It’s also perfect fodder for some of the stuff I’m writing. You thought of a lot of points I didn’t.

Thank you.

1. “What’s in it for me?”

2. Reality as identity, wellness, and stability.

Looking past stereotypes to deconstruct and reconstruct categories and “laws of reality” or social conduct can involve a lot of curiosity and work but before most people will do any of that, they want to know why they should, as in **what is in it for them.**

I know what’s in it for me. I might have people actually see me for who I am and connect with me rather than take advantage of me, misunderstand me, or exclude me. I also know what is in it for them…for society at large.

Some people will pass the marshmallow test (get the connection to greater rewards) and some won’t. If they can’t connect to the motivation (as to why challenge stereotypes and break things down, articulate and question) then they generally won’t do the work and won’t display the necessary curiosity and that **does** have to do with neoteny and it does involve yet another way that imagination (curiosity) trumps (present) knowledge.

The work of discovery and of challenging rules of reality/categories/stereotypes strengthens the plasticity of our intellect and the stability/adaptability of our society. The more we do it, the better we sense what to question and when (the better we pick our battles or challenges). The more we do it, the better we are at breaking ideas/problems/benefits down to the point that we can better address issues and reap the benefits. The more we do it, the less threatening it feels. The more we do it, the more we see our behavioral patterns, character, and abilities as huge parts of our identity and stability than our fixed ideas and beliefs.

I noticed for a long time now that I get along with people who’ve worked in research and the arts and I know now that this is not accident or coincidence. I get along better with people who regularly exercise their imagination and who regularly break things down to manageable categories, rules, and phenomena in order to better understand, manipulate, solve, discover, and ultimately reconstruct into new realities, cures, understandings, or works or art. These sorts of people are more likely to see and include me more than others. They are more likely to embrace and deal with difference and see it not just as damage but also as opportunity.

Yeah, there seems to be a connection between widgets, the idea that people can only have one “difference slot,” and the whole phenomenon where… someone starts responding to their mental hallucination of you rather than to you, no matter how much you wave your hands around and go “No, THIS is what I think, not that,” while their hallucination is apparently saying entirely different things from what you actually are.

We’re not immune to forming those mental hallucinations of people, ourselves, but we had them a lot more when we were trying to hold widgets in our head, which is difficult for us at best and always required a huge amount of thought control (trying to steer ourselves away from our natural reaction to a certain thing, for instance, because we were trying to hold a widget which said that thing was okay even when our gut feeling was that it was not okay).

I think part of it is, a huge part of many widgets is the way they attribute certain motivations and beliefs to “not-us.” These often aren’t much more than straw men, but apparently they need to exist in order to provide a “bad guy” and a “reason to fight” to the people who have that particular widget or something. I, myself, don’t actually believe that anyone needs to caricature their opponents as “bad guys,” or as embodiments of evil or unreason or whatever, to have a reason to fight for their own rights or anyone else’s, or even just to say that someone else is *wrong,* but it seems that a lot of people think they do.

But… yeah, if you happen to run afoul of someone’s widgets and ideas about types of people, suddenly everything you say and do gets twisted, in their mental hallucination of you, into something that conforms to their concept of what “that type of person” is like, wants, thinks, is motivated by, etc.

basically, it seems to me that some people think you can study people the same way you can study rocks and other inanimate objects.

Sigh. Yeah. We’ve been trying to battle against this for years, in groups where a lot of people find themselves mentally different from the “norm” and stigmatized by psych, but a bunch of those same people keep insisting “but psych is a hard science no reely guyz see it’s got experiments and hypotheses and conclusions and so therefore you can trust it the same way you trust chemistry or physics” anyway. Instead of deciding “hey, you know, maybe the human mind can’t be quantified or categorized that precisely.”

I think the problem mainly comes in when people get really invested in a particular widget or widget-set that they use for dealing with reality.

Stereotypes seem to figure pretty big into many widget-sets, to the point where they (stereotypes) start getting confused with “literal definitions of particular things” rather than “semi-loose but sometimes statistically significant observations built up by many people over the years in the context of various cultural forces”.

I’ve been working on a post for a while now about categories but I don’t know when it will be finished — basically, it seems to me that some people think you can study people the same way you can study rocks and other inanimate objects. When in reality, you can’t actually do any such thing because there’s a kind of feedback mechanism that occurs between researchers/examiners and sentient/living creatures that needs to be acknowledged and controlled for, if possible.

And this becomes even more of a problem when someone is attempting to study auties or other atypical/disabled folks — sometimes it seems like they think the feedback mechanisms that are part and parcel of studying sentients simply don’t exist in such populations.

Wow. I guess that went off the subject of stereotypes a bit, but it seemed at least tangentially relevant. I should probably figure out some of the language associated with this stuff before writing much more.

We had a similar experience with receiving the label of OCD, and then being encouraged to view all this stuff as “OCD stuff” that wasn’t. But it was just taken for granted by doctors, and by ourselves, for a long time, that all these vaguely-related things which happened to be going on at the same time (some of which actually had to do with things that psychiatry rarely likes to deal with at all without treating them as either a delusion or a defense mechanism) were all either directly connected to or some side effect of the OCD.

And we accepted this for a long time, and kept trying to deal with them that way, even though they really didn’t resemble the OCD we had experienced in junior high and high school at all. (Of course, that was also a problem because it violated another stereotype, which is that if someone has ever had behavior and thoughts that fit the OCD profile, they “never recover.” Or, at least, never do so by any method that isn’t approved by their doctors, or if they do, were “never that badly affected” and don’t understand what it’s like to have severe OCD. Etc, etc.) Actually, having certain things continually treated as OCD when they were not based in that caused us to return to “more OCD-like” behavior as sort of a trained thing, I think. We were desperate to have these problems go away, but didn’t know how to do so, at the time, without treating them as what everyone said they were.

But of course, there are those people who really don’t want to own up to the fact that they are not always right about what they are thinking, or thought patterns they are following.

Wow, I really didn’t expect all of those words to come out.

I’ll more than likely visit this blog again before Dec. 25th, but in the event that I don’t, Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays..and the same goes for all readers of this blog.

TI