Self-identified incel Alek Minassian is currently on trial in Canada for the van attacks that killed ten in Toronto in 2018. His defense? That his autism made him do it, leaving him not criminally responsible for the killings.
One of the psychiatrists testifying on his behalf argued that his thinking was so distorted by “extreme autism” that he was virtually psychotic. The other argued that Minassian was so lacking in empathy he was unable to understand that what he did was wrong.
There are several problems with these arguments. For one thing, autism is not remotely the same as psychosis. For another, despite Minassian’s lack of empathy — a trait shared by many violent criminals — he made it clear in interviews with the two experts that he does indeed know the difference between right and wrong. It seems unlikely that the defense’s logic will convince the judge trying the case.
More broadly, the “autism defense” is distressing because it essentially throws every law-abiding autistic person under the bus, suggesting some sort of innate connection between autism and acts of extreme violence that simply doesn’t exist. As Autism Canada has pointed out in a response to the defense’s arguments, autistic people are far more likely to be the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators.
In an essay on the case, autism activist Sarah Kurchak wrote
The lingering idea that autism alone can make a person violent and dangerous, and the idea that autistic people can’t experience empathy—and that those who don’t experience empathy are dangerous and incapable of caring about others in alternative ways—affects everything from the way that people treat us socially, to our employment prospects, to whether we are able to access autism testing and services at all.
Reading about the Minassian trial, I’m struck by the similarities between his lawyers’ arguments and the ways in which Minassian’s fellow incels also use autism as an excuse for their own foul ideology.
Many incels claim to be autistic, or at least on the spectrum, though it’s hard to know how many of these people are legit and how many are self-diagnosed pretenders. And while it’s likely that the social awkwardness that tends to come with autism has led to romantic difficulties for some incels, autism doesn’t explain or excuse their adoption of a hateful, misogynistic set of beliefs, or the cheering on of mass killers like Minassian and incel “saint” Elliot Rodger, or the acts of outright harassment of women and girls that some incels indulge in.
Just as there is nothing inherent in autism that led to Minassian’s rampage, there is nothing inherent in autism that leads to the so-called “Black Pill.” Pretending there is some innate connection is an insult to the overwhelming majority of autistic people, who are as horrified by incels as the rest of us.
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@.45:
Well, that’s one person who’s autistic but not super-sober, I guess. Adding this data point …
Not unless it was part of a systematic pattern. If every different avenue of communication was malfunctioning at once, so regular phone calls also weren’t getting through, and emails from the boss went straight into the spam filter or similar, and Skype and Zoom both kept crashing on your laptop, and the collaboration webforums on the work intranet went down simultaneously with all of the above, then I’d suspect something more than a simple phone malfunction.
Same if there was an ongoing series of “things making your boss mad at you”, with say your work somehow magically becoming less satisfactory between your completing it and their seeing it for a period of time, then that stops but the phone delays your receiving their text messages for a time, then that stops but something starts systematically interfering with your ability to arrive at work on time, then that stops but some other thing starts that your boss blames you for and that you don’t understand and can’t control … if something like that kept happening, and as soon as one thing stopped another thing started that had nothing in common with the previous thing except that it made your boss mad at you, then also I would suspect something intentional and malicious.
Same if something showed clear signs of being contrived and unnatural. A “bug” in communications software that only affected inbound messages from 3 addresses in the entire world, your boss’s work number, your boss’s personal mobile number, and your boss’s secretary’s work number, while everything else got through in a timely fashion, would be obviously suspect.
From the sounds of it, though, your phone bug affected all inbound numbers equally and didn’t fit into any larger pattern with nominally-unrelated problems all happening to focus on the same higher-level thing, such as your work relationships, either sequentially or simultaneously.
@Surplus:
You could say the first ghostbusters did the same. Janine had a thing for Egon as well.
I had huge crushes on both Egon and Louis as well, so definitely a girl after my own heart.
Also, on the music thing…
I’m a singer, but with my reading disabilities, I’ve always had tremendous trouble reading music. I mean, I can do it, but it can take me 20 minutes to get through a measure, and I may not completely “get it” until many, many tries. However, because of the *synesthesia that can happen with sensory processing disorder, I have sound-color associations, which makes it really easy to learn all my music by ear.
*synesthesia is such a wonderful gift to me, I honestly don’t know what neurotypicals do without it.
@ yutolia
The evidence now seems to be that everyone is essentially born with synesthesia, and it’s only as a baby develops cognitive functions that different bits of the brain take on different processing roles for each sense and start to compartmentalise. But the level of compartmentalising seems to vary among individuals.
There’s some fascinating research on this though.
