The President’s attack Dog-e often talks about his Asperger Syndrome (AS) and mentions the standard diagnostic characteristics he says he has: missing social cues, lacking emotional or intellectual empathy or understanding of others, not looking people in the eye, self-absorption, an ability to focus, and behaving weirdly.
I don’t know if he was medically diagnosed or self-diagnosed. The internet is full of sites for self-diagnosis, because being an “Aspie” is a nice, positive way to acknowledge personality traits that might otherwise make one feel like an oddball, a way to belong for people who fear they do not belong. Being an Aspie is the aim of most therapies for AS where patients are taught how to behave socially in acceptable ways, taught, for example, the Theory of Mind, that is, to attribute minds and feelings to other people. In this I’m-all-right-you’re-all-right world, the popularity of the Aspie fad demonstrates a healthy pyschological culture.
To understand and to think about what Musk means when he talks about having AS we really need to take a very long historical and medical detour about AS because it is something of an invented thing. I don’t mean this negatively or positively. It is simply a fact. Look up from the machine where you are reading this and look around you. Most of what you see is artificial and invented. We haven’t lived in a predominantly natural world for a long time. AS is simply, factually part of this invention we inhabit.
Hans Asperger was an Austrian behavioral scientist who published in 1944 a synopsis of his doctoral dissertation for the University of Vienna identifying a new type of personality defect through a study of four individuals whom he called originally “autistic psychopaths.” Although Asperger never joined the Nazi party, he worked with affiliated organizations, supported race hygiene policies, and engaged with a child euthanasia program. See Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and “race hygiene” in Nazi-era Vienna | Molecular Autism | Full Text. Asperger’s very limited study was mostly ignored for forty years, and then it was revived and popularized in the 1980s by British psychiatrist Lorna Wing, who named the group of characteristics after Asperger. Musk was then a 10 year old in South Africa.
The invention of AS as a defined problem for us to deal with medically, psychologically, socially matches the blossoming of the social sciences in America. These invented “disciplines” arose as a bridge between the humanities (studying humans as individuals or through human institutions) and the sciences (the study of nature). Social sciences–sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc.–study human group behavior, and they do so by using numbers which are thought of as objective and scientific. Thus, a behavioral scientist looks at the behavior of someone with AS characteristics against a background of numbers, that is, in terms of statistically normal behavior. AS, therefore, is invented to describe “abnormal” behavior. In all the social sciences, this intent to be non-evaluative and objective gets overridden by the language it uses. Thus normal/abnormal or average/deviant become, especially in popular jargon, desirable/undesirable or in medical terms healthy/unhealthy. We’ve invented a culture of conformity.
The Aspie movement, of which Musk is an example, is a nice pushback to this drive in our culture to avoid distinction, to belong, not to stick out. However, the power that Musk now has over the lives and livelihoods of millions of people exaggerates the valorization of AS symptoms (and exaggeration is one of the characteristics of AS) and makes it vastly harmful.
Not only is indiscriminate cost-cutting and service-cutting seriously harmful directly to tens of thousands of individuals turned from wage earners into unemployed people trying to meet financial needs and indirectly to hundreds of thousands of people who needed and benefited from public services. Careless firing of federal employees also harms the economy directly because the earned wages, now lost, significantly returned tax dollars to the economy and indirectly because the mass firing increases mass unemployment, increases the country’s non-productivity, increases the burden on the economy to provide in one way or another for the needs of the unemployed.
The cost-cutting is carried out mindlessly and without understanding human consequences. The process is treated like a simple-minded solution to a simple-minded problem: Save money? Cut costs!
Indeed, the singular feature of Dog-e’s operation has been its breathtaking lack of empathy, lack of a social consciousness, lack of a Theory of Mind.
Indeed, Musk has directly addressed this issue as an ideology. His position of power allows him to elevate the characteristic Aspie feature of lack of empathy to a positive universal principle. On a recent Joe Rogan interview, Musk said several times that he believed in empathy, that empathy is a good thing. Good, that is what therapists try to teach Aspies. “But,” he adds, “you have to think it through.” And when he does, he says “the fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.”
It’s a stunning thought. Empathy, he says, is “a bug in Western Civilization, the empathy response.” See the video Fact Check: Musk said ‘The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.’ Here’s his full quote.
Having taught Western Civilization, I’m not aware that its history shows that “weakness”: six million Jews killed in the holocaust; the whole world colonized and enslaved; the continuous invention of more and more powerful weapons of destruction; the continuous destruction of the natural world. But Musk seems to think so, and he seems equally determined to redeem Western Civilization and to chainsaw out that weakness maybe through some Western Civilization hygiene policy, like euthanasia of those non-Aspies who are into “empathy exploit.” He’ll just delete them as he deletes a bug from the computer program.
Once again, a heartfelt THANKS to Mr. Yeh for his insightful and educational article on Mr. Musk and his Asperger’s DISease. He certainly exhibits all the flaws of the disease. Empathy is an important part of our makeup to help ease the pain of others…. Appreciated, sir.
