a lot of support no matter how demanding you were a kid (because you pass on their genes essentially). However number 2 is basically a tit-for-tat situation. If you give person "A" you just met a slice of your pizza one day at work, then later that week person A will offer you some m&ms. If that doesn't happen, say, if person A instead continues to take pizza from you but never shares any food or even polite conversation with you, then you would be understandably upset, and probably will want to giver some kind of punishment, such as not ask this person to hang out in the future, or demanding to be reimbursed for the lunches they've been mooching etc.

Even among wild wolf packs these things are true. It's been shown in African wild dogs that when you see an alpha treating a beta in a way that is not in any way mutually beneficial to the beta, the beta is essentially "only putting up with it" because they are typically a close relative (Girman et al., 1997).

So basically, I doubt even dogs would put up with unrelated folks being jerks.

There are cooperative people out there and there are cheaters who want to play the system to their own individual benefit (there always will be). Don't let those people get you down, because they get everyone down, NT, AS, you name it. People on the spectrum may not be the most smooth, but we can follow the rules of social cooperation the same as anyone else, perhaps better, since it may be easier for folks like us to objectively examine the situation, where as so many NTs I know are stumbling blindly based on following gut instincts.

As Verdandi suggested, just make sure you treat each other with the same kindness, and you can make relationships with people that treat you as an equal.


Hope that helps.

I believe in freeing peeves from captivity, so that they can roam freely across the open plains.

Sorry guys. I feel like it's been months since I actually had anything resembling a conversation with anyone on these forums. Usually I just say things and people ignore them and I go do something else. =_= ...then part of me wonders if anyone responded to what I said while I was doing something else, so I go back and I check... and I realize that no one did.

And that's today's episode of smoooooth forum posting for the win. oh yeah. deep thoughts.

ok, I'll go back to being on topic now.