One experiment basically trained someone to be able to process magnetic fields inputted from an external device. So in the end he could navigate blindfolded.
And have you seen the blind bloke who can ride a bike by echo location? There’s that old cliche that when you lose a sense the others compensate. In this case though this seems to be literally true. What’s especially interesting is that the bits of his brain processing what are now auditory inputs are the ones previously used for vision. So somehow the brain has repurposed whatever neural pathways were utilised before.
@Alan
OK, never mind. I’m not that special (not that I really thought that to begin with). I’m sorry, I feel like I’ve probably offended a lot of people on the board.
I have been doing this a lot lately where I think I’m way smarter or something than I actually am, and then I say really stupid things that prove to everyone else what a complete *idiot I am.
I think it means I really need to shut the fuck up for a while.
*I just realized, I’m always going after people for using ableist language against others but I never noticed just how freely I use it against myself. I’m doing everything wrong now!!!
Sorry for the overreaction, I’m not doing so well this morning.
@Yutolia
I don’t think you offended anyone, it’s fine. FWIW I read your post as sharing something interesting about yourself. I don’t have synesthesia but I know a few other musicians who do, so it was interesting to hear your experience.
@ yutolia
Oh, I didn’t think you said anything untoward and I wasn’t trying to downplay your experience. I apologise if it came across that way. I actually found what you said really interesting. It’s a fascinating topic and it comes back to this thing of what’s regarded as a ‘disorder’ and what’s just a particular way of experiencing the world. Human perception is an amazing topic; and it would be a pretty boring world if everyone processed things in the same way.
More power to your elbow!
@Naglfar:
Thank you for this.
While I was writing that I also was accusing myself of just flaming out for attention, but I realized in reading your answer that I’m really looking for someone to give me permission to not be so hard on myself.
And I don’t need anyone’s permission! I can stop now.
@Alan:
Oh I totally agree, it is really fascinating.
A little bit on why I still use the “disorder” terminology…
So, this type of neurodivergence has had several different names (including sensory integration disorder, sensory integration dysfunction, sensory processing dysfunction, etc) none of which really cover or describe what it actually is.
For example, there are some aspects of it that have to be treated if possible (I had to go through vision therapy to get my eyes to both receive information at the same time, instead of my brain deciding I was blind in one eye at a time, and I couldn’t tell where ). But the rest of it is not treatable, and that is mostly the synesthesia part. Our sensory neural pathways are different from neurotypicals in that they can be way more combined like you said, or there are things that don’t connect at all (my sense of touch doesn’t seem to be connected to anything, and so sometimes I’ll know what I’m looking at but while touching it, it still seems like a foreign object).
And I know it’s possible that some neurotypicals do this to an extent, I just have always felt like the ones I’ve met are some kind of neurodivergent people as well, maybe just not diagnosed. But I know those of us with SPD have it a lot more, specifically because our type of neurodivergence is so sense-related.
Sorry for overreacting before, today is a hard day.
@Alan:
Regarding the guy doing echolocation…
I remember reading an article about that. As you noted, he was apparently using a lot of the ‘spatial’ part of his visual cortex to handle auditory input for this; they verified that using an MRI, and even did things like spoof the sounds to produce fake echoes while he was in the MRI to see how his brain reacted and track it all.
The other interesting point: he could teach other people how to do this. This even worked for people who had previously had normal vision and whose blindness was only temporary, though once their vision came back most of them stopped doing that anymore.
There were also a number of articles over the last couple of months because of a report that came out suggesting that the reasons there tended to be clusters of people who associated the same sets of colours with letters could apparently be tied to old school refrigerator magnets of the letters. Meaning the colour associations weren’t random, they were keying off older memories because these people had always seen the ‘W’ as green, for example.
Perception is interesting in a lot of ways. I’ve joked before that ‘some people have photographic memories… me, I have a phonographic memory.’ I remember songs really well, and I can often recognize people by voice before face. Heck, I once recognized one of my co-workers who had just stepped into the bathroom stall next to mine just by listening to the breathing because of particular resonances that came through there.
@Article:
At the very least, one should hope that the prosecution will be bringing in its own expert witnesses to thoroughly shoot down the whole ‘blaming it on autism’ idea.
As others have noted, Minassian has certainly demonstrated no particular remorse, but has also shown quite clearly that he knew what he was doing.
I remember comments before (maybe even here?) that defined the difference between autism and sociopathy as being sort of ‘external’ versus ‘internal’ empathy issues. Apologies in advance for anything I get wrong, but the idea was that someone with autism generally has empathy internally, but doesn’t necessarily have the same level of subconscious parsing to pick up what other people are feeling. Sociopaths, on the other hand, often have that external parsing ability (it’s easier to manipulate people that way) but don’t actually feel the emotions themselves. They’re not particularly related aside from both reacting to other’s emotions in atypical ways.
