The Advantage To Being An Outsider

Trey Smith

If you have a disability or weakness, learn how to use it to your advantage. Also, do not misuse a strength or talent so that it becomes your undoing. The sage thus appears to have the benefit of unseen forces.
~ a Taoist Daily Quote from Lao Fzu ~

One of the hallmarks of Asperger's Syndrome is the feeling of being an outsider. In many respects, the social world is like a puzzle and, for whatever reason, we haven't been provided with all the pieces. This makes it quite difficult to put the puzzle together in such a way that it makes sense. When we look at the fractured picture, it still looks like some crazy puzzle!

Hold this thought in mind as I share a snippet of Glenn Greenwald's excellent column from Sunday.

One can object to some of its particulars, but Frank Bruni has a quite interesting and incisive New York Times column today about a new independent film called Compliance, which explores the human desire to follow and obey authority.

Based on real-life events that took place in 2004 at a McDonalds in Kentucky, the film dramatizes a prank telephone call in which a man posing as a police officer manipulates a supervisor to abuse an employee with increasing amounts of cruelty and sadism, ultimately culminating in sexual assault – all by insisting that the abuse is necessary to aid an official police investigation into petty crimes.

That particular episode was but one of a series of similar and almost always-successful hoaxes over the course of at least 10 years, in which restaurant employees were manipulated into obeying warped directives from this same man, pretending on the telephone to be a police officer.

Bruni correctly notes the prime issue raised by all of this: "How much can people be talked into and how readily will they defer to an authority figure of sufficient craft and cunning?" That question was answered 50 years ago by the infamous experiment conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram, in which an authority figure in a lab coat instructed participants to deliver what they were told were increasingly severe electric shocks to someone in another room whom they could hear but not see. Even as the screams became louder and more agonizing, two-thirds of the participants were induced fully to comply by delivering the increased electric shocks.

Most disturbingly, even as many expressed concerns and doubts, they continued to obey until the screams stopped – presumably due to death (subsequent experiments replicated those results). As the University of California's Gregorio Billikopf put it, the Milgram experiment "illustrates people's reluctance to confront those who abuse power", as they "obey either out of fear or out of a desire to appear co-operative – even when acting against their own better judgment and desires".

Bruni ties all of this into our current political culture, noting one significant factor driving this authoritarian behavior: that trusting authority is easier and more convenient than treating it with skepticism.

You see, naturally being an outsider makes it far easier to be a skeptic. In situations where most people will try to appease authority, Aspies tend to follow the beat of their own drum. In other words, from what I've seen, most of us tend not to be followers, blind or otherwise.

Owing to the advice of Lao Fzu, I utilize this space on this blog to use my so-called disability to an advantage. Being a natural skeptic, it is far easier for me to discern others who manipulate and abuse authority. And, since I am autistic and I don't readily fit in with general society, I don't worry about trying to fit in.

Even though I am a leftist, I can just as easily criticize the actions of Democrats as I can of Republicans. In fact, I am more critical of the Democrats because they pretend to care about the needs of the masses. This is why I am so critical of Barack Obama: he pretends to be a populist when he is really a corporatist!