It’s your time to shine, highly disagreeable contrarians

There's rarely been a greater need for those willing to bear the social costs of championing inconvenient truths

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S. Eliot, 1936

All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and call him names
They never let poor Rudolph
Join in any reindeer games

Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say
“Rudolph, with your nose so bright
Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”

Then how the reindeer loved him
As they shouted out with glee
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
You’ll go down in history”
Johnny Marks, 1949

You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way
Marlo Stanfield, The Wire, 2006

Let me begin by telling you about a Danish writer.

Nobody had heard of autism when this writer was alive, but let’s just say there were one or two neurodivergence red flags. Notably extreme social awkwardness and intense preoccupations.

This writer also travelled with a rope – so he could escape if ever trapped in a building that caught fire – and slept with a note next to his bed that read, “I am not dead”.

Even if you’ve not keen on Scandinavian literature, you’ve probably heard of this author and one of his stories. His name was Hans Christian Andersen and his most famous story concerns a high-status individual’s new outfit.

Autistics – the case against
The question that arises for anyone familiar with just how unsettling/exhausting/obnoxious autistics can be is why they weren’t long ago deleted from the gene pool.

In the contemporary corporate argot, autistics aren’t team players. As Andersen’s fairytale illustrates, they’re given to noticing the pachyderm in the vicinity that everyone else is studiously ignoring.

And autistics’ naïve concern for truth is just the tip of what would seem to be a evolutionary-non-adaptive iceberg.

Autists struggle to understand other people’s emotions and perspectives. They often have suboptimal motor skills. They’re frequently hypersensitive to lights, sounds and textures. They are wont to sperg out (i.e. engage in verbal or behavioural outbursts).

In short, they’re unlikely to have been much use hunting gazelles on the African savannah.

Granted, it’s rarely an option for today’s neurotypicals to behead a trainspotter who is boring them witless at a work or social function. But why didn’t the trainspotters’ ancestors meet with unfortunate gazelle-stalking accidents during the 300,000 years when humans lived as tightly knit bands of hunter-gatherers?

This is what (almost certainly) happened to hyper-aggressive males. If a man was judged to be too alpha, a coalition of betas would form to eliminate the hothead.

As a result, even the most alpha of human alpha males don’t nowadays dismember their rivals and eat their children, the way their chimpanzee counterparts will.

If our forefathers jettisoned the brutes, why didn’t they get rid of the heretics at the same time?

Autistics – the case for
You don’t have to be autistic to be part of a minority standing in opposition to a tragically deluded majority.

But there’s invariably a price to be paid for telling people something that they don’t want to hear. To trying to make a man understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. To attempting to get a consensus-prioritising woman to renounce a belief when she’ll be reputationally destroyed by members of her social circle and class for departing from the mutually agreed upon narrative.

It’s always dangerous to claim that a particular demographic has a special insight into the truth, and that is not quite what I am arguing.

What I am proposing is that while autists are often fascinated by status hierarchies and how they function, they are also insouciant – relative to their neurotypical peers – about embracing unpopular and hence low-status positions.

They hate you until they need you
In an insightful recent post my fellow Substacker Adrian Lambert explored “the evolutionary role of neurodivergence”.

Here are the money quotes:

Autism, ADHD, and other atypical cognitive styles are highly heritable, stable across cultures, and present throughout human history… From an evolutionary perspective, that alone demands explanation…

Different minds attend to different signals. Most specialise in social cohesion and emotional attunement. Others in pattern detection, system building, long-range planning, or rule consistency. The value of this diversity is not evenly distributed across circumstances, but becomes visible under stress (my emphasis)…

Reduced sensitivity to social consensus, heightened attention to internal consistency, and low tolerance for unresolved contradiction are less rewarded when systems are functioning within expected parameters. In stable contexts, these traits can appear maladaptive, disruptive, or socially dysfunctional.

Civilisational collapse flips this relationship.

In such contexts, traits associated with neurodivergence (system-level pattern recognition, reduced reliance on social validation, and willingness to follow implications to uncomfortable conclusions) become functionally relevant (my emphasis).

You either die an eccentric or live long enough to see yourself become a hero (in a collapsing society)
The hero in Andersen’s story is the boy. It’s easy to see why Andersen identifies with the boy. By the time he wrote his world-famous fairytale, he’d spent three decades abjectly failing to move fluidly between what the Japanese term honne (the truth truth) and tatemae (the socially sanctioned truth).

What’s curious is that Andersen’s readers also fondly imagine that – rather than being the dim-witted king or a nervously conformist crowd member – they too would be courageous enough to risk slipping to the bottom of the social status hierarchy to speak truth to power.

Well, maybe.

But let’s consider some Emperor’s New Clothes tatemae truths championed by the sense-making-intuitions-dominating Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) in recent decades.

PMC-approved narratives, circa 1991-2024

Liberal democracy and market capitalism have forever ‘won’, thus ending history. (Also, history has a “right side”.)

Developed nations should outsource their manufacturing to China. China will liberalise and become just like Western nations (see the End of History).

Globalisation is pretty much all upside with negligible downside.

Mass migration – without much concern as to the worldview of the migrant or the wishes of the current electorate – is pretty much all upside with negligible downside.

Asymmetrical multiculturalism is pretty much all upside with negligible downside.

Identity politics will bridge societal divides and advance equality, without provoking backlash or diverting attention from distributional issues.

You can decriminalise crime without ending up with a lot more of it.

The benefits of prolonged pandemic lockdowns will far outweigh the costs.

By exercising rigorous narrative control – that is, strictly policing and disincentivising wrong think and wrong speech (aka mis/dis/mal information) – you can get the common folk to ignore the evidence of their lying eyes.

Whether you lean Right or Left, dear reader, you must be willing to concede at least half of the beliefs listed above have now proven, shall we say, overly optimistic.

The Bat-Signal (Rain Man signal?) flickers across a darkening sky
Lambert’s post ends on a resigned note. He points out that drawing attention to inconvenient, if important, truths rarely ends happily for the truth-teller.

As Lambert observes, Cassandras are “likely to experience social marginalisation, dismissal, and reputational damage, particularly when their assessments contradict dominant economic or political narratives”.

There’s no shortage of tragic tales that attest to this grim reality.

In the 1840s, Viennese obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis intuited the rudiments of germ theory and insisted his fellow doctors start disinfecting their hands.* Semmelweis was shunned and ridiculed by his peers and eventually committed to an asylum.

Lambert concludes by insisting, “Neurodivergent people do not carry a responsibility to warn, lead, or compensate for a civilisation in decline. Boundary-sensing traits are not a moral assignment; they are a by-product of variation that becomes visible under certain conditions.”

If only for reasons of self-preservation, this seems short-sighted. There’s little reason for autistics to imagine they will fare well in societies breaking apart due to a toxic brew of class, ethnic, gender, generational and religious conflicts.

More importantly, remaining silent seems like a shameful dereliction of evolutionary duty.

After all, if autistics exist to function as early-warning systems, then surely they do have a “moral assignment” to draw attention to the mistaken premises that are sending their societies hurtling towards the cliff edge.

After all, Semmelweis had a rough trot of it but countless people lived who would otherwise have died because of his status-sacrificing obstinacy.

*There’s no compelling evidence Semmelweis was autistic. While autistics are disproportionately likely to be contrarians, not all contrarians are autistic.