White torture is the general term for torture that involves things like isolation and sensory deprivation. To a degree, this is a problem for people on the spectrum and other neurodivergents. The effects of loneliness, especially, at-length and sometimes combined with social rejection and social rejection for superficial characteristics can be very injurious. The reason a lot of them go ape-shit is because of this. I call it suburban white torture because that is the context in which it happens most, atomized Robert Moses-style urban design which is most associated with suburbia.
One of the major problems in dealing with suburban white torture is that the system, as mentioned in the second-to-last, article is based on a Rawlsian notion of a hypothetical citizen as opposed to, for example, a Millian-Utilitarian recognition that a citizen is a human with a psychology. It asks what do people have a right to as opposed to what do they need. Rawls’ position would be that people have different needs according to their cultures and if we satisfy one set of cultural needs we risk offending another and thus violate the principles of liberal impartiality.
Rawls ideated this based on the faulty idea from John Locke that people are “blank slates” built by their culture. The problem is that such an idea has been proven to be untrue. A part of the reason neurodivergents don’t go ape-shit as much in other Western countries is because of the lack of suburban sprawl and the lack of a Rawlsian geist. To use an example from their criminal justice systems, in Europe they focus on rehabilitation and integration into society and we focus on punishment because they’re more utilitarian and we’re more deontological.
And Rawlsian philosophy is basically a variation on Lockean philosophy and it really, ideologically, as hyper-modern as it feels, hails from the early 18th century. Rawlsian philosophy ignores the material and scientific developments of after The Enlightenment. My utilitarianism is based on people like Mill and Maslow and says that people have scientific needs and we need to use science to meet them. One major problem with the Atlantic aside from how much we’re polluting it is how it divided Europe and America philosophically. We had one revolution, really: The Revolution. The victory of liberal ideas and nothing further while Europe had 1848, The Great War, and The Second World War. America participate did the latter two but we saw the conflicts as extensions of our original revolution: that of liberal democracy against tyranny. While British likely saw the industrial slaughter of The Somme as treating humans as statistics and that was an insult to their human dignity.
John Rawls never experienced the philosophical revolution of what The Somme represented. The utter and total horror of humans failing to see the Aristotelian fullness of the human person by making them fodder and sending them over the top. Without the philosophical revolution of the metonymic Somme, one gets a system that breaks neurodivergents through suburban white torture. A lot of psychologists have made the point about the effects of loneliness but the fact that our philosophical system does not see humanity in people means that there is no ideological mode by which the system can develop strategies to ensure people are not in a living hell, alone, for weeks or months on end. No one has a right to be accepted and no one has a responsibility to accept them.
As a strong cultural moré, a high school administrator cannot force a clique to accept a disabled person or tell them to be kind to them. That clique has freedom of expression and freedom of association. Contrary to Bentham’s idea that rights are useful fictions which should be reconginzed insofar as and to the extent they are useful. In order to abate the suburban white torture, there must be a philosophical shift from deontology to utilitarianism and America must have the philosophical effects of the metonymic Somme.
The Autistic Resistance 