Fatalism & Indifference

For most of my life, I cared deeply about politics. By that, I mean from the ages of around 10 to the age of 31. It was something about which I thought I understood quite a bit and I generally thought I had a good bead on things. Probably around the end of the second Bush Administration was where my passion for politics began to deteriorate, finally shattering utterly and irrevocably at the close of the 2012 elections. Now, I used to think that my disgust with the Republican Party on social issues, the utter rejection of my core fiscal values by the electorate and Occupy Wall Street, or sheer frustration at the GOP for sheer incompetence in messaging, compassion, and the ability to find candidates who weren't batshit crazy were behind my lack of passion and nonvoting status. Don't get me wrong. Those objections remain important, valid, and present, but there's a greater issue I've come to understand that keeps me in a constant cocktail of fatalism and indifference to politics. Autism limits my ability to understand the lives and thinking of the vast majority of human beings and I think that that is not something I can simply cast aside.

As I have written before, I no longer watch the news, although my Facebook feed tends to insist upon exposing me to it nonetheless. The great battles of modern politics rage on, fresh with debates, ad hominem attacks, and inevitable comparisons to Hitler and Stalin. While there are still issues about which I care, I do not feel any confidence in my analysis or my ability to properly going on with current events. For this reason, when I do offer comment, it is in the form of armchair ratiocination, rather than specific comments about matters at hand. My own internal logic remains something I find to be fairly reliable. Ideology is one thing, and politics is another. What I've learned is that I am competent at the former and rather clueless on the latter. When it comes to politics, you're dealing with the messy facts of the real lives of human beings. Sure, I have aspired to that kind of life before, but that doesn't mean I come close to really understanding it. For how can a disabled man understand the life of a man who possesses the traits that allow him to live independently and must apply those traits to the struggles of making a living? How can a man incapable of good relationships understand the pressures of having and supporting one? He can't, and that's a lot of what it means to be human.

At the heart of it, I don't really feel that the world that our politicians seek to govern in the various styles available to them is my own. The world I live in is built by, for, and of neurotypicals. Perhaps autistics higher-functioning than myself feel more connected to it, but I do not. As I watch the political tide flow, I am watching it as one would watch a fictional television drama. One might root for one character to come to a certain end or a certain storyline to turn out a certain way, but this does not mean one is invested in these outcomes in the same way one is invested in, say, the condition of one's car. Of course, the actions of politicians could well affect me as much as any of you, but this does not mean that I feel a sense of agency about the outcomes of elections or that I any better understand the rest of the electorate. Everyone else has much to consider in the direction the country is headed because they are fully a part of society, understand it reasonably well, and have specific and deep interests about how they would like to see the United States government proceed. Whoever one votes for doesn't really matter to me. If a particular candidate is going to take us to Hell in a handbasket, then that is what the candidate is going to do. In any event, I'll keep enduring my struggle to stay as sane and functional as I can. Saving the world may matter a great deal to you, and, if so, go try and save it. To quote Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen, "Why would I want to save a world I no longer have any stake in?"

-Frank