11-20-2016, 09:03 PM
(11-20-2016, 05:22 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(11-20-2016, 01:30 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: ...in some cases, aiding people in getting along with certain disabilities would keep people from becoming public charges over longer times.
Heck, if society had adapted to my Asperger's, like retraining me, then I might have had a long and successful career doing something useful, highly remunerative, and suitable for me becoming an above-average tax-payer. To be sure, there is no medical treatment for Asperger's; it is as damaging as alcoholism. I am sure that anyone can tell much about my verbal skills and mastery of formal logic through my posts. That's not bragging. I am humble about the rest.
I'm borderline aspie, I definitely wouldn't trade it for being neurotypical. I did have the luck to get into a university, MIT, which was majority aspie, and then collecting a resume that was strong enough to get me hired without sucking up to the interviewers. And I tended toward jobs where attention to detail and getting things correct was important, helping balance the scales with more voluble but less persnickety coworkers.
So basically, I disagree that Asperger's is damaging at all. It's just different and makes one suitable for a different - and admittedly smaller - set of jobs.
I was not quite in that rarefied zone, so people interviewing me saw the eccentricity and not the attention for detail. I ended up in the pack, competing for entry-level opportunities and doing badly at them. Maybe I am not so borderline.
What is terrible is having to live a lie, scared at all times that one will mess up as anxiety strikes. it can be a lonely, frustrating life.
But even had I known, I might have drifted much less in life.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.