Fairness: the vulnerability law, What to expect

The law of vulnerable adult groups covers us ethically, it establishes that we must not be taken advantage of, financially, or emotionally, by anyone engaging in any type of support relation with us. Any support relation, that could be a formally employed or charity placed support or aspies showing each other support in the self organised scene.

Oh so nothing bad or hurtful ever happens in an autism service? ... obviously not so, but all bad happenings are breaches of vulnerability, the protection against them is there notionally and conceptually. Its enforceability in practice is what needs building stronger. The defined duty to vulnerability includes to prevent corruption, and what prevents corruption is transparency and accountability. So all losses of direct voice and accountability for aspies about service issues are breaches of the vulnerability law capable of contributing to suicidal feelings in persons made more vulnerable. Hence structures like ANS and regular participation in the autism local plans can never be taken away. ANS's imminent issue of a book compiled from a spread of ordinary aspie life experience, An Ordinary Life Too, will greatly strengthen the body of facts that establishes this. It will advance the accountability over uncorrupt protection of vulnerabilities, that comes from strengthening the claim of permanence upon these participative structures.

What does this mean you can expect in Elas, and any Asperger society self-organised independently from the problematic big charities?

• You are among folks who know it would be liably against the vulnerability law ever to turn socially corrupt and backstabbing to escape from answering a fairness issue, like the former Phad charity in Fife did which led very quickly to its break-up and demise in 2011 a bad outcome for all.
• Fairness is never an obsession. Fairness is never called an obsession, because fairness is a red line ethic, and red line ethics are never obsessions.
• For any fairness issue in your life that affects your relationship with any other members, e.g, something which their own invitation involved you in and resulted in an unfairness.Your pursuit of it, time unlimited, will automatically have the reliable solidarity and backing of the rest if the group. No one will ever dismiss it as an autistic rigid thought pattern or obsessive.
• You will never accidentally catch any member doing that when they think you are out of hearing. You will never be let down by a friend with a long back period of discovering this way that they were never real.
• You will never find the group dug in to stay noncommittal about your fairness issue.
• You will never see this include a member refusing to reverse a serious mistake that had worsened the wrong, such as the mistake of apologising to the party that wronged you after being lied to by them.
• You will never see the group suspend a normal routine of going for a drink after meetings, and instead all hasten home uncomfortably, by reason of wanting to avoid the issue.
• You will never hear anyone express in blunt words and a cutting tone of wordly-wise macho boredom the emotionally abusive view that you may have to live with a social injustice unsolved.
• You will never hear anyone argue that fairness to you should fall in the greater interest of the group.
• You will never find that the group get sick of the subject and start to sanction or socially reject hearing about it, when that leaves you with them expecting you to live in acceptance of it.
• You will never hear anyone use the word "unfortunately" as a weapon for any of these maltreatments of you.
• You will never see another member continue to belong to, and hear him keep mentioning its place in his social life, anything which has wronged or unjustly excluded you, if he has said nothing about efforts on your behalf to change that. Particularly if his own invitation had led to the wrong happening in the first place.
• You will never have anyone believe that you should live in acceptance of, and stop fighting, a wrong which has not happened to them.

These are not points that any autism group, any group in any support scene, can discuss and decide not to accept. You will not suffer these things because the group will ensure conscientiously that each other know, that it would break the vulnerability law, with many potential lines of liability, for any of them to exploit anyone's vulnerability by doing any of these unfair unsupportive things to them. They are all acts of emotional abuse, for they betray and kick away wellbeing and result in exclusion experience. Hence they all risk, as is well established illegal, well-motivating suicides by it. They are all actions whose breach of the vulnerability law is serious enough that they risk life. The members of every aspie group have a duty to ensure each other's awareness of this, to be vulnerability compliant.

You do not have to be a suicide risk to have this protection, e.g, you may be articulate enough with writing to fight back, but the group will know that if they wrong you they cause suicidal ideation in a less articulate person who sees it happen and encounters any similar wrong, now or later. So, because the group dares never wrong that person, they dare never wrong you either. Backing for total literalist fairness is your claim of right.

Maurice Frank

Thoughtful culture

Popular culture at mob level has never exactly been famous for its civilised tolerance. So it can hardly be a priority of life to become a winner in a minefield of unreliable friendships and cliques. That is not the place to look for deep acceptance, it is the place where our survival advantage is the ability to go without deep acceptance and follow our own consciences. Above all, it's never worth being submissive in search of acceptance. How miserable is that? You won't know what directions it will push you in, which innocent folks the social leaders will force you to exclude and pick on, which bigotries they will force you to pretend to believe in? You could be alone in the world and still none of that will be worthwhile.

