[Ask the Gulch] Was Galt an Aspie? Asperger's Syndrome is a form of high-functioning autism, that often expresses itself with extraordinary interest and focus in a particular area, to the exclusion of many others. It brings an inability to recognize social cues.
Posted by EAJewett 8 years, 3 months ago to Ask the Gulch
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13 REASONS WHY SANTA HAS AUTISM:
1. He lines up & names his reindeer over and over again
2. He wears the same clothes every day
3. He has an extremely limited diet of only milk and cookies
4. He gets stuck in the same routine year after year
5. He avoids social interaction & does all of his work at night when everyone else is sleeping
6. He checks his list over and over and over.....
7. He likes hanging out with people smaller than he is
8. Everything is black or white (naughty or nice) no in-between!
9. He loves squeezing into teeny spaces (chimneys!)
10. He is clueless about the social stigma of creeping into other people's houses
11. He spends an entire year preparing for one night
12. He does things that amaze people & has them wondering how in the heck he did it!
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All joking aside, if you or a loved one is on the spectrum, and you are looking for a role model in John Galt, why not pretend that he does have it? Since he is a fictional character, you can do that if it helps you. I've read an article that some people with autism have found inspiration in the character from the movie Guardians of the Galaxy who is unable to grasp irony, although that is supposed to be a trait of his alien species, not necessarily a symptom of autism. Hey, whatever you find beneficial. Just don't necessarily assume other people will agree.
Jan
My grandson is severely autistic, with the added difficulty of ataxia (inability to properly comprehend speech), and the absolute inability to provide any competent therapy wildly apparent in the medical community. Each mentally challenged person is as unique as their fingerprints, and so-called mental health scientists have failed with diagnosis, causality, and therapy, accomplishing a trifecta of failure.
Surprisingly, contradictory to the claim of inability to read social cues, my grandson is acutely aware of subtle behavioral signs in people he interacts with, which unfortunately often triggers a breakdown if he experiences even subtle forms of repugnance. He seems to be so sensitive to sensory influence that he's overwhelmed by too many inputs, and can't handle crowds.
John Galt was, of course, Ayn Rand's alter ego (gender aside). Many intelligent people practice a form of social editing, eliminating trivial contact to enable them to focus on the important relationships. Unfortunately, in a society obsessively centered on trivial, meaningless interaction, this behavior is considered rude. Labeling such people as damaged is a foil to make the irrelevant (most of self-important society) feel better, since they can call themselves "normal."
Jan
I will admit that I am taller when I read The Fountainhead than in everyday life, if you get me.
I recognize the difference between not recognizing and just not caring about the social cues. I felt like they each were baffled by why someone would choose to live by those restraints. My take on it was that it is a choice, not limited to just those of superior intellect. The Wetnurse shadowing Reardon made a conscious decision to work with him instead of against him. Eddie Willers may have been average in many ways but he chose to be competent and chose to trust competence over expedience.
Careful about attacking strangers. They may not mean you harm. There is, btw, a tongue in cheek article on the hazards of being "neurotypical." http://musingsofanaspie.com/2013/01/1...
Jan
When I found Big Bang Theory on the library shelf in 2010, I brought it home. My wife could not watch it. It was too much like being at work. She got over that and we are collecting a full set of DVDs. We both work in IT (who doesn't?) and for my last job, I actually went out and bought long-sleeved t-shirts so that I could wear short-sleeved Ts over them. Everyone in the office dressed like Sheldon. I would have preferred being more dressed up, but I already know from long experience that is better to blend in... even among weirdos.
Further, you have only to consider Galt's interaction with Dr. Stadler and the other people who question him after his "capture" to realize that he was perfectly capable of understanding social cues. It is also clear from his easy social interactions in the Gulch that he was not only respected and but also liked there.
He was also capable of understanding that to care more about social cues from others than about your own cues, based on intelligence, rationality, and self-awareness, of what is right and good and true, is to place your life in the hands of others rather than in your own hands.
See ICD-10 here: http://www.iancommunity.org/cs/about_...
The "diagnosis" lacks substance. The core indicator lacks measurability:
"B.Qualitative abnormalities in reciprocal social interaction (criteria as for autism)."
The term "qualitative" is an admission that the diagnosis cannot be objective.
As a description of personality, the most damning indicator is that no "syndrome" exists for the gregarious. I enjoy hearing from my libertarian comrades who actually go to a Congressman's office over some issue, and come back to report that, while they did not agree, the politician was very nice, very likable. Now, in my medical book, that's a "syndrome."
