Knowing what to say, when to say it, and how to say it.
And knowing what not to say or, if it has to be said, when not to say it.
The means by which you convey your message can very easily come to displace the ends you seek to promote – presuming, of course, that you do indeed have any ends. It is increasingly hard in the contemporary world to discern any point or purpose in messages beyond the noisy process of messaging.
In his autobiography, Spare Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex no less, recounts how he lost his virginity in a field behind a pub to an ‘older woman’ who treated him “like a young stallion.” Job done, the ‘older woman’ slapped him on the backside, he reveals, and “sent me on my way.” He was still at Eton at the time and says it happened in 2001, meaning that he was 16 or 17. Well it’s every boy’s wish fulfilment, the psychologists will say. Looking back, I can remember the figure of the ‘older woman’ looming large in folk culture. She was all over TV, radio, and fiction. My mother warned me that ‘there are a lot of devious women out there.’ I’m not sure if the ‘older woman’ was to be taken as a warning or as something to look forward to. So if you are telling a relentlessly bleak and boring story, I suppose her salacious presence is intended to brighten things up a bit. It doesn't. It strikes me as remarkably disrespectful (the same with respect to other details Harry reveals with respect to identifiable others in this book - you can be honest about yourself, but not about others without making it clear that views may differ. I have certain strong views about people who have been in my life, some of whom have made life difficult for me. But I can see how I made life difficult for them, too, and am inclined to see any misunderstandings as the product of ignorance. Some people have considered that I have acted out of malice. They were wrong. Likewise, I have thought others have acted maliciously towards me. If we are interested in healing, it is wise to see people acting out of good rather than ill will in the main. I have a painful story of lifelong struggle to tell. There is nothing to be gained by making it as painful a read - it's the quality that endures through all that matters, the undefeated core.
I would also add this cautionary note: your sexual details are much less interesting to others than they are to you, and silence fosters a mystery that incites an imagination that goes to places that reality rarely does.
I intend to write with a great deal of humour and self-deprecation. I've achieved a lot against the odds. I have also got things wrong, somehow managing to scrape through despite some entertainingly eccentric decisions and actions on my part. I think it wise to admit one's eccentricities and share in the laughter you invite. It's disarming.
People are now repeating Harry’s revelations in laughter and ridicule. His poor judgment along with spite brought it on himself. I'm not laughing, he seems so obviously damaged and in need of a help he is not getting. But there are some things we really don’t need to know about.
All I can say, sympathetically, is that depressed people in pain will open their mouths and talk endlessly without boundaries in a desperate attempt to connect with somebody somewhere. I’ve done it. I’ve approached members of the family with ‘my truth’ about other members of the family, only to find that people don’t want to know. If you have a problem, it is unwise and unfair to expect others to help sort it out. They know that there are at least two sides to every story and choose not to get involved. You have to sort it out directly. As for the details of one’s sex life, you may find tale-telling here profoundly satisfying, but others will merely find it so much material to snigger over (not to mention that those involved will find it rud, discourteous, and disrespectful. If something needs to be said, then state the essentials and mask the identities). Preserve the mystery and let anyone who is interested use their own imagination.
The ‘older woman’ is, indeed, the staple of folk culture. My first response hearing of this was to raise my eyebrows, smile, and say 'oh no, not the older woman again.' Ubiquitous, indefatigable. and insatiable. I remember Wayne Rooney getting somewhat entangled at the same time. The press was full of 'cougars.' The previous generation the press was full of 'toy boys.' If you insist on going down this route in an autobiography, I would suggest avoiding cliches that read like a bad Jilly Cooper novel.
But this is the least important point to discuss (although it does relate to a certain undercurrent in the book, on which more later).
The basic take away for me is this:
Prince Harry’s constant whingeing and whining offers a salutary lesson on how not to write about yourself, still less how to live your life.
He whinges and whines about his brother Prince William pushing him into the dog bowl and breaking his necklace. This is hardly the spirit of 1066. More ‘1066 and all that.’
