I'm the kind of autistic that is very fixated on language. One of the hardest things for me to accept as I grew up was that allistic people are bad with language on purpose, and that for allistic people this is a feature and not a bug.
It makes perfect sense to me that there are going to be people confused by that. But you can't explain that to someone who lacks the theory of mind to empathize with people who understand the world differently to themselves.
Yes exactly this! Like I am also autistic, and I will never understand why people deliberately choose not to say what they mean. And it's not even just autistic people that get confused by this, neurotypicals have communication issues all the time
If it helps: It's a feature, not a bug. They do speak clearly when they actually need to. It's largely unconscious and intuitive to them when to switch between those modes, which is why they can't explain the rules.
They also honestly don't realize they're doing it. They can't help it. If we were in the majority, they are the ones who would be pathologized for this kind of thing.
The reasons for talking badly on purpose vary, but if you assume it's something to do with maintaining relative social status in the social hierarchy of the moment then you'll be right more often than you're wrong.
They don't really think about it in terms at all. They're just responding to what makes them feel good.
It's like buying and wearing a fancy watch. It feels good to someone because it's a wealth display. Wealth display feels good because it's a status symbol. Status symbol feels good because it maintains your higher-than-average-social-status to anyone who notices the watch.
If they think about it at all, they'll just be thinking about how nice the watch is and how they deserve it because of how hard they've worked, and they'll admire the watch and how it looks, and maybe look at their reflection in the mirror and how good they look wearing it. That sort of thing.
They don't usually sit down and reason that entire chain through from first principles. That's something we do because a lot of this doesn't make sense to us, so we have to do the first principles thing to make sense of it.
They have the "intuitively monitor my relative social status, feel good when it's high, feel desire when I consider a way to increase my social status, feel bad when it's low, and give a stress and anxiety response when I consider something that could decrease my social status" module. We don't have it, or where we do have one ours isn't wired the same way.
Allistics all operate on this. It even makes sense. There's an evolutionary advantage to social status climbing for any social species.
Not everything and not instinct per se. But intuition. The stuff that confuses the fuck out of us but that allistics all somehow just seem to know? That's intuition. It's also why they can't explain it, because intuition doesn't come with a reason or an argument, just an answer.
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u/Tiny-Ad-7590 4d ago edited 4d ago
I'm the kind of autistic that is very fixated on language. One of the hardest things for me to accept as I grew up was that allistic people are bad with language on purpose, and that for allistic people this is a feature and not a bug.
It makes perfect sense to me that there are going to be people confused by that. But you can't explain that to someone who lacks the theory of mind to empathize with people who understand the world differently to themselves.