Which, being taken in by the politician's schmoozing or the politician who has learned to emotionally manipulate people as a way of life?
They can remember a long list of people's names and personal traits, but struggle to find an use models for the physical world. They're good at snap decisions. The data often back up their hunches, but they struggle to come up with a proof to verify their hunches and often get confused and unsettled when counter-intuitive things turn out to be true. Basic calculations that other people can do in their heads require them to write it out painstakingly. It's not a stretch to call it a syndrome.
"But I don't think of you." Chapter XV, p. 413 ; Ellsworth Toohey and Howard Roark" some cues aren't worth considering. Roark GOT all the cues and so did Galt. But their intellects applied a filter.
Why do you think Galt focused on a particular area to the exclusion of many others? He was competent, intelligent and focused across the board. And he knew exactly what other's "social cues" were but knew which to ignore and refuse to pander to.
On the other hand, AR felt that art, which included her work, should omit people's blemishes as a distraction from what it was trying to convey. So even had she understood psychology, she probably would not have given him that flaw, or at least would have tried to keep it unnoticed.
- (Kent Lansing in The Fountainhead)
Ayn Rand left men with a philosophical guideline as to what are good ideas to stand by - the mixed system you live in causes trauma and these resultant syndromes.
Although not 100% structurally integrated then, they are now, and into a motor to boot - come and see it all for yourself in June:
www.GaltsGulchPortal.blogspot.ca
And I mean it.
JohnGalt Iamoura
Haha...sorry.
Seriously - I won't be surprised if somebody on the spectrum is the one who cures cancer.
Galt is a notch above, as a brilliant engineer who
convinces others to shrug -- in my humble opinion --
he's just a very selective hugger! -- j
.
Besides: no one ever said that of John Galt the young engineer, pre-strike.
Lately, I have tried to get away from constructions of un and non- if a positive word exists. The horror in Orwell's 1984 was the contraction of language through Newspeak: ungood.
John Galt was not an anti-villain. I do not know what point you are trying to make by blanking out on the concept of a hero. Moreover, a hero is not an anti-villiain because villains have values, too. Last night I watched GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. The dastardly villains all had values.
The anti-hero lacks values. Thomas Mann's Felix Krull is one example. The original Thomas Crowne in the 1968 version was another. The 1999 remake was all about values.
John Galt makes his life-altering decision before the period of the narrative.
The true heroes of AS are Dagny Taggart and Henry Rearden. Each must make life-altering decisions--and decide whether John Galt is as much a villain as Dagny thought he was--before she connected the slang name with the man draining the brains of the world.
The Greek prefix anti- means not only "opposite to" but "substituting for." An "anti-villain" displays all the drive, single-minded purpose, and stopped-only-by-death quality of a villain. But unlike a villain, he serves a just cause, not a venal or nefarious one.
This might go against your grain, I know. You are used to defining a hero as "one serving a just cause" and a villain as "one serving a wicked cause." My experience, in one writers' conference after another, tells me different. Oddly enough, you're closer to the truth than you think. Of course villains have values--rather shortsighted ones, but values nonetheless. Anti-villains value most of the same things you and I do. True villains value only themselves and their own aggrandizement, and do not value other people's lives, liberties, or property, except to the extent they flat-out covet them.
Similarly, anti-heroes make life-altering decisions that lead them to lives of crime or other rebellion against true justice instead of service of just causes. Senator Joseph Harrison Paine (D-Colo.), in Mister Smith Goes to Washington (dir. Frank Capra; with James Stewart, Jean Arthur, and Claude Rains; Columbia Pictures, 1939), is the most instructive example I can cite here. When two conflicting value sets collide, he chooses the unjust one--until his opponent, by refusing to surrender until he literally cannot stand any longer, so pricks his conscience that he first attempts suicide, then makes an almost incoherent confession on the Senate floor.
"Fans are slans".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slan
Fortunately, at several schools I attended, they shelved the teachers books in the same library as the kids' books...so I was able to get hold of Canticle for Leibowitcz and some other good stuff.
The term "mundane" has been used a lot: B5 had the PsyCorp apply it to non-telepaths, and the SCA uses it to refer to unimaginative and uninteresting normal people (who do not do reenactment; SciFi and interesting people are exempted, even if they do not do medieval reenactment).
This is all tribalism, but I don't really disapprove. I would rather be a slan.
Jan
"Aldebaran"???
EAJ's link (http://musingsofanaspie.com/2013/01/1...) was a pleasure to read, in an "Anthropologist on Mars" sense. It is a good thing that I have dogs, because it means that I have something I can chat with normal people about.
Jan