It's true we may lack socially approved ways of expressing fellow-feeling.

Ones that are aware of status and social positioning, and the importance of social performance.

Which could, in a lot of contexts, get read as not caring 🤷‍♀️

But…

2/10

Maybe our empathy just looks different?

I think autistic empathy can be quite practical (if we're not feeling overwhelmed or under pressure).

And genuine - if not always very smoothly expressed.

3/10

When I was young I'd feel awful about myself if certain people expressed sympathy for me, but I hated it.

I thought there was something wrong with me!

Now, I think I was reacting to incongruence... my skin prickling.

4/10

Now I know that a lot of what gets called "empathy" isn't quite that simple.

It can be about showing deference, or superiority. Or virtue signaling.

Pleasing the right people, in the right ways, at the right times. Making yourself look like a good person.

5/10

#PowerDynamics #Hierarchy

Now we're onto the topic of power dynamics 😁

I've noticed autistic empathy can be rather unorthodox. 💟

That could mean feeling compassion for animals, plants, trees, octopuses, sharks, avatars, our plushies… or even inanimate objects.

🧸

6/10

So perhaps it's about direction of travel?

Service and deference, in society, are meant to flow upwards.

Yet we autistics, it seems, are more likely to feel for the excluded person, the animal or child… the spider in the bath, or the earthworm on a sunny road.

7/10

#Autistic

Empathy is usually believed to be a personal virtue, that some people have and others don’t.

I don't think that's the whole story.

It’s also shaped by power. By conditioning. By rewards and punishments. By who’s allowed to have needs, and who's trained to attend to them.

8/10

Autistic people often don't fit that mold.

We get called rigid, naive, inappropriate. But I think it might be a lot more to do with ethical consistency.

If we’re told honesty matters, we tell the truth. If we’re taught kindness matters, we try to direct it where it seems most needed.

9/10

So perhaps autistic people aren’t empathy-impaired at all.

Just misaligned with a social order that expects empathy to be smooth, selective, strategic, performative, and status-aware.

And maybe that's really what gets pathologized.

End of 🧵

Full article, with refs, in the link below.

@KatyElphinstone empathy is NTs is 'performative'. yes, absolutely.

can anyone look around at the state of the world and think that neurotypicals are doing a good job of practicing empathy? or that they even have the right to define what empathy looks like, to the exclusion of others?

my autistic friends are extraordinarily empathetic, it just doesn't look exactly like what we are told it's supposed to.

@coppercrush @KatyElphinstone Counterpoint: there are a significant amount of neurotypical people in the world who have, and practice, empathy, but they're not in positions of power.

The problem is that the structures of power make it easier for sociopaths to rise to the top. There is no empathy at the top (because in a hierarchical world, it's really difficult). We live in a world ruled by sociopaths.

But empathy exists in NTs. It's in the local communities. It's in the little people. It's not in the news.

@ska @coppercrush

Yes, that's true... By definition really, when you look at what having relative power does to people. I call it the 'empathy lobotomy' 😢

https://www.neurofabulous.org.uk/what-power-does.html

and...

https://www.neurofabulous.org.uk/decreased-empathy.html

@KatyElphinstone @ska @coppercrush I think this is only true of "power over" or authoritarian forms of power.

I think power is often misunderstood, and reduced to include only certain forms of power.

Power itself is the ability to make binding decisions about things. We do that in cooperative ways all the time in healthy relationships and well functioning groups, This doesn't seem to corrode empathy/compassion.

But totally agree, hierarchy bound (authoritarian forms of) power sure do.

@CJPaloma

These are the effects of relative power, according to research studies.
So, really, simply having more power than those around you.

But yes, in terms of agency, I think I get what you mean... and I'd call one type 'liberatory power' and the other 'supremacist power' (which I got from Cyndi Suarez' book on power). Does that sound about right?

@ska @coppercrush

@KatyElphinstone @ska @coppercrush

yes very much, I'm not familiar with her, but the framing sounds intriguing. My distinctions come fmostly rom Riane Eisler's work on dominating vs nurturing societies.

And how from that it's hard not to notice how these dominator societies typically have heavy colonial histories and authoritarian strains running all through them…