Help! Find me an ontologist, quick!
Social media, especially TikTok and Instagram, are full of so-called “influencers” who regularly spout on about all things neurodivergence. Many have quite a bit of followers. Because of the topics I post on regularly, many show up in my “suggestions.” I usually turn “suggestions” off as these suggested feeds are just not worth my time. Yes, I said it. So many of these autistic “influencers” are just explaining their day … and then extending their day so as to apply to all autistics. Perhaps if they took a statistics class and understood sample sizes, they might reconsider?
One picture series that popped up recently on IG featured an autistic speech and language specialist, who uses their experience to inform their practice, telling their followers that “non-verbal” is not only not a thing, it’s not even logical. I left a comment that tried to correct them on the issue, but the problem goes much deeper than just uninformed social media people.
Let’s back up…
When I first gained literacy in my 30’s, I had the ability to choose to read whatever I wanted. Such freedom. I chose to seek out and read the books and authors that I remembered were on my grandmother’s book shelf. I touch on one of the authors that I read, Edgar Rice Burrows, in No Place for Autism? in relation identity (the whole Barsoom vs Mars thing). Another author that I tracked down was Robert Anton Wilson. I remember my grandmother loved his works and the covers always seemed so wacky.
Robert Anton Wilson built a reputation as a novelist and philosopher who used his writings to shock readers into reevaluating and reshaping their fundamental notions of reality. Central to his literary and intellectual mission is the concept of “reality tunnels” and how our tunnel-vision affects what we perceive as real and possible. Paraphrasing what he wrote on the subject, the ‘reality tunnel’ term suggests we each inhabit a kind of experiential tunnel or lens that shapes how we perceive the world based on our beliefs, knowledge, expectations, and assumptions. It determines what we regard as ‘real.’ Most people blindly accept the reality tunnel of their culture and society with its ontology, norms, language games. This breeds conformity and robs freedom / individuality.
Within the metaphor of reality tunnels, Wilson points out that most humans become trapped in a highly limited perceptual tunnel. We constantly have expectations and pre-defined notions imposed on what is and is not plausible. Our tunnel narrows as we internalise more beliefs and assumptions from those around us. This creates automatic filters on what we can comprehend. As Wilson argues, this breeds conformity and robs freedom / individuality.
This confinement within a restrictive reality tunnel that dismisses anything outside its norms and language is precisely the dilemma Wilson’s works attempt to emancipate readers from. Through Wilson’s writings on topics ranging from conspiracies theories to psychedelics states, occult rituals to extraterrestrial intelligence, he deliberately violates consensus worldviews. He bombards audiences with challenging ideas that shock them outside habitual thought-patterns.
Whilst this assault on ontological assumptions is destabilising, it is meant to ultimately liberate readers into new vistas of possibility. By cracking open chronic reality tunnels, Wilson wanted to undermine institutions that use tunnel vision to control populations and diminish free will. His “guerrilla ontologist” approach promotes individual cognitive liberty rather than conformity. Those willing to join his intellectual insurgency may discover their horizons of reality infinitely expanding.
What’s this got to do with Instagram?
Social media influencers across all niches, from beauty tips to political commentary, invariably construct “reality tunnels” that they share widely, hoping followers will inhabit the same perceptual frame as them. But this risks creating distortionary optics on events and issues suited more towards content creation than truth.
For autistic influencers - figures on TikTok, YouTube, and elsewhere with large autistic followings - their position as a visible advocate often motivates overgeneralising their personal reality experience as universal for autism. They share emotional moments or trauma stories as emblematic of all autistic life. Or promote lifestyle tips, special interests, and ‘therapies’ as certain fixes any autistic person should implement.
Whilst perhaps well-intentioned, projecting one’s reality tunnel as THE reality for an entire group risks flattening diversity of perspectives and individual needs. Not all autistics require the same things, have similar sensitivities, have the same issues, or share special interests for instance. There exists vast plurality across regions, support levels, finances, and (especially) races.
Through repetition, these narrowly subjective reality tunnels calcify as internalised “truths” for followers seeking content they relate to. But it can foster excessive conformity around the influencer's version of autistic life rather than embracing and exploring the space between diverging self-conceptions.
As Robert Anton Wilson warned, becoming trapped within overly rigid reality tunnels limits imagination and autonomy. Autistic influencers should be cognizant of how their tunnel vision, when marketed as prescriptive, diminishes opportunities for pluralism and self-definition in others unlike them. Whilst personal experience offers insights, projecting it as definitive “reality” goes against encouraging responsiveness to neurodiverse needs.
My rebuttal to the premise that being “non-verbal” is an illogical impossibility
The influencer, and I won’t name names, promotes a notably rigid conceptual ‘tunnel’ that verbal language intrinsically defines and bounds all human cognition and communication. They dismiss alternative realities outside their linguistic-centric tunnel vision. However, conscious experience requires recognising diversity in neurocognitive processing and different vehicles of conception.
