[Commenter] Zorost proposes two axes, “empathy” and “abstraction” (or “symbol”). The Leftist is low on both, but for our purposes the “abstraction” part is the most relevant. An autistic, apparently, has trouble abstracting individual items into groups. They over-focus, such that you see lots of OCD-type behaviors. Zorost gives the example of a person being hit by a moving car in a parking lot because he can’t shift his attention away from all the parked cars.
To the autist, each car must be inspected in detail, with full attention … and while the autistic’s attention is laser-focused on one particular parked car – “1998 Ford Taurus, midnight blue, left front tire is a little low, right taillight out, bumper sticker near muffler”, etc. — he fails to notice the moving car that hits him.
As opposed to the non-autistic, who is capable of “abstracting” that situation into a realistic threat assessment. He can’t even give you a ballpark guess of how many parked cars are in the lot, much less any details about any of them, because he has abstracted them out: “a bunch of parked cars” = no threat, so his attention is free to roam around looking for moving cars.
I instinctively want to argue against this, because it appears to me that Leftists are nothing but abstraction. They don’t see individuals; they see huge identity groups. That’s why they see an anti-feminist woman or a conservative homosexual or whatever as not really X. It makes sense to them, somehow, to say that Amy Coney Barrett isn’t really a woman, Clarence Thomas isn’t really black, and so on.
[…]
The non-autistic sees [a child’s drawing of a train as] a rectangle, two wheels, some lines underneath, and thinks “train,” because he’s boiled it down to the essentials — a train is a wheeled vehicle that moves on tracks. That’s good enough to cover pretty much all “train” situations; we can add or subtract details as needed to get to this or that particular train (e.g. electric vs. steam), or a wheeled vehicle which moves on tracks that’s not a train (e.g. a rollercoaster).
So, applied to people: I see a black man walking towards me on the street and I have one set of assumptions in my head. First I see just “person”; then I realize it’s a man; then I realize it’s a black man; then I realize it’s an elderly black man; then I realize it’s Clarence Thomas. All the while I’m dialing in both my perceptions and my behavior — I’m not at much physical risk from an elderly man, and I’m at nearly zero risk from Clarence Thomas, specifically, so I modify my behavior. When I was still just at the “black male” stage of the recognition process, I behaved very differently.
If I’m reading Zorost correctly, the autistic would do something like the reverse. He wouldn’t be able to make any judgments until he’d fully inspected the individual man in front of him at close range and verified that yes, this is Clarence Thomas. And then the confusion kicks in, because he — the autistic — has memorized the rule “black man = Liberal” and here’s Clarence Thomas. Error 404.
Severian, “Why Are They Always Underdogs?”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-07.
September 24, 2026
QotD: The perpetual progressive underdogs
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