General discussion

Well thanks for the kind reviews ;)

No, I don't work in marketing, though the first few years of my working life I was in sales. As a person with Asperger's Syndrome, I lack the abilities which most people naturally possess, to subconsciously analyse and respond to non-verbal communication (body language, voice tonal/pitch modulation and other prosodic information, facial expressions and so on), so I had to train myself to *consciously* analyse these behaviours in my day-to-day interactions with other people. Straight out of high school, I threw myself in the deep end and worked door-to-door sales for almost a year, as a kind of 'crash course' in face-to-face communication. Best thing I ever did, it got me started on the road to understanding people (including, most importantly, myself).

At the same time I also explored many related social conventions and the way various parts of society interact (commerce, the family, legislature, religion, etc). While I can't speak for all 'Aspys', I can say that at least some of us have trouble seeing the value or sense in things like pleasantries, taboos, advertising, and a number of other social conventions and constructs which are essentially ubiquitous in modern life. In some contexts (especially courtship, or touchy situations like funerals), common social conventions and prohibitions can be immensely frustrating and counter-productive to the mind of someone who abhors inefficiency and excessive emotional baggage. Okay, it's difficult to properly convey the point I'm trying to make there, but suffice to say that it is only after actively pursuing understanding of these things, that I am in a position to successfully operate and flourish in a social environment; I could just have easily been a hermit pumping out code from his basement but I decided I wanted a real life instead :P

So in a way I guess I can claim to have a better understanding of human motivation than some people, as I lack many of the automatic responses that 'normal' people exhibit, and thus have to actually think before responding to social stimuli. I of course still make plenty of stupid decisions, but I know WHY they were stupid ;)

I'm not sure that this insight would have headed off the Nazis, though - if the Stanley Milgram experiment showed us anything, it's that people tend to turn off their brains (or at least their sense of personal responsibility) when asked to do something by a person with a badge. So long as we have people trained to defer to authority (everything from a parent's "Because I said so!", to full-scale religious or military indoctrination), we will have problems with those people's psyches being hijacked for nefarious purposes and detrimental agendas.

Feel free to drop me a message on my YouTube if you would like to discuss any of these topics further; it seems to be where I spend most of my time these days, when I'm not working :)

- Gliktch

"religion fullfils a need for weak minded individuals who have the desire to be forgiven today for what they are about to do tomorrow"
While I pretty much agree with that specific statement (nice humor BTW), I wouldn't label all religious people as "weak minded" (don't know if that's what you intended).

Am not by any means a religious person myself, so I'm not defending them. But Jesuits, Thomas Aquinus, William F. Buckley Jr., and a few others I can't think of right now, are hardly "weak minded".

I think Gliktch/Cheesetrap was talking about Bible Thumping fundamentalists that promote things like "Intelligent Design" versus traditional evolution (or the morons that crashed into the World Trade Center and thought they would have 72 virgins to play with in the hereafter).

Richard Dawkins has some interesting counterarguments to that Intelligent Design stuff in his latest book.