On justice sensitivity in autism

Something I am only in my 30s realizing is that "Justice Sensitivity" being described as a detrimental symptom of autism is not neurotypicals being evil losers who don't care about others and who will frame even positive superior autistic traits as negative symptoms. It's actually not mentally healthy to experience very severe distress at knowing that something Wrong is happening to someone somewhere in the world at any given time. Not because it's OK that there is injustice in the world, but because we have to be able to live and function anyway, because no matter how powerful our autism is we aren't capable of ending all injustice in the entire world within our lifetimes and we have to be able to tolerate its existence enough to still feed ourselves and calm down.

It is good to have integrity and moral consistency. I believe in this still and I think it's a good thing that many autistic people are people of high integrity.

But that is different from when "justice sensitivity" is described as a Symptom. For me, there have absolutely been many times in my life when I was so distressed and overwhelmed by exposure to injustice existing in the world that I was not able to function. I had meltdowns and shutdowns and didn't eat or do other necessary bodily tasks. It sounds almost self-aggrandizing to say that there's been times where I lost entire days to doing nothing but being upset and crying about social injustices but I don't think it makes me noble or good that I did that I think that was me being autistic and not having the coping skills I needed to deal with it. I needed someone to tell me "Yes, yes, it's sad that there's microplastics in the ocean now eat your dino chicken nuggies."

I have many times in my life acted very impulsively and aggressively in response to injustice in ways that were actually harmful. It didn't help that throughout my life others have praised me for these outbursts and encouraged them as powerful displays of righteousness speaking truth to power. I often didn't even know what I had said. I had completely dissociated. During a period of time when I used a metaphor of plurality to understand myself, I had named that state of mind "The Weapon" and believe that a plural alter had taken over and that that was why I didn't remember it. Now, I'm pretty sure it would be better understood as an autistic meltdown triggered by justice sensitivity. A lot of both the moments I've been most praised for and the moments I've been most criticized for in my life both fall into this category.

Looking back I can see these highly irrational and out-of-control feeling moments where I just couldn't calm down because someone had done something Wrong to someone, and see them as being a detrimental autistic quality that I should be self-aware of and respond to as I do a shutdown or meltdown and not as something that makes me a Better Person than other people. I think that justice sensitivity also had lead me to be a highly codependent person with a very bad savior complex who struggles emotionally with seeing a problem and not trying to throw everything at it to Fix It Immediately. Everything in the world feels like my personal responsibility and I experience extreme distress at not being able to fix it. I end up with the two extreme responses of burning myself out pouring everything into trying and failing to fix it, or emotionally shutting down completely and becoming a cold callous burnt our person who shows far less care and compassion to the issue than I should.

At times this has led to good things, like being extremely generous in bailing a friend or stranger out of a crisis, but other times it led to very very bad things, like making someone else's personal conflict with someone severely worse by tweeting about it pretty transparently on an account with thousands of followers. Absolutely idiotic impulsive irrational and reckless behavior on my part because I was so upset by someone behaving irresponsibly and unfairly to others that I couldn't contain myself. Being morally right does not always mean you are being wise. What I should have done was recognize that I was getting extremely upset about something that fundamentally was not about me at the center and I should have given my phone to someone else and laid down alone in a dark room until I was able to calm down enough to not do anything stupid.

The internet and especially social media is possibly the worst thing you could have given to me given this problem. My brain was highly primed to be driven towards extreme and unhealthy thought patterns through people using hyperbole online. "If you don't reblog this you are complicit in genocide" posts hit my brain very literally. When I was 18 I lost a long-time friend because on tumblr I kept reblogging the exact same "reblog this or you're a bad person" post every single time I saw it because the post said if you didn't reblog it you were a bad person, even though I was sometimes reblogging it from myself. My friend who was so annoyed with me showed me her dashboard and it was me reblogging the same post four times in a row from different people because she followed fewer people than me. And I was so mad at her for being annoyed by it that I ended the friendship because I couldn't believe she was thinking about dashboard spam when injustice was happening in the world. How could anyone spend even a second thinking about anything else? I didn't eat my first meal like, 10:30pm that day. It's one thing to care about injustice, but this kind of reaction to it is dysfunctional and unhealthy. Growing older and taking things I see online less literally has helped a bit with my online behavior but during 2020 to 2022 I still had plenty of these accidental fast days caused being too upset by the news to function.

