Autism is a recent invention, one of the many symptoms heralding the recent rise to power of The Clinic and its rebranded eugenics, following their disastrous association with war-time eugenics programs in the industrial west.
The autist is shadowed by his own eugenic image. One critical difference between modern eugenics and the old, rejected eugenics, is that the modern Clinic asserts that the eugenic image is within reach for those who do not match its parameters for true personhood. And help is offered to achieve measured steps toward this unreachable target.
Today, our New Clinic considers autistic people not so much as persons but as more or less ambulatory clinical conditions. Having a clinical condition for an identity puts them beyond the help of their god and beyond the understanding of mum and dad. Their personality is foremost a description of their brain. Who, what, they really are, only the doctor is said to know.
Alone among others who have also had the blight of the perfect eugenic image shadowing their lives (we can think of aspergers, ADHD etc in this regard), the clinic's autist is affected by his brain, he suffers from his brain, whether he is happy or not. The rest of us...the rest of us might be affected by our brain - but with one crucial difference, we declare: brain differences are their differences, not ours; behavioural differences are their differences, not ours.
The clinic's autist is encouraged to reach the clean eugenic image that is believed to shadow him. If he is not assertive his holidays can become therapies, his associates helpers, his home-life can become a tick-box activity of tasks achieved. Medicated for achievement, he is the permanent patient, if not in practice then by deed-poll. For the feisty and independent, denying the clinical shadow can meet life-long resistance from a public and Clinic who's help is often conditional upon accepting their labels.
