Lacan’s Big Other, autism, high intelligence

Alex McNabb has another fantastic article out. But aside from the original point of it, I’m going to use a couple of well-summarized paragraphs to go out on a tangent:

Jacques Lacan has a concept called “The Big Other” which is basically just referring to the idea that there is some kind of external standard or formal expectation that you must comport with. I would describe it as the vague sense that you gotta be in line with various legal, cultural and societal norms, as if there’s some ethereal presence constantly observing you. This is likely a prerequisite for building complex societies and might help explain why white folks experience more stress than the blissfully ignorant African race.

The Big Other is the reason you feel like you’ve got to have a marriage license, a current car inspection, and must “keep up appearances” even if no one is watching.

https://dissident-mag.com/2021/12/23/why-you-cant-redpill-big-normie/

In short, I don’t have this. This idea helps me to understand a lot of my personal history, which consists of being disabused of my social naivete, which was itself driven by social heedlessness. My strategy, if you can call it that with a straight face, was to be technically competent and sincere, and other people would put up with nonconformity for access to someone who could solve their problems. Conformity to the Big Other is an extraordinary amount of mental work, taking up 95-99% of most people’s brain cycles, and they’re driven to do it such that the competition is fierce to the point of diminishing returns. If my decision had been conscious, I might have said something like “think of the savings if we all just cooperate instead!”

Obviously that sounds stupid to an older person, but we make decisions like this in puberty when a bit of idealism can be forgiven. Again, the short story is that I learned oversocialized people (read: women and therefore the men who want to be around them) would rather live in a mud hut in war-torn Africa than around someone who doesn’t take the trouble to minimally conform to the Big Other, which means you’re homeless and penniless.

There exists a probably true notion that nowadays it is harder for Aspergoid individuals to find and hold a job than in the 1940s when Asperger wrote his paper. Since the 1960s, Western societies have undergone significant feminization, and men are now required to behave like women in many respects: to be “team players”, to have “communication skills”, to work in “office gardens” instead of having a room of their own, to talk about “emotions”, to possess “E.Q.”, to “multi-task”, and so on. Such expectations are detrimental for this type, and what in the past would have fallen within the normal variance of personality now becomes a social and professional handicap. The blessings of feminism may be putting ever more potentially creative achievers in the disabled category, thus as it were castrating society’s source of progress.

https://paulcooijmans.com/asperger/asperger_summarized.html

A side effect of grinding poverty is you’re automatically out of compliance with government regulations, so now you have collections agencies of the Devouring Matron breathing down your neck for this or that. It’s very expensive to be poor, especially in America. And all because no one ever sat you down and told you that people buy car insurance because it’s illegal to drive without it. You’re just supposed to care so much about compliance that you find these things out on your own. I don’t think I knew about filing taxes until I was 22. As my sister in law once said, “I’ve never met anybody like you. You refuse to do anything unless someone takes the time to figure out why and then explain it to you.”

To add a nuance to this, it’s become clear that the Big Other resides in my mind as it does in anyone else’s. Having decided to learn how to conform because this is required to be allowed to do literally anything in adult life, I’ve developed social graces from perhaps 20th percentile to above the 80th percentile, though obviously still well below what IQ would predict. It’s not that I lacked social instincts and intuitions, it’s that I never bothered to consult them because it didn’t seem important. For lack of practice, they remained childishly undeveloped until I embarked on my grand dream quest of figuring out what the hell was wrong with me. In the ten-year process of reading about new ideas like the bell curve and Asperger’s, elements of common sense emerged that can only have come from the collective unconscious, as they do in any 100-IQ neurotypical by the end of puberty.

To wit, aspies could conform as well as anyone, the entirety of the syndrome is they don’t feel driven to.

No formal tests resulting in I.Q. or other quantitative scores were conducted because of the problems in communication with the children, and their unwillingness or inability to direct attention to the test administrator and perform requested tasks. Instead, selected subtests were used to examine, observe, the children’s modes of problem-solving and other aspects of their personalities and disorders. It was observed they did best on tasks that allowed spontaneous production (as opposed to following instructions), in particular on problems that require one to recognize and think in abstract concepts, such as problems that ask for the difference between for instance a ladder and stairs. On the whole they appeared to be abstract thinkers by nature, and the quality of their spontaneous production in some cases revealed they were years ahead of their biological age, despite poor school performance.

Also, they displayed a remarkable originality in thinking and experiencing; in the best cases this originality bordered on genius, in less able subjects it was deviant rather than original, far removed from reality and without much relevance or value.

It too became clear that the children were not inclined to accept knowledge from adults, teachers, to learn and automate skills according to instruction. They could only be original. As a result, a possible I.Q. based on their (good) performance on logical-abstract tests would overstate their school performance.

https://paulcooijmans.com/asperger/asperger_summarized.html

Having come to understand the Big Other, I actually feel a small sense of aversion to it. The more I understand people, the less sympathetic I become. Especially when we’re talking about the things they can’t control, like their genetics and tastes. To be quite frank, they need Jesus. It’s still an effort of will to not just be squatting in the middle of nowhere on land I don’t own, it’s just that I’ve already tried that life strategy and learned that no, people are never going to just leave other people alone. Life is a lifelong competition, to the death, and the competition doesn’t go away when you ignore it any more than pretending to be race-blind makes race go away.

These concerns are not unique to the autistic.

There is controversy about how isolated the profoundly gifted person is, with an IQ around 180. Some researchers believe that the greater gap is bridged by the greater ability to connect; Webb suggests otherwise, saying that children with an IQ above 170 feel like they don’t fit in anywhere. He asks what the effects would be if a normal child grew up in a world where most people had an IQ of 50-55. Some profoundly gifted have discussed the feeling that there’s an instruction manual to life that everyone but them has.

https://cjshayward.com/mindstorm/

This could be ascribed to the higher incidence of autistic traits in the higher ranges of IQ as often noted by Dutton (perhaps confounded by ordinary masculinization), but I believe there’s a more essentially true cause:

They seem completely average and without any psychosocial aberrations whatsoever. If there is one thing I have learnt through joining the Giga Society it is this: The very most intelligent people are the only normal people; the rest are degenerates, failures, and deviants. The highest range of I.Q. is the default state of human being. It is how we are meant to be.

-Paul Cooijmans, from one of his novels (H/T saladboy)

If you still think normal people are basically good at the end of 2021, it’s because you’re exerting an effort of will to remain a useless fuckwit, presumably because either you think the people will rise up emergently with the courage of their convictions and you can be safely lost in the crowd, or you think no one will want to genocide you if you’re agreeable and harmless. The trouble is that the Big Other is a bad person, and normies worship it because they’re bad people. Which we could have learned by opening the Bible to a random page and reading for five minutes instead of writing whatever the hell this was for an hour.

Oh, and since I wasn’t able to shoehorn this in anywhere, I should mention that Leviathan, Lacan’s Big Other, and the octopus lady who serves as the muse for Alchemists in Overwatch Theory are the same thing.