If we were all autistic

I  can't help but wonder sometimes... How would the world be if autism was the normality? Here's some things I came up with...

If we were all autistic, language acquisition wouldn't be considered a major toddler milestone. It would be widely understood that some people get there and some people don't and it would be a culturally accepted fact. Also language acquisition wouldn't be considered a necessary trait but rather a characteristic of some people, like blue eyes, or freckles. Some people would have it, some wouldn't. Either way it wouldn't matter.

As a consequence of that, a lot of alternative communication systems would be encouraged and the world would have made a lot of progress on that. Also people would take lessons to learn to understand different communication systems (e.g. pictures, sign language or even stimming) much like they do now with the different languages, since those would be considered culturally alternative forms of communication.

We wouldn't have phone calls. People would only communicate through texts and e-mails, since it would be widely accepted that information processing is very hard over the phone.

Chronological age wouldn't matter: people would be aged by their developmental age, which would not be linear but rather switch from old to young with no specific pattern. And of course that wouldn't matter, because it would be perfectly acceptable to be whatever age you want.

Everyone would work. Even two year-old children. Not for eight hours but for some hours a day and on their special interest. And everyone would get paid. And no, it wouldn't be consider "exploitation" to make little children work, because they would do something they enjoy for three hours and get paid for it. So if a child had a fixation with lining things up, for example, it would work with something relevant to that. Of course the complex levels of the jobs would vary according to someone's developmental age, so people with lower developmental ages would be given more simple and more structrured stuff. But if someone with a higher developmental age who was for example a supervisor would suddenly get overwhelmed by the task it would be perfectly ok for him/her to switch to a lower developmental task for a few days. It would be perfectly acceptable.

Schools wouldn't teach knowledge. Instead children would be grouped according to their special interests and would be taught things related to them, as it would be widely acknowledged that this would be the only way to keep them engaged. This would be a normality. The education debates would be on how to teach children with unsual special interests: you know, those (generally) who wouldn't like trains or dinosaurs or literature. All the other information (reading, counting etc) would be considered as naturally developping and would not require seperate teaching: it would be learned through the process of engaging with one's special interest.

Self-teaching would be encouraged, in fact it would be a lesson in the curriculum. All schools would have huge libraries, computers and rich databases and children would be encouraged to search them in order to find things that interest them to engage with. Then they would be encouraged to either proceed in learning about it alone, or form small groups with other people with the same interest. In certain cases those groups would be used socially, to teach children that they should also listen and not only talk.

Self care skills would be considered a valuable lesson to learn and children would spend time on learning how to organise their time, space and thoughts. Social skills would majorly revolve around respecting each others boundaries and making the children understand that other people might perhaps be annoyed by what they are doing. NOTHING would be considered a given or self-explanatory.

Every conversation, in and out of school, would start with the phrase "Permission to start interaction" and said permission would have to be granted from the other person in order for the interaction to start. If the receiver of the inteaction didn't give permission for it to start, s/he wouldn't be considered rude. Instead, if the exchange of the interaction was urgent the starter of the information would have to give the receiver a note (in physical or electronical form) with everything he had to say.

The world would be a much less sensory overloading place. Houses would be much better sound proofed and every light would have a dimmer switch. Clothes would be categorised according to their feel and concepts of "matching" wouldn't be prioritised. Public transportation would be consisted of cubicles where people would stay in until they reach their destination. No people would be allowed on a public transport once all the cubicles were full.

Market wouldn't be as big: multi-billion dollar industries like the clothe industry or the food industry wouldn't even exist, because people would wear and eat very specific things. In fact it would probably be more versatile as gadgets and fiddly toys would have more of a value than clothes and jewellery. Techological gadgets would probably be sold at the same, if not bigger, rate.

Other concepts would develop simirarly: fixations, sensory sensitivities, physical distance and stuff like that would be the normality, the culture.

So how would neurotypical people feel in a society like that? I would guess that they would feel exactly like autistics feel in ours. They would feel miserable, because they would get 100 "interaction denied" responses from people they tried to engage to small talk with. They would feel ashamed, because people would often think of them as creatures who talk with nothing to say. They would crave for more sensory stimulation, only they wouldn't be able to get it, because there would be no places catering their needs and if there were, they would probably have to go in the middle of nowhere to find them, so that autistics won't be disturbed by them. They would feel crazy for wanting to change their clothes, games and other stuff every few months because they are bored of them. Having a neurotypical child would be considered a major EXPENSE of the family, because of behaviours like these. Imagine two autistic parents having their child scream "but I want new toyyyyysss....!!!" every now and then. They would get sensory overwhelmed and this behaviour would be considered a "meltdown". People would feel sorry for them for having to bear that cross.

As if those weren't troublesome enough already, neurotypicals would never say what they mean but people would take what they say literally, so they would never get any of their actual needs met. Nobody would want to be close to them, for fear of having millions of conversation requests from them, so they would be miserable and alone: people would be afraid of them, they would not understand them. Slowly, they would dive into depression, they wouldn't want to leave the house and they would end up non-productive and institutionalised.

So there you have it. A reverse reality that is, in its core, what people on the autism spectrum have to face every day. We are not disordered. We are a minority.