I had no idea “Aspie” was a fad. I was under the impression that this term and the term Asperger’s Syndrome were no longer in use because of Hans Asperger’s Nazi sympathies. To my knowledge, the diagnosis is no longer used, either. That said, the autism spectrum is a real thing, and being autistic does not preclude empathy, though social awkwardness, difficulty reading facial expressions, and difficulty with eye contact are part of it. Alexithymia, finding it hard to name emotions, isn’t the same as lacking empathy. A number of very successful actors are autistic. A lifetime spent masking oneself and working to comprehend how neurotypical people think and feel actually can enhance empathy, though struggles with social interactions make it hard to express it. (Other less obvious aspects of autism can include sensory sensitivities, such as finding noise and smells intolerable, and a need for structure and repetition.) Ideally, yes, those with autism learn social skills. My perception of Musk is that he thinks of autism as a superpower and an excuse to be the sort of person he wants to be. In my opinion, it’s better to discuss him without the label. There are plenty of people on the spectrum who find him appalling. I think you could have critiqued his ideas and behavior more effectively without digressing to an irrelevant implication that the social sciences are not valid sciences. (I may have misunderstood you here, but that was my impression.)
Ms. Kearney,
Thank you for your knowledgeable and sensitive reply. It has caused me to read more on the history of these designations and to think more about the source of my critique of that history.
You are right that I have a critique of the social sciences (and concepts dependent on social sciences). At issue are two aspects of early social science: one I mentioned in the article is the blurring of the distinction between description and prescription. The inability to distinguish has affect this culture in unacknowledged ways, not only in the behavioral sciences but, for example, in educational theories, based so much on social science dicta. We keep on teaching children that grammar and dictionaries are about “correct” or “proper” writing when in fact these are descriptions of how we use language. The other aspect of social science that bothers me is the claim to universalism based on evidence gathered solely from Western sources. In the case of AS, it was not until this century that cultural differences were included in the discussion, and then, sometimes in bizarrely acultural ways. For example, a study of how to integrate AS diagnosed children into families whose cultural expectations of behavior may differ from the Western standard, as if the AS diagnosis itself were not fundamentally based on Western cultural expectations of behavior.
These are complex problems that cannot fit a little article like this one, but I cannot leave them out because my perception of Musk’s references to his AS is not about him as an individual but about his concept of what that identification means, and that problem implicates the whole history of how this “syndrome” or “disorder” came to be a social construct and what having AS means in this culture and at this time. The fact that in 2013 the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DMS) erased AS as a distinct disorder and folded it into the Autistic Spectrum Disorder does not rid us of these problems. [I thought the change was caused by substantive issues of diagnosis and not by an aversion to Asperger’s name; in fact the wisdom of that change is still debated.]
Your description of the ways in which empathy might be conceived as a spectrum clearly describes a therapeutic understanding. However, at issue is still the conceptual problem that Hans Asperger left us. Asperger himself thought of the behavior he studied a gradation of autism. The issue he faced with racial hygiene and euthanasia was distinguishing the highly functional and desirable people from the useless ones. That distinction, not necessarily those ends, is still here. Who among the diagnosed autistic needs to be “educated” into normalcy, and who are “functional” and so socially useful as they are? These are value questions and not technical, scientific ones. They impinge on diagnostics and not on therapy per se.
Culturally speaking, it is significant that on the internet people with AS maintain that appellation in spite of the DMS and in spite of the Nazi implications. More significantly, they celebrate the appellation in the name “Aspie.” It’s the use of that dimunitive as well as the marketability of self-diagnosis that caused me to assert that it is a fad. Perhaps, I should have used scare quotes around the word, but this morning, I read an MA thesis on the Aspie movement which calls it “trendy.”
This morning I also read Anna de Hooge’s 2019 essay “Binary Boys: Autism, Aspie Supremacy and Post/Humanist Normativity.” I hesitate to recommend it because it is densely jargony, yet her view from within the Aspie community and her understanding of how Aspie fits in the culture wars give credence to her argument for a connection between the way AS has been framed by the discipline, the rise of Aspie Supremacy, and its support by and for white, male supremacy through such concepts as Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory that autism is the functioning of the Extreme Male Brain.
This is where Musk’s identification with Aspies comes in. He is not the agent of his talk or of his actions. They merely identify for us, the cultural sources of his concepts. His chainsaw is a symbol of his white male, autistic superiority–as are his 14 children and his financial success. As de Hooge argues, autistic supremacy is simply the other side of the same coin from the ideas of normalcy and abnormalcy, of autism as something to erase from autistic individuals in order to humanize them (de Hooge compares this concept to conversion therapy for homosexuality). Musk’s embrace of Aspie supremacy includes his in-joke while speaking with Joe Rogan. Empathy, he says, is fine for the individual but not for the vastly more important Western Civilization for which empathy is a weakness. This is almost a direct quotation of Asperger’s distinction between the individual and das Volk.
Thank you; this explains a lot.
This is what we’re up against . Musk is a machine, rather like Hal in “2001”.
I don’t think he’s a machine. His thinking is a product of our culture, as all our thoughts are, and in that, he’s just like you and me.
I enjoyed this article very much!