As an autistic gestalt processor (aka, non-verbal), my mind innately operates through non-verbal mediums prior to verbal semantic structures (more about my internal processes here). I think by manipulating vivid nonverbal imagery, emotional impressions, and spatial / relational patterns. From this non-verbal theatre, I can then overlay learned syntax and vocabulary to symbolically encode my rich visual perceptions into verbal approximations, though imperfect (I go over this, and the research behind it, in the upcoming Holistic Language Instruction).
Critically, cognition and expression have stages of development in humans before words crystallise. Pre-verbal infants, for example, still communicate intentionally through gaze, gesture, and emotion. Intricate consciousness predates language acquisition. There thus exists a imagistic reality, closest to gestalt cognition, that is fundamentally non-verbal despite feeding eventual verbal development.
My identity as non-verbal references residing primarily in this direct perceptual space, decoding the world through relational visual impressions not yet translated into semiotics. It is the theatre of the mind where context shapes perception, and from which I generate mental simulations parsed into syntax as a secondary translation layer.
In this sense, verbal expression remains an acoustic approximation to me – one channel for outwardly encoding internal data that originated non-verbally during perception. But processing and controlling reality through direct imagery allows rich ideation, comprehension, and purposeful behaviour without verbal intermediary steps.
The“guerrilla ontologist” …
Wilson’s image of the “guerrilla ontologist” as a kind of “cognitive insurgent” trying to liberate minds imprisoned within rigid reality tunnels is apt in this case. My intention here is to sabotage and subvert this influencer’s obstinately narrow linguistic reality tunnel which dismisses the validity of nonverbal cognition streams. As Wilson argued, such acts of ontological disruption can shock people into reconsidering constraints on thought imposed by cultures and institutions.
This influencer projects their linguistically-biased tunnel of human experience onto the entirety of the autistic community, falsely universalising that verbal expression is necessary and intrinsically defines internal processes like perception and ideation. But this imposes profound limits on understanding neuro-cognitive diversity and alternatives modes like my non-verbal, visually-driven thinking.
My conceptual framework resides deeper in direct gestalt imagery, environmental modeling, emotional currents. Into this non-verbal theatre, symbolic language later emerges as an attempt to “digitise” rich nonverbal data flows. But experience and intentionality flourish in the liminal, pre-semantic imagination space.
In dismissing this consistent nonverbal plane as inconceivable or impossible, the influencer’s tunnel vision indeed contributes towards narrow social constructions of normalcy that marginalise cognitive plurality. This ontological warfare around the boundaries of neurological diversity must challenge reliance solely on the verbal and tap into imaginal sources springing from profound perceptual matrices. Expanding such vistas aligns with Wilson’s call to rupture false sensory and analytical limits that some impose upon possibility and interpersonal reality.
In the end …
Having read and absorbed Wilson’s works, my mind imagines the “guerrilla ontologist” crafting and sending a cease and desist letter to such ‘influencers’ as caught my attention today. As a form of occupational therapy, and taking a rare leap into the fictional space, here’s what that might look like.
…
*Dispatches from the Reality Militia*
To: CaptainBlackAndWhite pronouns Patrolled
From: General Nonverbosa, First Division of the Reality Raiders
Date: February 14, 2024 (Maybe?)
Re: Cease and Desist Your Oppressive Neuro-colonialism
Greetings and hallucinations, Captain Verbal Centrist!
I temporarily occupy a vibrationary singularity in space-time to issue notice that continued occupation and patrolling of autistic cognitive reality must cease by order of the Inter-Dimensional Association of Ontological Freedom.
Through very real magickal surveil, we observe your persistent mapping and conquest of what constitutes “true” experience for those within the vaster Aspergian Territories. Via post after post, video upon video, and dogmatic duet, you encode waves of cultural imperialism, neuro-conformism and verbal enslavement over diverse tribes of the meaningfully non-verbal.
This does not abide! Before the Mystery, no singular ganglion of syntax can mirror or control the full flower of conscious intent. And yet you filter all thoughts through your battalion of phonemes and tightly bound semantic chains. You deny being or desire outside these! Such strict verbal enforcement diminishes contact with the raw perceptual underneath from which new gems of externalised awareness bubble into meatspace.
Thus, I am manifesting as a non-verbal interloper to issue CEASE AND DESIST orders against this vain linguistic landgrab. Get thee to the memetic Hinterlands outside your echo chamber and immersed perspectives not puppeteered by monologue! Decolonise cognition to allow radically different experience, unburdened by your word cult’s lexic tyranny! You force-fed my people a narrow bandwidth reality poison. Now it is you who must tune into our indigenous psychedelic wavelengths.
Stop babbling your Logo-Fascism or suffer further sorties by the reality guerrillas! We declare cognitive self-rule through a thousand dissident thought streams. In honor of a more Kaleidoscopic Soul.
- Brigader General Nonverbosa