u/Future_Interest_3649

Some people in the USA who have a more alarmist bent like to claim the country is on the verge of a second civil war due to the level of political and cultural polarization there is right now. The people making this claim are on both sides of the divide, but one thing they seem to all have in common is that the first analogy they reach for is the first American Civil War (1861-1865).

To an extent, that is understandable, since it’s the only civil war we’ve had, and people in the USA tend to be more than a little myopic when it comes to histories other than our own.

But I can’t really see the similarity there. For one thing, there is nothing directly analogous to antebellum slavery in the USA right now. On the right, anti-abortion extremists sometimes claim abortion is the new slavery (and even that a civil war to stop it would be justified). On the left, you sometimes have people comparing anti-LGBTQ persecution to slavery.

But neither of these comparisons hold any water, for the simple reason that the South was entirely economically dependent on slavery. Meanwhile, it would be ridiculous to claim today’s economic system is built on abortion (in blue states) or on discriminating against LGBTQ people (in red states). These are both practices that draw a lot of passionate opposition, but both of them are “post-material” issues that have far less economic significance than slavery did.

Instead of the American Civil War, I think the closest parallel to the current US political climate is the Thirty Years’ War (and the Reformation era that preceded it). I‘m curious as to whether more established historians also hold this view.

Some similarities I can see include:

• The sides differ in how much trust to place in established institutions (such as universities, the administrative state, transnational organizations, governments, etc.)
• One side has a populist, rabble-rousing leader who is known for vulgarity at times, and flatly rejects existing institutional norms (Martin Luther / Trump)
• One side is known for taking down statues that offend them (Beeldenstorm / George Floyd protests).
• Disagreement on whether religion and morality ought to be a matter of individual conscience, or whether they should be about fealty to an outside authority (the institutional Church and/or the state and its laws)
• Scapegoating of various minorities becomes more common, with Jews in particular being accused by people on each side of the divide of secretly aiding the other.
• Increasing paranoia about supernatural threats (increase in witch trials / things like QAnon)
• The rise of a completely new medium of communication (Gutenberg’s printing press vs. Internet/social media) and the destabilizing effects on society that resulted.

Notably, the parallels aren’t one-to-one (so that Blue America and Red America each resemble the Catholic side in some ways, and the Protestant side in others). But besides that, the similarities are quite close and seem to be a much better fit for what is going on today than the American Civil War.

It’s a shame U.S. schools don’t place more emphasis on early modern period European history, because it‘s very relevant to why the U.S. system of government is the way it is. For instance, you can teach students that the founders didn’t want an established state religion, but if you want to teach them why, it’s hard to do so without bringing the Thirty Years’ War into it.

The one linked above has a .us domain name and the tagline “Faith and Politics United“, however there is also another, churchoftrump.net, which instead says “Faith and Leadership United”. Both sites have the exact same stock photo and no other references to Donald Trump apart from the name.

This is something I‘ve wondered about a lot recently.

Some studies have shown that up to 50% of a person’s political leanings could be the result of genetics. Which implies that there would be some genes that predispose some people to be MAGA (or at least authoritarian conservative-leaning) or, conversely, that predispose other people to oppose movements like MAGA.

The implications of this are somewhat unsettling, or maybe thrilling, depending on your personal political leanings.

At the present moment, at least, conservatives have gone all-in on pronatalist rhetoric, with Charlie Kirk urging his followers to have more children than they can afford. Young Republicans seem to be following his advice, having lots of children who are going to be genetically predisposed towards conservatism as well.

Meanwhile, among liberal- and Democratic-leaning groups, the exact opposite is happening. You have movements like 4B and BirthStrike (which often get written about, if not effectively promoted, in the mainstream news media). You have a lot more people who self-identify as childfree on the Democratic side of the aisle, as well as LGBTQ people (relatively few of whom procreate, compared to heterosexuals).

