Sheep Go To Heaven, Goats Go To Hell

What constitutes the "social awkwardness" of those with autism? I have discussed how autistics' discomfort with lying can lead to socially awkward situations, but there is another thing I have noticed by observing my son and reflecting on what I know both through experience with and through reading about autism that definitely leads people to consider autistics as socially awkward.

Neurotypicals are naturally social, and the reason they are naturally social is that they are uncomfortable unless they are conforming to the group they are in. If you are a Catholic, you would feel uncomfortable not kneeling to pray when everyone else is. Or pick any social situation and refuse to do what everyone else is doing -- that anxiety you feel is how people with autism feel in pretty much any social situation. Neurotypicals of course know how to solve the problem: conform. Conforming does not solve the problem for autistics.

More, autistics don't feel the need to conform. We will join in if we want to join in -- or we will not join in if we don't want to join in. How is this going to be perceived by neurotypicals? As socially awkward behavior. Neurotypicals think everyone should conform because, after all, if they are uncomfortable not conforming, then others must be as well. This feeling gets transferred into a social rule (sometimes into an explicitly moral rule), and those who do not conform are at best perceived as socially awkward, at worst as not being a member of the social group at all. Yet, this failure to conform may be a source of a great deal of social change. How many cultural changes have been made because someone with autism did something different? Perhaps more often than we realize.

Someone with autism is going to only do something if he or she wants to do it. There is no social pressure felt by them. They may try something everyone else is doing, simply to see what it's about, and if they like doing it, they will continue doing it, but if they don't like doing it, they simply won't do it. Like everyone else, though, they aren't likely to merely say they aren't doing it because they don't want to; rather, they are likely to rationalize it after the fact, declare it "stupid" or "irrational." It's likely neither irrational nor stupd (from a cultural standpoint), but rarely do people allow you to say outright that you don't like something because you simply don't like it. They demand a reason, and in the end, you will get one -- though it may be expressed in a "socially awkward" fashion.

So it seems to me that autistics' tendency to not conform would be interpreted by neurotypicals as being "socially awkward" behavior. However, it might be the very behavior that makes us question what we are doing, and which can sometimes lead to cultural changes and social transformation.