I couldn’t help but laugh at the stories about the broken necklace and dogbowl, being ribbed by the King, the virginity lost to the ubiquitous 'older woman,' and frostbitten extremity etc until it struck me that most of us have had experiences of a broadly similar nature. I have to admit to having written of the ‘frozen extremities’ I suffered at the top of Mt Baldy at 10,000 feet in 2015. I merely meant that I lost the feeling in my fingers and lost the ability to take photographs. At least that was as far as I was prepared to go with respect to public revelation.
The key lesson that I learn from this is to write your autobiography as comedy. Invite the laughter that is certain to come anyway.
That’s the funny bit. I am reading an article which says that Harry’s revelations are ‘like those of a B-list celebrity.’ That’s rather unfair. We can lose the urge to gradation that comes with listing: if Harry's stories prove one thing it is that we are all the same, no better than anyone else, and no worse, either. (That said, I don't care for his arrogance, elitism, and snobbish disdain for 'ordinary' pople, which comes out time and again). Harry's revelations sound pretty much like everyone else’s, just much lamer and tamer. You had only the one scrap with his brother?! You only lost your virginity the once? I’ve had more than a few scrapes with death, too. ‘You all look very worried,’ I joked to the nurses who brought me round after I had keeled over in intensive care. Falling head-over-heels down a mountain was even better.
I jest. But I can tell quite the tale. But won't. Because some things really are private, and add nothing to the stock of knowledge. Know what point you wish to make, and make sure that it is a point worth making. If some things are worth revealing, remember that other people may be involved and may not share your interest in revealing their details. And remember that your truth may well not be shared by others.
The whole sorry episode has had me reassessing the “humane storytelling" approach I take on my Irreducibly Polynomial website. I write to further the cause of autism understanding, awareness, and acceptance. I also write to gather personal material with a view to writing my autistobiography. There are large swathes of autistic experience which are buried in mystery and misconception, or are simply unseen and unheard. I speak out in the attempt to shed some light on some of this experience, and since this experience is my own it inevitably involves me talking about myself – a lot.
I am now asking myself: Is this wise?
Because telling my tale also involves details about relations to others. I have been scathing in certain instances. These were not rash judgements. I'm still inclined to be scathing. But maybe there is a better way of writing these episodes, setting the words and actions of uncomprehending and seemingly callous others in a social and historical context - given their own priorities, struggles, and upbringing, how could they have acted otherwise?
When wounded, you lash out, and you often lash out the most at those who are closest to you, for the reason that they are close and will aborb your blows more than most others. For a while. They may also pull clear and maintain a distance over time.
I write in full acknowledgement of the fallacy of universalisation, that mode of expression which holds that one person’s experience is necessarily the same as that of all other autistic people. Whilst the experience of each autistic person will be different, I write on the assumption that there are shared difficulties and traits, and that some commonality beyond different particulars can be gleaned. But I cannot write on others, only myself. That's just the way it is.
I will confess that I do write about myself an awful lot on this site. The evidence is irrefutable. But what else could I do with respect to an autistobiography? The approach has its dangers. A relentless complaint which is delivered through a barrage of details that are of personal interest and significance only is ultimately off-putting and boring, not to mention mountainously self-important. And it fails to convey the message. In my defence, my concern is to excavate as much information as I can with a view to conveying something of my autistic experience. If this is not quite the autistic experience, it is most certainly an authentic autistic experience. It is in such writing that the facts contained in the books on autism written by the professionals become existentially meaningful.
Such is my intent and is, I trust, quite distinct from the narcissistic self-importance that is running rife throughout the western world. I hope very much that I have not written anything as remotely whiny, self-pitying, resentful, sensational, and downright irresponsible as Prince Harry’s memoirs. But it may well express a similar damage and fragility. I must confess that I do complain a lot, I do point the finger at others a lot, I do whine about missed opportunities and misunderstandings, and I do give hints of bearing a grudge. Being thankful for things to be thankful for is my saving grace. As Dostoyevsky said, the devil would never give thanks. I make sure to give thank where thanks is due, even though it’s not my main focus on this site.
But you will find next to nothing from me on personal details. I could write a book on fraught relations with family and friends, and yet another book on relations with women. (So could everyone, some may say). I've exchanged some incredibly heated words with people over the years. But it’s nobody’s business but mine and theirs. And, importantly, the exchange of harsh words never hardened to become something permanent through nurturing a grudge and grievance at a distance. This bad habit is one of the very worst aspects of the contemporary culture. So I select, parse, and mask identity. There is plenty of significance I have not written about. Harry goes there, writes in a very distasteful way and becomes the subject of ridicule. He may be braver than I am, or more foolish, more confused, more manipulative/manipulated.
I have joked in the past that you would have to pay me a lot of money, and guarantee my legal and physical protection, to have me writing on my private life. But isn’t that what Harry has just done .. for 20 million? It doesn't make it right. Does everyone have a price? I don't buy the psychobabble that rationalises neurosis and nonsense. Harry is sailing close.
I think there is a strong case for arguing that intimate details of a personal nature way well be more revealing of the autistic experience than any other kind of detail. The reason for that is that we are dealing with the nuances of close relationships to others, an area where an autistic person may well struggle more than most, to the consternation of partners and would-be partners. When it comes to autism we are interested in the world behind the public mask. I will simply say that certain former partners found my behaviour constantly baffling, particularly the indirect route I would habitually take in contradistition to nature’s way which is ‘direct, quick, and dirty’ (as a biologist former acquaintance informed me when dismissing my interest in religion, ethics, and philosophy). My response is that ‘direct, quick, and dirty’ is not necessarily right, and that there is plenty that is natural that is downright immoral. Always the thought, always the concept, always the search for reasons, always the need for preparation, instruction, and rehearsal... How to write on this as a key autistic trait without personal details? How to exemplify this without crossing some line of taste, dignity, and decorum. This trait causes people to misread my thoughts and intentions in one situation after another, leading to conflict and upset. That, I would suggest, is of more than personal experience in exposing another layer of the autistic experience.
I give no details beyond generalities because it is nobody’s business but mine. But couldn’t precisely the same be said of all my other stories relating to my social life? And if those personal stories do indeed possess a universal significance – which is the claim I make – then surely to maintain silence on the closest relations of all is to impose an arbitrary cut-off point? Whatever the truth of the matter, there are some details that the world will not be getting for free.
I put the question because I am less than sure. If details of a personal nature are indeed to be offered, then they need to be carefully weighed in the balance and presented with an edifying and substantial purpose. One thing you don’t do is simply open the floodgates. Depressed people open up and pour their misery out, only to find people recoiling and retreating, confirming isolation and depression. It's not merely that people are not interested, most of all they are at a loss as to what to do. They can't help you. Plus recollections may differ every bit as much as views at the time did. I knew I was baffling friends, family, and the odd lady at the time, even if I was as baffled as they were.
Listening to Prince Harry and his wife talking about themselves and complaining endlessly has caused me to worry that my website has gone down the same debilitating route. Whether you think they have justifiable cause for complaint or not, the relentlessly repetitive self-absorption is grossly unappealing. The thought occurs to me that people will have the same reaction to my own apologetics and confessions. To be the subject of such constant scrutiny a person has to be something very special indeed.
This pair have inverted the Royal Family’s motto of ‘never complain, never explain.’ That approach works to prevent the emergence of a nonsense and a scandal that feeds on itself, expanding outwards to consume the whole world. The real clash here is between two very different cultures, the culture of silent service embodied by the Royal Family and the culture of noisy celebrity. I would caution leftists taking the sides of Harry and Markle here – the culture they personify is acidic and dissolves every just cause it seeks to weaponize and use to its end of personal aggrandizement. I have issued the same caution with respect to the way autism has been thrown into environmental politics. Those who think Thunberg an inspiring figure need to be aware that the environmental question is incredibly difficult in political and sociological terms and a relentless, repetitive, simplistic, monotone messages that use 'the science' as authority whilst scotomizing the complexities risks once more associating autism with the more negative traits of its public image. As someone who is autistic, I offer a very different approach, one that listens not only to the natural sciences but also and especially the social sciences and the humanities. There is more to life than objective ‘things’ delivering an impersonal and unquestionable truth.
Always complain, always explain is the new motto, and complaining about everything involves an awful lot of explaining. This is the problem to be aware of.
I hope I am not being overly critical of Harry here. I spent a very long time in the 2000s complaining, endlessly, relentlessly, seeking who-knows-what from family members. My mother had died, I had split from my partner, all within a two week period. I had suddenly gone from being the centre of attention to being on the fringes. I guess I was looking for inclusion, little realising that I had it, or about as much as a now fringe member of the family could expect to have. My mother had been the centre of this side of the family, and I had been the centre of her world. Complicating matters was the fact that I had a partner who wanted to get married, and whom I wasn't sure about at all. To this day I'm not even sure we actually split up, which probably has some autistic significance. It was as I was giving her the silent treatment that my mother died suddenly. I felt alone. I wasn't thinking straight, I had lost the people I could conside in. I made the wrong decisions. I drew a line under the past. And it took me a long time to come to terms with my aloneness. You will find that family members look most favourably upon other family members who are married with children. Those who are unattached and without children are considered marginal. I felt marginalised and hit out. I became more marginalised as a result. I hit out for years, only to have family members pull even further away. I needed support and this was my way of advertising that need. My mother would have understood. But she was no longer around. My cry for help backfired spectacularly. The world and its wife is not going to change just to accommodate you.
So if I am critical of Harry here, I'll let it be known that I waged something of a war of attrition within my own family from 2006 until maybe 2010, maybe longer. And it really wasn't all my fault. Only some of it. In a life of crossed wires and purposes it is good to remind yourself that others may well be stupid, selfish, insensitive, inconsiderate, but most probably not malicious. Feeling hard done to, you will be inclined to think the worst of people. The truth is usually much simpler. Once coldness, mistrust, and detachment intervene, divisions that could have been avoided can become entrenched and extended.
It is unethical and unwise to monetize trauma and mental health.
There is a meme I have seen used on autism sites, which declares proudly “I’m still here!” I have written on the meme and the motto, valuing much more than mental and physical survival against the odds to emphasise the preservation of the authentic person, the inner core that remains one essential, integral being. To say “I’m still here” is to say that no matter all that life has thrown at us, we remain the unbowed, the untamed, the undefeated – not victims nurturing grievances and harbouring grudges. That view gives us the courage not to become victims, no matter all that we may have suffered. Events may inflict wounds and leave scars, but they do not constitute the essential self, the inner core, unless we let them take over. You can face down those events and become proactive, taking control of what lies within your control. I’m sceptical of psychiatry, therapy, and mental health. My experience of the expert industry in other areas has been less than encouraging. I have learned the truth of the proverb to conclude that if a pretty girl can give only what she has, how much less place-sitting professionals with only limited resources and not much more understanding have to offer. I think little of the gospel of mental health when it is commodified, weaponised, and intrumentalised. I think even less of the worship of the self. We live within a narcissistic culture which cultivates character traits that encourage to serve our discrete selves first and last. The gospel of the self abandons every duty, every obligation that we, as social beings, have to others. ‘Serve yourself,’ as John Lennon wrote in contemptuous rejection of Bob Dylan’s claim that ‘you gotta serve someone.’ It should come as no surprise that Lennon is such an icon of the new cultural Left that has sprung up in the aftermath of the demise of the Social Left in face of economic neo-liberalism – they are two wings of the same individualism and libertarianism. There is nothing here of service, duty, and obligation, nothing of the sense of human beings as social beings embedded in relations to others.
Instead there is this vortex of self-regard, self-service, andself-absorption. What is most remarkable about this narcissism is how small and petty it is, with its tendency to inflate the most minor and insignificant of things out of all proportion. On the scale of human affairs, they are not even molehills, and out of these are made not merely mountains but entire mountain ranges.
To the extent that this is a weaponising of issues and causes and a monetizing of traumas, then this is repreheible; to the extent that it is also an expression of mental ill-health, it is a tragedy – sadly, people do not always surround themselves with people who have their best interests at heart, the very opposite, in fact. So I pity Harry and pray that he finds a way back from the Hell he is in.
Joanna Williams writes, "To watch Harry talking about himself is to witness what happens when we abandon all boundaries between the public and private spheres of our lives."
Prince Harry and the cult of ‘openness’ by Joanna Williams
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/06/prince-harry-and-the-cult-of-openness/
The culture of narcissism destroys both the public and the private sphere.
This is treacherous ground for autistic people who are concerned to write on autism. Autistic people are often isolated, living life at a distance from others at their own time in their own space. When there tends only to be yourself in your world, you will tend to talk mainly about yourself. When seeking to exchange information with others, you will tend to make the issue being discussed about yourself given the absence of a shared experience. To those who know nothing of autism, such constant reference to oneself could easily be construed as narcissism. Externally, it looks the same. The word ‘autism’ does indeed derive from the Greek for self. The Greek prefix auto- means “self.” So autistic people are self-obsessed and self-absorbed in the same way as a narcissist? The truth is that autistic people are selfists but not thereby selfish. Whenever the question crops up I avoid controversy by owning up immediately – I am my favourite subject!
I thus make light of my self-absorption. I also justify it in terms of a Socratic self-examination.
‘Why would anyone expose themselves to the world in this way?’ asks Joanna Williams. Some think that he is revealing all these personal details for the money. It’s a lot of money, so much money, in fact, that anyone would be tempted to make some details up. Some think that Markle has instigated the whole thing. I get the feeling he would have volunteered it all up for nothing sooner or later. This is precisely what you would expect mired in the culture of narcissism.
‘To watch Harry talking about himself is to witness what happens when we abandon all boundaries between the public and private spheres of our lives. Harry seems to have lost any sense of a border between his interior world of thoughts and feelings, and the outside world of speech; between the private realm of family and home and the public realm of work, responsibility and social convention.’
To write honestly and insightfully on autism requires intimate excavation and revelation beyond public image and social convention. The autistic experience concerns precisely what happens when the interior world comes into collision with the exterior social world, or simply retreats from it to become silent and unseen. Maintaining the border between the interior and exterior worlds may be good social policy, but it buries autistic experience.
Families and friends argue all the time. People get angry and upset andsay things in the heat of the moment that they come later to regret. I’d be more worried should such things not happen than by the fact that they do. Love and hate are closely related. One thing a relationship cannot survive is indifference. So I take the fight in any relationship as read. It takes place in private and that’s where it should stay. ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ my granny would say. My dad was one of few words, my mum was one who had a lot of words. I could argue heatedly with both. So what? The security – and privacy - of the home allows us to give vent to all that upsets us, whether rightly or wrongly. And then we forgive one another and move on without holding a grudge. Making the private public instils them with a fixity they never possessed in the heat of the moment. Such details are of significance to me only to the extent that they shed light on the miscommunication that blights autistic interaction. Importantly, whatever misunderstandings I had with family and friends never hardened into a permanent animosity by way of resentment. Things are, of course, different with respect to sexual partners, making separation inevitable. It is best to seek to explain the causes of incompatibility than to apportion blame.
The fashionable belief of the times is that maintaining one’s silence and keeping things private is detrimental to mental health. A complete openness without shame, guilt, and taboo is the best policy, it is claimed. I have had this said to me by health professionals and, to be fair, I see their logic: for them to help you, you need to supply them with the information they need. But – and this is a big but – the road to health and happiness is a lot rockier than ‘speaking your truth.’ There has to be a reckoning with reality, a reality-check, if we are to get to the place where we need to be. But this reckoning is much easier to have with respect to biological health than it is with respect to mental health. Biological facts are much easier to identify and act upon than are psychic feelings. In my experience, the guesses of ‘experts’ with respect to the latter are no better than your own and often a whole lot worse. You know yourself better than others do. It took over fifty years for outsiders to finally twig that there might be something more than anxiety, lack of confidence, and sheer bloody-mindedness going on with me. We should also bear in mind that autism is not a biologically objective condition but a subjective evaluation. As a result, highlighting the facts of autism inevitably involves extensive discussion of feelings. To simply assert fact over feeling here is tantamount to telling autistic people to keep quiet about themselves.
But this comes with certain dangers.
We live in an age in which being true to our own selves is interpreted in the sense of wish fulfilment, hence my premising of this entire piece on Harry’s ‘older woman’ was more than simple titillation – consider Harry's constant comparison of his wife to his mother …
The mind boggles at the segment in which Harry talks about the unusual use he made of his late mother’s favourite cream. You can look it up yourself.
Many people have called this “a Freudian nightmare,” so many so often that it is hard not to conclude that the imagery holds some attraction to them, no matter how loudly they shout "creepy!" in public.
You have to be very brave, very careful, very foolish, very open and/or very fragile mentally to hang things like this out in public. Or just so stupid in your semi-education/indoctrination to think that the kind of thing people reveal anonymously to culturally fashionable sexologists will receive public praise. The truth is that people are social conformists in public - few have the nerve to stand out. But maybe some are attempting to engineer a new conformism, subverting the patriarchal family and all that goes with it. There are some strange ideas afoot in contemporary culture.
Is Harry merely writing in an open, honest, and raw way, just throwing ideas out as they come to him? I’ve been doing something similar on this site, whilst hopefully having the sense to check any wilder flights of fancy. I would suggest publishers and editors and others have checked the material Harry delivered. I would suggest further that there has been a conscious effort to adapt material to a narrative and an agenda. I would suggest, too, that Harry is not surrounded by people who are kind and who have his best interests at heart. He is being moulded to a new identity. There is a lot of Californian LALA psychobabble in the book: the kind of shallow, ephemeral, narcissistic tripe that people who make a big thing of being spiritual but not religious lap up. It’s a pick-and-pick self-serving religion for the me-me-me age. It's the new conformism among cultural elites. It is also possible to detect a whiff of the anti-patriarchy rubbish that is fashionable in ‘progressive’ circles. There are some fanciful feminist beliefs afoot which cloath certain desires and wishes in an academic and literary veneer. It’s a remarkable passage, hardly an afterthought. So you have to work out what thought processes went into its creation.
You can read Harry's Freudian wish-fulfilment passages in your own time and place, you don't have to be Freud to make the links and draw the conclusions. It's a mistake on his part, but it will have been encouraged / sanctioned by others.
Who, what, why. Keep questioning. Who thought this a good idea? To what end? Who benefits?
A certain kind of mind may wellsee Harry as brave here. His words fit a certain cultural trend which sees transgression as liberatory. That’s a huge area to explore. I see what Harry has written and see the way he has written it and conclude that he is surrounded by unkind people who have their own interests at heart, not his, and that his story is being edited and instrumentalised for an extraneous agenda. Add the admission of drug taking, and we see that Harry has been induced to reveal himself as psychologically fragile, damaged, and unbalanced – grounds for whatever anyone may want in the future. He is holding on to his wounds, neither honouring them nor healing them, merely scratching them constantly - or allowing others to do so. He is now isolated from his past, from his family and his friends. The process of isolation started straight away.
Most of all, I see an endless whining and whingeing and a constant blaming of others: it indicates a chronic dissolution of character. It is ugly and it is repulsive. Even if – and that's a huge if – Harry has good cause for his grievance, it’s hard to think of a more unappealing way to seek sympathy, help, and support. The book is a model of how not to write an autobiography of a life, however troubled: it is humourless, joyless, cruel, mean, negative, spiteful, vindictive. I could forgive such things if they had the truth of raw unexpurgated honesty, but every line of this book is contrived and has passed through a filter. The writing is so manifestly targetted to cover certain fashionable bases that lacks the ragged raw honesty of real experience.
In writing my autistobiography I had been tempted to be raw and brutally honest. The public can't digest such an approach and recoil in discomfort. You have to identify the healthy core of your essential being and cleave to that in tempering and tailoring your material.
Harry's book seems raw but it is contrived. I don't believe a word of it. You hear certain key themes and phrases and you know where the rest is going - in other words it is dull, predictable, conformist, contrived.
What was once a key principle of existential health has become a delusion which is destructive of the self. Given that human beings are social beings with relations and responsibilities to others, the centering of our own emotional needs above our family, work, community, and polity is not authenticity but a self-destructive selfishness. That’s the trap of selfness which autistic people are charged with having to spring without the social equipment that ‘normal’ others possess.
The narcissistic compulsion to dissolve the barriers separating public and private spheres and share personal details of the deepest intimacy is pervasive in contemporary celebrity culture. I trust that it is clear that I write on personal issues with a public intent in order to shed some light on the autistic experience for a world that is in darkness. Whilst autism does indeed legitimize one’s own lived experience, it isn’t a licence to say and do as one pleases according to one’s own truth. There remains an objective world of people and things ‘out there,’ of which we are each and all a part. Taking licence here produces not the authentic self but a dissolution of the self. The problem is that it is desperately difficult for autistic people to make and maintain expansive social connections the way that ‘normal’ people do. This is not a result of narcissism but of different ways of processing the world’s information.
The irony, of course, is that our sense of ourselves doesn’t necessarily become stronger the more it is revealed, it may become weaker. It can have us depending on others to validate our feelings and desires. This is the worst position to be in, a position of needy weakness as opposed to the assertive, affirmative strength required for flourishing. This unfulfillable need for validation is what seems to lie behind Harry’s emotional incontinence. He is not a man in control of his reason and emotion, exercising agency in a productive, creative way. Instead, he cuts a pathetic, fragile creature, incapable of seeing beyond his own immediate feelings, unable to exist without constant public validation, unable to exercise autonomy outside of a script and a scam. The sorry spectacle shows us that it is often the best policy to keep private things private. And shut up. I make no statement as to whether he has cause for complaint, merely say that his way of complaining is enough to turn us against him.
I will end with this general statement on my social philosophy of life.
Since human beings are social beings, they need others in order to be themselves. Socialization is healthy in a way that social isolation is not. You need to reach out to and connect with others as well as engage in something that is much greater than your own ego. Talk sparingly about yourself. People like to know something about you, but much less than everything. My mother gave me some advice early on. If you want to break the ice with people, ask about them. People like talking about themselves. I found this to be true! And they like people who ask them and listen to them as they talk. I smile and nod and never let on that most of it goes in one ear and out of the other. If that sounds callous, I have the feeling that’s how most other people have listened to me talking about myself. Cognitive resources are limited and people are quickly saturated. People want to know the basics about you, enough for them to make a decision whether you are worth knowing any further. They aren’t interested in much beyond that. In other words, offer information enough for the end of socialization to be served, but no more. Say enough about yourself to make you interesting to other others, people aren’t as interested in your ‘special interests’ as you are. Make it a rule to avoid talking about yourself much beyond the things people have shown an interest in. Measure and temper your responses to others, get the line and length right, be involved in a dialogue rather than a monologue. As a rule, you should be more interested in others than in telling others about yourself. People will respond positively to the interest you show in them. The philosophy of a flourishing social life is to look upwards and outwards, away from the self to others and to the world. Open up to others and to the world! Expand your being outwards by seeking to engage with and embrace something greater than the ego. Avoid introspection and burrowing inwards. The ego is a prison. The more self-absorbed a person is, the more unhappy and unfulfilled he or she will be. Driven by sacrifice, duty, and service to others and to a cause, you will flourish and be happy. Driven by a purpose, acting out of duty, sustained by faith, and pursuing interests that lie outside of yourself, you will be happy.
Constantly looking within yourself and seeking the satisfaction of yourdesires is not healthy in the long run. In fact it is destructive. The happiest and most fulfilled people are those who have interests that extend beyond themselves – social causes, service, nature, art, science, sport, hobbies, something that brings entry into and participation in the world around us. The unhappiest people are those buried in introspection, those who are forever brooding about themselves. If the unexamined life is not worth living, a constant self-examination is unliveable.
I will carry on complaining, if not all the time, since there is a need to express something of the insight and ecstasy that comes with the experience of autism. With a sense of chaos and confusion comes also a marvel and wonder undimmed by age. And I shall carry on explaining, too, taking care to highlight the joys as well as the sorrows.