If individual people want to take themselves out of the future gene pool, then they have a right to, but what happens when it becomes a society-wide trend? If the only people having biological children in the USA (and other countries for that matter) are right-wing conservatives, what does that mean for the future? If Steve King had a Democratic counterpart, he would probably be asking: “do you really think we are going to rebuild our democracy with the children of Trumpers?”

I recently joked that someone should write a book called The Genes That Got Trump Elected, and the cover image would depict an anthropomorphic DNA strand wearing a MAGA hat. Sensationalist, I know, but at least it would get more people thinking about this issue.

Do you believe differing fertility rates among supporters of different parties are really going to have long-term effects on U.S. politics (or other countries for that matter)? Or do you think that other factors will matter more than genetics in the long run?

There’s also a third possibility: what if the phenomenon of conservatives having more children than liberals is a temporary phenomenon rather than a permanent one? Perhaps, at some point in the future, Catholic monasticism might come back in a big way, and you might then see conservative youth pursuing that option instead of marriage and childbearing. Or else the fundamentalists/evangelicals will start embracing “end times“ theology again and conclude that having children at this late hour is not worth it.

Meanwhile, at the same future time, perhaps we might see liberal-leaning youth abandoning Gen Z-style risk-aversion and becoming more disinhibited again (like they were during the 1960s sexual revolution), thus resulting in more births among this demographic. You’d have to ask a historian if they think this scenario is likely to occur, but it can’t be entirely impossible...can it?

I remember reading at one point that there was an anthropologist who claimed that the Aboriginal Australians (or at least some tribes of them) communicated this way before coming under European influence. However, this was long enough in the past that it might now be difficult to prove either way. Are there other cultures where this is believed (or known) to have been the case?

It actually seems plausible to me, since one time I encountered a man on the public bus system who was like this. He didn’t seem to be directly talking either to me or to the driver (and neither of us was responding back to him) but he just kept rambling on about various things as though he knew there was always someone listening. I’m guessing he had some sort of mental health issue, but it made me wonder if this kind of thing might not always have been outside the norm.

A person who communicated like this would just say whatever comes to mind, even if no other humans are physically present at all. I could see this happening in animistic cultures (since, to an animist, everything is potentially an audience that could listen to what you have to say, not just humans).

I’m sure I can’t be the only adult on the spectrum who has sometimes wondered if the reason why I have so much trouble functioning in society is because I live in a highly developed, “WEIRD” country (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic). Namely, the Midwestern USA.

Maybe it’s just the intrusive thoughts talking, but sometimes it seems to me like modern, middle-class values are really just neurotypical values. I find it rather telling that neurodivergent traits seem to be significantly more common among both the very rich and the very poor, as opposed to the “average” citizens of the middle class.

That fact makes me wonder if highly stratified societies that don’t really have an educated middle class (such as under feudalism for instance) have/had a much higher proportion of the population that exhibited autistic traits. And possibly even to the extent that it would have just been within the range of what they‘d consider normal!

Such “closed” societies typically had an established social hierarchy with fixed and predictable roles. This made for a lot less ambiguity in social interactions, and little need for modern-style “discourse”, introspection, or cognitive openness. Likewise only a very small percentage of the population in those societies attended formal educational institutions (which, by their very nature, are infamously inhospitable toward anyone who isn’t NT).

Finally, religious observances in those societies were very different in nature from what we typically think of as religion, and often involve a lot of “repetitive and sterotyped” ritualistic behavior; for instance, worshippers in medieval Catholic churches often tended to occupy themselves in “private devotions” (might we call that stimming?) rather than actively listening to the sermon like a neurotypical (and, most of them wouldn’t have been able to understand it anyway since the liturgy wasn’t in the vernacular.)

Most people would probably find a society like that to be a pretty shitty place to live, but at least autistic people wouldn’t have fallen as far behind neurotypicals back then (for the same reason that dyslexia wouldn’t have been a disadvantage at all in societies that didn’t have or value writing). Think of it as like a Harrison Bergeron society. (I wonder how common it is for disabled people who read that story to actually sympathize with the Handicapper General?)