My own experience with those who I know have autism of some sort is that they tend to be a lot more careful about social interactions because they know that they’re not picking up the details well, on top of the ‘fewer spoons’ issues that others have already mentioned.
Someone like Minassian could easily be both.
@Jenora Feuer
Yes, this is what I do. I’m always really nervous I’ll say something wrong or miss something and ruin the conversation, so I’m very careful.
@ jenora
Brains are amazing. I just find human consciousness and perception almost overwhelming. We’re big bags of random protoplasm yet we are how the universe views itself.
In other, sadder, science news. I’ve been viewing the footage of the Aricebo collapse. What a loss. That dish in China is a great piece of kit; but it can’t do radar; so Aricebo will be sorely missed; both for the science, and just as an integral part of human history.
The amount of mental effort I put into any conversation to just remember to blink so I’m not staring intently into someone’s face to try and focus on what there saying is outstanding. So much so I end up not paying attention to what they saying to me because I’m trying not performed some arbitrary social cue act instead of actually have a conversation with someone.
As another autistic reader/ lurker of this site, I’m obviously joining the outrage against using autism as an excuse.
I do still run into the notion, fairly often, that autistic people have “less empathy” than neurotypicals — a notion Minassian’s lawyer is taking advantage of. I want to point out, in case it’s news to anyone here, that this is an illusion. Austists do have a harder time empathizing with neurotypicals, it’s true. But this is in exactly the same way that neurotypicals have a harder time empathizing with autists.
In other words, it’s harder for anyone to imagine other people’s reactions/ motivations when the other people are different. It causes me more trouble, as an autistic person, only because I’m dramatically outnumbered. But other autistic people tend to make perfect sense to me; they’re often my favorite students to teach, for example.
The slander of bringing it up in criminal trials, of course, is that both neurotypical and autistic people tend to hate being assaulted or tortured or murdered, for exactly the same reasons. And therefore, of course Alex, like any of us, knows it’s an evil thing to do.
@Yutolia, I’m sorry you’re having such a hard day. I don’t think you did anything wrong or offensive.
@Lainy
For me, it’s like that but with eye contact. It’s just so hard to do that and pay attention to what someone is actually saying at the same time.
@Naglfar
My audio processing is shit so staring at people face is just one of the ways I’ve coped to try to figure out what the hell is going on
@Naglfar
Like it’s so bad my husband had to repeat his marriage proposal to me like 3 times
@Viscaria:
Thank you. Mornings after I didn’t sleep because I’m out of pain meds and have to wait are really hard.
Thank you all for being such an awesome community.
@Surplus
“Well, that’s one person who’s autistic but not super-sober, I guess. Adding this data point …”
Shoot, I didn’t realize I could also gain the status of data point. Should have put that in. ;D
More seriously though, got no official diagnosis right now, only the implications from those here reading my anecdotes. Seems pretty likely the more I read about it and look over what everyone is saying here, but technically no professional has weighed in. (For whatever that’s worth. Sounds like they diagnosis autism much the same as anyone here. Do I really need their opinion?)
At any rate, I’m guessing the long convoluted scenario you suggest with my phone is a variation of something you experienced?
No offense, but it does offer me a perspective on what my less educated associates must feel like when I start over explaining something to them though. I’ve gotten variations of: “Seriously dude, I just want a yes or no, can we do it? Not a blow by blow of the process…”
@ yutolia
You’re pretty awesome yourself. I enjoy your posts. I hope life starts treating you right soon. You deserve it.
@.45
Not really unless there’s some specific issue you’re dealing with that you want therapy or another treatment for.
@Brian B.:
Maybe this means we’d be a vital part of any first contact team. We have more practice than almost anyone else at dealing routinely with people who are different in such a fashion, which seems like it would be a very useful expertise to have available in the event of an encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence.
Speaking of which …
@Alan Robertshaw:
Sounds like the alien infiltrators are conspiring to weaken our planetary defenses to me! 🙂
@Naglfar:
Or you need a doctor’s note for something. To take time off school or work, say, or to get government disability benefits …
@ surplus
Well, we do keep sending them unsolicited dick pics; so it’s understandable if they’re annoyed with us.
@Surplus
I agree, also given that a common autistic trait is ability to recognize and analyze patterns, which could be very useful in encountering unknown languages or customs.
I would assume that falls under specific issues.
Fair enough, I didn’t think of that one. I’ve never gotten disability benefits and am not sure if I qualify, so idk how that works these days (also probably depends where .45 is located, I hear it’s a nightmare in the US to get and keep benefits).