Critique of ToM , trying to find an approach.

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This is not a critique of ToM. I'm trying to draw together my thoughts and feelings and understand why I want to citique it. I had some vague sense and I felt something was wrong with the whole idea of one small group of people having an outright monopoply
in being able to define another group of individuals , people like us ,who can think and define ourselves in equal terms , but accademics have gone ahead and done so without our consent and without our advice and input. Significantly to do so is a means of those peddling these theories of achieveing staus, wealth and power at our expense and maintaining those things throughout their lives.

When I saw a video clip of Borat ,the reasons why I have felt this unease crystalized within a few hours after watching it. Because I'm a pattern recognizer I began to see links between what the two Cohens do, ( in case you didn't know ,Sacha Baron Cohen is Simon Baron Cohen's cousin) and I find this questionable, on the same ground in both cases.

This took me back to a time when I working in London and Borat The Movie was released. I went to see it in a cinema in a wealthy part of London. Imagine the scene:
I come from a poor area of the UK and I'm overwhelmed by the jam of cars trying to get over , what I think was, Westmister Bridge. There's Range Rovers, Porsches, BMW's Mercs and I reackon there must have been about a million pounds-worth of cars in my line of sight. I remember there's these shops selling expensive foods and wines and everyone, well almost everyone, is well-heeled , and buying delecatesant foods and wine that would be a week's budget to someone one like me. Their voices have that confidence, and they all talk so loud because they want other to hear wht they are doing.

Now there's the secene: the rich milling around on a summer's night , and right next to them are a bunch of homeless people, sitting on a wall outside a shop . They are begging , or at least hanging around to see what they get given by the rich passers by.
I notice to the rich this is almost a zoo of the poor, and thy're giving them money as if they were feeding the ducks with bread . As I moved on I heard the rich talking about the homeless guys and loudly taking the piss, saying all kinds of stuff like the homeless smell and making tramp jokes etc.

I go in watch Borat the movie and I guess many of the people in that cinema were some of the rich guys off the streets and after they figured out that this excruiting humour was a cue for laughter they laughed at the targets of 'Borats' inquiry. What I saw was one group of people defining themelves as a group at another's expense.

I kind of mentally stood back and felt uncomfortable . I can't even remember if the" throw the jew down the well song" ( sung by Borat to a bunch of Rednecks was in this film ) yes, on one level it is a funny idea to do provoke prejucide but if you stand far enough back and figure out what laughter is in this context I think it's a form of cruelty
and group definition.

I come from a background of hard working people. They don't like strangers and quite honestly they don't have a lot of perspective and don't really think in political or ideological terms. They have had to be like this to survive. They certainly don't wander around thinking about throwing jews or anyone else ' down the well' . So along comes this SaBC and builds up a small prejudice into a big one and then conveys to the audience that these guys are all full time anti semites- well I don't think they were until he showed up. What the film doesn't show is the hardship, and the hard love in these kind of families and groups that is necessary to survive. It's OK to be a liberal clown and have security and then set out make a load of money exploiting other peoples prejudices , but if SaBC had lived their lives he would find some degree of necessity to have a sense of group identity and a sense of the other. In their world he is the outsider and that other. Just as when SaBC was on a Kibbutz in Israel the Palestinians were the necessary other.

So its down to one group of people having the power and being given the voice in the media to define another.

So what about the other Baron Cohen ? Why is this similar , or rather where do I see the same pattern? What they both do is lay out ideological frameworks of what is the norm
and what is the abnormal .Nobody actually thinks to question these frameworks because they are seamless developments of mainstream ideological constructs. But these frameworks emerge from a rather abstract set of relationships between individuals and society , most of the 'thinking' component of identity and self awarness, beyond the (redneck- style) extended family level is non-loclalized, instilled through books, film and other media - it's no longer a product of direct experience, direct interaction with family and neighborhood. You see where I'm going with this? When society eveolves beyond the local ( the social cluster and of groups SaBC was taking the piss out of) you got the abstract, and my guess is , when things get this abstract it relys on elemets of congnitive empathy to interpret and evaluate and communicate. It's one group with the illusion identity reinforcing their sense of identity through prejudice at the expense of another.


So when I read 'Autistics have no empathy ' I first question what is the constitutant elements which make up that 'empathy' in the individual we are being measured against.

The second thing I ask takes me back to the homless people near Westminster Bridge. People become homeless because they lack the social skills to manage . Put another way people with more apt social skills get the share of resoursces the homeless would otherwise have had. They then make a general theory that justifies their relative position
and they treat the poor like a human zoo and laugh at them, when out of earshot, just like the audience is encouraged to laugh and buy-into the belief that that their relationship to society is anything other than an abstract and they are some way different from the targets of Borat's humor. They are not - I watched the predjudices of these people spill out on the pavements outside the cinema. - That they are better than the targets of Borat's humor is part of the illusion generated by the comedy they were paying to watch on the big screen. - Thye were literally buying into it.

SiBC recognizes that we are outside of the paradigm of this nexus of abstract relations
which he deems nomal society. Perhaps his is the same as Borat's tactic, and here we share a similarity to the poor, or marginalized in a rich society- we are in our position because those like the Cohen's were able to grab that share of social resources and to extent we are alieneated because of this resource grabbing process, and much of this kind of research and ideolgy is about generating a mythology to cover this very obvious fact , up, ie the 'socially' rich, cognitively wealthy are so because they have figured out how to take , define and dominate the social field. The define the very ideologies of exclusion and then place the blame on the outsider for their exclusion.





Meme.

A lack of Theory of Mind is applied to the Autist because he has difficulty empathizing with others.
Those "others" are the NT's who surround him whose brains are wired completely-differently.
NT's are similarly-clueless as to how the Autistic mind works,
but NT's make up the statistical vast majority, and thereby define the Autist's lack of TOM toward them as deficit, and not vice-versa.
Airdrop an NT into an Autistic world and he would be thought to be lacking in TOM as well.

It is an NT-centric theory, just as heterosexual psychologists used to define homosexuality as a pathology, and male psychologists defined (and still do, often) the human mind according to a gendered view. Unfortunately, neuro-diversity hasn't "caught on" yet as something to be embraced.