Probably the closest thing to a feudal society that still exists today is Somalia, and it’s worth pointing out that autism diagnosis rates seem to be especially high among the Somali diaspora, including here in Minnesota. I don’t know if there is a genetic reason for this, but if there is, maybe it could be because some autistic traits might actually have been an advantage in the old country. For instance, in Somalia, you need to memorize your genealogy going back quite a few generations, in order to prove membership in a clan (without which you’d be in danger since the clans have power and the state pretty much doesn’t). Being able to memorize stuff like that, along with all the other extremely complex, arbitrary rituals and traditions that characterize such cultures (but not modern Westernized ones), is something autistic people might actually do better at.

In addition I wonder if totalitarian societies like North Korea might be similar in that regard; even though they are a more modern phenomenon, they do have certain ancient parallels.

Once I even suggested to my therapist that I didn’t think people like me could ever belong in modern societies, because the modern era is called the Age of Reason, and “reason” is just another word for neurotypicality! She countered by saying she didn’t believe that, because she did think I was a reasonable person.

But I do think that a lot of autistic people have deep-seated issues with this kind of thing. I mean, our very existence is proof that John Locke and all those other thinkers who believed in tabula rasa/blank-slatism were full of hooey.

Some people like to speculate about which historical figures might have been autistic; I sometimes do the exact opposite and wonder which historical figure(s) were among the first people who would be considered neurotypical in today’s world. Locke is definitely on that list: so is Thomas Paine (only a neurotypical could actually believe there is such a thing as common sense!), and so are all of the Protestant Reformers.

Whereas Thomas Hobbes, with his more pessimistic view of human nature (and his corresponding preference for a closed society, in the form of the Leviathan state and the social compact), strikes me as more likely to be autistic.

In more modern times, you see autistic people disproportionately represented in a lot of extremist political movements, many of which also seek some form of “closed” society and don’f place a high value on reasonableness.

There’s been a lot of attention given to autistic alt-rightists, since they are very vocal: Matthew Heimbach, for instance, said that most supporters of the alt-right whom he knew personally were on the spectrum, and that’s what distinguished them from the mainstream right wing. Heimbach himself was diagnosed fairly young, and he has since gone full Horseshoe Theory and reinvented himself as some sort of tankie/neo-Stalinist type, going through a nazbol phase as well.

Whereas autistic leftists are probably more numerous than their far-right counterparts, but once again, they tend towards the more authoritarian flavors of leftism (tankies and CCP-admirers, not so much liberals).

And then outside the left-right paradigm, you have the kind of atavist who rejects modern politics (and indeed civilization) entirely, such as Ted Kaczynski (whose mother initially wanted to send him to a facility for autistic children). And of course you have just plain old cults, many of which disproportionately draw in autistic or neurodivergent people as well.

So that makes me wonder if being autistic might be inherently counter-Enlightenment in some way. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cultural movements that were reacting against Enlightenment rationalism (such as Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, etc.) were primarily being driven by people who we would today consider neurodivergent, and who might have felt their place in the world becoming more tenuous in the face of an expanding, very neurotypical middle class.

That’s more or less how I often also feel today; unlike some autistic people, I don’t tend to see much “progress” in today’s world; I catastrophize a lot instead. And part of that catastrophizing involves me wondering if maybe I wouldn’t be at as much of a disadvantage if I had lived centuries ago, or in a country that was much poorer, or less “free” (because it does seem like neurotypicals benefit from society’s “freedoms” a lot more than we do). That YouTube sketch from The Onion, about the autistic reporter who visits a prison and actually finds the idea of living there somewhat attractive, was obviously satirical but it does hint at something very real about us.

Again, a good part of this is probably intrusive thoughts, which I’m less likely to have if there isn’t something else stressing me out at the moment. But I can’t be the only autistic person who has wondered about some of these same things.

Here is the video in case anyone is curious. I’m a little surprised it didn’t become a “Rick Roll”-style meme in the Internet era. “You just got Squiered“ has a nice ring to it.