In family, in political or religious or hobby social life, at work, at volunteer days, basically at anywhere normal, there is no formula beyond personal chance that determines how much acceptance and fitting in is possible. Living within reach of as many options as possible, for the sake of adaptability, must be one sensible tip. Then it just becomes a question of trying to observe, in each person you associate with, whether they are just a closed mind, then it would be damaging to mention AS, or they have any spark of thoughtfulness and civility. If they have, I find, then a casual mention of AS, not a deep sermon about it, is good because it helps to secure that the person stays a nice way. It gives them a reason not to drift towards being on more dumbed-down and ribald terms with you just from thinking you want that normality, which is exactly what we don't want. From chances grabbed as they arise here and there, with the right folks, ground can be gained for awareness and acceptance on decent terms. Slowly it builds up, to all our benefit.

Thoughtful folks have always aspired to find or own congenial community outside the conformist horror world of the type of normal thickos who booze and gamble and iron and believe what the tabloids tell them about foreigners. That type of popular culture is a starkly treacherous place to get by in, even to win a place in at all. It does not operate rationally or thinkingly. So the point of describing it so grimly is not snobbery, it's to illustrate that culture's own choice of enmity towards us. How it is not designed for anyone guided more by reasoning and logic than by gang following, to survive or thrive in. Thoughtful folks of all types need to defend ourselves from having to belong in social conditions like those. We have always needed an alternative and been in search of one.

What better justification can there be, for needing our own scene, our own space, than an impairment to communication? But even in thoughtful activities, groups become ruined by the normal cultures' influence and the resulting fear of ribaldry and derision that comes to enslave the socially minded to take the rougher and more dumbed down life attitudes. I have watched an astronomy society die in this way. As the traumatic nature of science education has driven away from enjoyment of science the potential keen new blood the society could have kept attracting and formerly had, firstly the more practically minded strongman types came to stand out as the leaders. Then that meant all abstract chat about the subject's wonders petered out and stopped being expected or thought comfortable. Then that left the shrunken society's core life reduced wholly to happening among a few normal hard-edged cynical sneery impatient men, further alienating the non-core membership. To a comment on the virtues of serving ethical coffee the vice-president could say, "Don't let's bring ethics into it, this is the astronomical society not the ethical society, I'll get some more Nescafe." Any time you are thinking of joining an astronomy society, quote that and ask them if it could happen.

Casual evil like this, and like the pointless cliquiness we all know can pop up out of the blue in the personal boundaries of workplace social life when least expected even in health-conscious workplaces, are why the struggle for a secure thoughtful counterculture to belong to has repeatedly been defeated and savaged all through the history of semi-civilisation. Before AS was known, I had already seen, and been dismayed by, the failiure of such scenes to last permanently, in 2 settings: around children with unusually intellectual interests, and around folks going through emotionally intense problem youths.

Aspies are another grouping who could deliver a parallel culture for nice thoughtful non-ribald characters totally opted out of the majority hard soul-dead culture. We need each other's acceptance as a higher priority than to dream about finding it with any consitency outside the caring circles. Trouble is, aspies are no more immune from having nasty ways than any other grouping are. It's only as an overall tendency that our society is made nicer than average by our willingness to think critically. There are still some aspies who don't think much at all, who just want a quiet life, or who feel clever by having sarcastic uncaring characters. So the quest depends on willingness go be combative about the aspie scene's standards of personal fairness whenever they wobble, and never just passively take what the big organisations deign to give us. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

The work the Scottish Autism Services Network is doing with us, putting our own voice into the info produced about us for all sorts of health or other service providers, is part of this vigilance. That won't be delivered to us by submissively trusting the big organisations who speak without consulting us, to "choose their priorities."

All organisations who don't speak out about how school homework destroys some aspies' chance to be child authors like the 2 well-known ones, commit a crime of child cruelty and endangerment. All organisations who ignore the case that because aspie clumsiness and gaps of attention give us a greater than equal likelihood to lose small objects, public transport can no longer require any passengers to carry losable tickets or passes, commit an endangerment of our safety. Yet one director of a lobby group for us just wrote to me, "I note what you say", a well-known bureaucrats' answer that says utterly nothing. If they lobby employers about us without mentioning the biological entitlement to dress freely, that is proved from our sensitivity and metabolism issues, they have lied about us while gambling with our life opportunities. Which all makes it important to keep local groups self-run, not provided by the big organisations, and independent of any urge to keep in their favour. There must be no divisive attitude of one generation against another, because that's not friendly, and there must be a declared automatic right for all members to count each other as equal in social worth and wantedness.

No group, big or small, local or national, is ethical unless it declares that in every conflict between personal fairness and the group's wider interests, personal fairness shall always automatically win. Our web communities too have good and bad among their number. It would be so much easier on emotionally stressed aspie reasoning if our scene was all good, it's not, but a dedication to keep the good parts of it going is our best strategy to belong and keep some part of society even half-reliably worthwhile.

Maurice Frank