Morality also isn't a single objective system. While I've been On The Left for a very long time, changes in political tendencies from anarchist to marxist-leninist to whatever other microlabels I used in the middle had led to some pretty extreme stances and claims due to adhering rigidly to a moral system imposed by a fervent online group of people spouting extremist things they didn't mean literally or earnestly. I'm often surprised by my reputation for being this nuanced level-headed person given how often I was defending Joseph Stalin in public on the internet in 2018 and 2019. As an anarchist, I made some dumb criticisms because "hierarchies are bad" in ways that had social ramifications. During the height of tumblr misandry I said some dumb shit and antagonized a lot of men who did not deserve it. Justice sensitivity can lend itself to easily falling into fringe extremism.

Before I was On The Left I was growing up in a cult which had its own system of morality that made complete sense within the cult but horrifies people who hear about it. I carried the cult's lawbook around with me at all times so I could reference The Rules. Nothing was more important than "ensuring the continued existence of our community" at all costs. Betray friends? Yell at children? It's all justified for the sake of Enforcing The Rules since the Lawbook was my moral code since childhood and Justice at the time meant the Judicial Committee reviewing Rules Violations. Littering was as much an Injustice as Assault. People often described me as "explosive" due to how extreme my reactions were to people Breaking Rules. Someone put an open can of soda on a book shelf and I screamed at her. When I was 16 I got in trouble myself for very loudly scolding a new girl for using a pair of scissors when her name was not on the list of approved people who were allowed to use scissors. I was so upset by this and how it didn't make sense to me that I had a meltdown and it resulted in a serious conversation where some people started to realize just how bad my understanding of social stuff was and it led to some people choosing to try and patiently teach me tact and social skills manually. This incident was sort of the incident that, upon later reflection as a young adult, made me say "oh yeah I'm so autistic aren't I." It took me a very long time to understand why my behavior had been considered worse than the girl who was using scissors without first getting her name on the approved list of people allowed to use scissors.

Like all autism symptoms, it has mellowed a bit with age. I'm definitely not who I was at age 16 anymore. But I very much see looking back how Justice Sensitivity has very much been a very real and very disruptive symptom in my life and not something stupid that neurotypicals made up because they're inferior to mortal righteous upstanding autists (which is pretty much how I genuinely saw this in my mid-twenties. "The NTs have no morals. Also Stalin was good actually." Ridiculous.) And I think that it's a pretty huge factor in the severe burnout I've been dealing with lately leading to some of my overcorrecting on politics lately.

I've been reading the Wheel of Time lately and there's some pretty conservative ideas in there that are bad and dumb. There's also his concept of the Ta'Veran, someone who has chronic main character syndrome and pulls the weave of fate around them whether they want to or not. They are cosmically the center of the story. Lately, I've been trying to cope with my justice sensitivity, my feelings like i'm only here existing on earth to martyr myself to save the world and fix all the world's problems, my codependency problems, by telling myself "I am not Ta'Veran. I am not the dragon reborn. I do not pull the weave of fate around myself at the center. I am but a thread in the pattern." It's genuinely been helping a lot, as silly as it is.

(I do think that the American understanding of Stalin is far too overly simplistic and doesn't account for a lot of the complexities and nuances of Soviet history and there's a lot of stuff people believe about Stalin that isn't true.... but a lot of it is true... and you do not, in fact, have to hand it to him.... except maybe for defeating the nazis..... but not the other stuff.)