Ramsey Dukes is the pen name of a magician and well-respected British writer on occult subjects, Lionell Snell. I’ve known Lionell since around 2004, when I first sent him copies of Matrix Warrior and Lucid View. We’ve met AFK (away from keyboard) only once, in London, but kept in touch since then. I sent him my long essay on autism recently, and he wrote me some responses via email. I encouraged him to turn them into an essay, and he compiled the thoughts and added to them.

While I am busy tunneling deeper into the Strieber/SRI/Quatermass Pit, rather than leave the blog inactive, I thought I’d post Ramsey’s response here, in two parts. Most interesting to me, perhaps, is how quickly and gracefully he recognized himself as possibly being on the autism spectrum himself. This has been a recurring theme for me when introducing acquaintances to the autism enigma, and is among the most encouraging and desirable results of doing so.

So here’s Ramsey!



Thoughts on reading Autism and the Other by Jason Horsley

This slightly ragged essay is based on an e-mail correspondence I had with Jason when he sent me his interesting essay for comment. Being busy on my other work I have not been free to create a response as well-structured as his original essay, but have strung together (with editing) my intermediate comments and then added some more paragraphs to explain why I felt his essay is important and why it related to some of my own ideas.

One point that interested me, and I wanted to follow up, is whether I am on that [autism] spectrum? Notably in the very social environment of Cape Town, I find myself struggling to interact. I can be very good at it, but it is very tiring and I need to slink off alone to recharge my batteries after an hour or so. (Being good at it is not that paradoxical: because a learned skill can be very well developed, but just not natural and easy.)

I’ve always put this social awkwardness down to being brought up in the country, and being five years younger than my next sibling. So I spent most of my early years on my own, unlike those living in towns or villages, and missed out on a lot of social grounding. I do like people, and am highly curious to find out more about them, but struggle to make good contact.

First impression of Autism and the Other

Having read the first 2 pages, I have an immediate response.

I am aware of a tendency people have to turn a phenomenon into a condition by labeling it. My wife Lynn does this habitually:

I sometimes wake up with watery eyes or I sneeze – Lynn has “Hay Fever”

I am sometimes melancholy – Lynn suffers from “Depression”

Sometimes I suffer pangs of hunger – Lynn is “Hyperglycemic”

And so on

In the 80s when the big family values thing blew up, a major study was launched on how divorce impacts the children. It was obvious to me that, when a majority of people have decided that children of divorcees have a problem, then the children will begin to feel like “problem children”, and so they will have problems. I can equally hazard a guess that, when divorce was first legalized, it was justified by a similar but contrary assumption that children of bad marriages had problems and that an easier divorce process would help them to avoid those problems!

So, take some ordinary condition like being tall. Most people see that as a positive thing. But if society suddenly decided it was a problem? Imagine people looking at you and whispering, then one comes up to you and says “Jason, don’t worry about your height because we’ve kept a seat for you at the back”; or “this house has low beams, I just thought I should warn you”; or “your new girl friend must be really understanding, considering she’s of quite normal height”.

That is how I interpret the McLuhan quote [“Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.”] in your context: that a sudden labeling – like Thatcher’s labeling of single mothers as a problem in the 1980s – causes a lot of destruction. It creates a sort of division or fault line across society. And I guess that autism is a new such label?

On reaching end of chapter 3

That Blake Fleetwood [Huffington Post reporter] article is an appalling example of what I wrote about: turning something normal into a “condition”. In a few paragraphs it describes autism as a “condition” having “victims”, and as a “disease” and says it is an “epidemic” and is “skyrocketing”. All of which could equally apply to people growing taller….

Do you remember the article XXXII I sent you [reference to article published in XVI. The Tower. Radical essays confronting a world in crisis published by Scarlet Imprint] in which I associated killing sprees more with the desire to be significant, noticed or famous? All those desired qualities are encouraged in our society, and your McLuhan quote fits the picture of violence becoming a quest for identity.

It occurs to me that you could cynically rewrite most of the quoted article and replace the words “autism” with “American” – an unfortunate condition that has skyrocketed since the Pilgrim Fathers and demands early treatment for its sufferers before it explodes into individual or group acts of violence like Desert Storm…

Ref Chapter 4: I’ve suggested tallness and Americans as tongue-in-cheek examples, but one of the best true examples of a once positive factor being turned negative is “cleverness”. Under dictatorships and at public school, and often elsewhere in society, there arises a feeling that intelligence is a handicap or vice that sets you apart. President Bush was elected because, in many people’s eyes, he was not clever and so was more “one of us” or less of a threat.

On reaching end of Chapter 11

Your Chapter 7 is amazing. I like your opening quote[1] as I myself have in the past noted the way people define themselves by what they are not, even when the thing they are not does not actually exist. My example was “I’m sorry, but I’m not one of these people who think children must be allowed to get away with absolutely anything…” As I pointed out at the time, not even the most radical alternative-schooling addict would really support that level of freedom without a lot of qualification. I was also amazed that when people say things like that they begin “I’m sorry” as if to suggest that they are actually feeling guilty for not thinking that way! This underlines their fantasy that they are a lone voice of reason in a society gone mad.

Later in the chapter you revisit the sense in which scapegoating becomes self-fulfilling. In The Good the Bad and the Funny, I gave an imagined example of a young German lad who joined the Nazi party in a spirit of high idealism; he does not really go along with the party’s anti-semitism, and is in a state of denial about it. Then he is sent to be a guard at Belsen. Whereas he always used to believe that Jews were human – maybe just a bit inferior – but what he sees for the first time at Belsen is an undifferentiated mass of resentful, dying Jews in a near bestial state of deprivation – “proving” that they really are sub-human after all. The system has made its own lie come true.

So, in response to your excellent article, we can expect an increasing amount of “real data” confirming that autism is indeed dangerous and violent etc. as the scapegoat myth begins to fulfill itself.

As to finding ways to work against that creeping myth? I seem to recall the anthroposophists arguing that Down’s Syndrome was not an affliction needing to be eradicated, but rather a significant factor in human evolution, in some way.

Chapter 11 where you describe the link between autism and exaggerated sensory impressions: as a child I do recall times when the sheer vividness of seeing seemed to hurt my eyes. I am very attuned to touch and used to be so open to the senses around me that I felt utterly vivid and “in the moment” and so was puzzled when my school friends said I was usually in a “trance”.

Psychopathy v autism reminds me of the late section in the first chapter of Little Book of Demons – about the choice Baby makes between 2 ways of interacting with the world.

See here for excerpt from Ramsey’s Little Book of Demons: