The West Is Having An Autistic MELTDOWN | Prof. Ed Dutton
3 Things I Learned
Autistic people don’t lack empathy — they lack the right kind. They have high emotional empathy (they feel your pain acutely) but low cognitive empathy (they can’t work out how other people think). That’s why they come across as tactless or offensive — not because they don’t care, but because they genuinely can’t read the room. This is what makes them both brilliant and disruptive at political extremes.
Political extremism keeps collapsing because of who it attracts. The kinds of people drawn to far-left or far-right movements are disproportionately high in autism, disagreeableness and neuroticism — traits that make them brilliant at generating new ideas but terrible at holding a coalition together. That’s why you always get the purity spiral and the inevitable split. Dutton points to Reform already fracturing within a week as a live example.
The Quakers are behind almost every left-wing movement in history. Abolition, women’s suffrage, prison reform, anti-colonialism, vegetarianism — there’s always a Quaker behind it. Dutton’s thesis is that it’s an evolutionary strategy: super virtue-signalling as a way to carve out a social niche and accumulate resources. He also draws a direct line from 17th century Quakers to modern wokeness — including the first recorded person to claim a non-binary gender identity, who was a Quaker in 1650.
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