I just watched an episode of a pop-science show called Brain Games about how people tend to “follow the leader” in a lot of things. It culminated with a simple and brilliant experiment where all they did was set up a sign that said LINE STARTS HERE on the Vegas Strip and set up  a few velvet ropes behind it and get one person to stand at the head of the line .

Sure enough, after a few cautious sniffs from the passing crowds, a vacationing couple joined the one guy (who was a plant, of course) and after that, people started lining up behind them. And the longer the line got, the more people joined.

And remember, none of these people have the slightest idea what they were waiting in line for. They joined the line because anything with a line that long has to be good, right?

And that is the normal response in human beings.

But that would have never worked on me. I know this because I have encountered this situation. What I did was walk up the line (from outside the line) and asked someone at or near the front of the line what everyone was waiting for.

Then I exercised my own judgment as to whether the thing they were waiting for was worth the wait to me.

Admittedly, nobody ever said “I don’t know”. If they had, that would have tipped me off instantly, especially when the person at the head of the line said it. I would instantly know that someone was fucking with them and it was probably a TV or a social science experiment or possibly both.

That’s because I am socially defective.

Due to my intensely lonely childhood, I was (in effect if not strictly true) isolated from others of my species and therefore did not receive the proper socialization from other members of my species. I never learned how to tap into the zeitgeist and let it lead me.

On the contrary, I act like any under-socialized primate and actively avoid anything everyone else is doing, at least till I have made my own judgment.

And that’s the thing : I only trust my own judgment. Nobody else’s. I defer to others on matters of facts and knowledge if they are more learned in the subject than I am, but when it comes to judgment, I make up my own mind about everything.

That makes me, perhaps, some kind of ruggedly individualistic intellectual, but it’s just a side effect of being socially defective I don’t think I am capable of taking on someone else’s judgment without verifying its logic myself. That part is simply not installed in me. If I tried to do that, I would immediately panic and ask myself “But how do I know that they’re RIGHT?”. And then I would have to use my own judgment anyhow.

Us social defects usually have massive trust issues. Without the ability to partake in the mutuality of human life, we do not get the rewards from social interaction that healthy humans do, and that makes us a suspicious and mistrustful bunch.

That is only reinforced when our isolation from the social stream attracts negative attention. We are not conscious of what we are missing, and so these attacks seem absolutely unprovoked and without meaning.

But while I would never call these attacks justified, I understand them, Having someone who is not in sync with the group is disturbing to those who are perfectly in sync. They don’t know how it is possible to be so “weird” (remember, everyone else they know is in sync) and that makes the aggression come out. The anger is supposed to either force synchronicity on the social defective or drive them away so that they stop disturbing the members of their synchronized in-group.

They are seldom aware of this, of course. They are simply responding to the messages their social instincts are feeding them.

It is sometimes said that the problem with us social defectives is a lack of empathy, but I find that term misleading and inaccurate.

It’s misleading because it makes us sound like sociopaths. Like we truly do not care about others. But that’s almost never the real picture. We care as much as anyone else^[1], the problem is that we are operating on much less information that the socially healthy.

The problem, then, is not empathy in general but that particular subset of empathy I will call social empathy, That the empathic channel dedicated to sending and receiving social cues. That is as opposed to emotional empathy, which is more about syncing with individuals and feeling what they feel.

Despite the fact that society tends to shun us, it actually needs us.

Society will always need people who are immune (or resistant) to the social illusion and can see what is really going on. We act as the voice of reason and do our best to warn the herd when they are about to collide with harsh reality when it doesn’t match social reality.

It also needs us as independent thinkers who can solve seemingly unsolvable problems due to this ability to see through things.

Ever since I was a tween)and first read Flatland) , I have felt like I am not in the same dimension as everyone else. There was so much that I could see that others could not, and things others found obvious were perplexing mysteries to me. My radio was not tuned to the same frequency as others’.

In a previous era, I might have been a holy man, a seer, a scholar, or even a leader by dint of my unusual capacities. I might also have been a miserable recluse, a madman, a misanthropic hermit, or simply one of history’s many clueless victims.

In this current era, it comes across more as my being a totally clueless dork with some surprisingly good ideas.

I can work with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.