The architecture of autistic order
When I first got involved in left politics in the early nineties, an older comrade asked me how I thought we’d get to socialism.
I drew a straight line with an arrow.
Socialism was at the end. That was the goal. The arrow might have to move around obstacles but it always pointed in the same direction. Simple. Logical. Honest.
He looked at me and said it wasn’t as easy as that.
I never said it was easy. I just answered the question as clearly as I could. But I knew in that moment I was speaking a different language. So I started adapting. Fitting in. Saying things the way people expected them to be said.
It always felt contrived. It always felt illogical.
The arrow is still pointing in the same direction.
For decades the clinical establishment has looked at the autistic mind and seen deficit. Restricted interests. Social dysfunction. A fragmented internal life.
That is not my experience.
My experience is order. Sometimes relentless order. A mind that looks for the underlying machinery of things, the patterns, the systems, the internal logic that holds everything together or exposes where it’s broken.
What gets called disorder is usually just a different kind of order. One that doesn’t fit the world capitalism built.
In a capitalist world, order is social and hierarchical. It runs on unwritten rules, reading the room, knowing your place. The rules shift depending on who’s speaking, one standard for the CEO, another for the worker on the floor.
For an autistic mind, that’s not order. That’s chaos with a dress code.
My internal logic doesn’t work like that. A rule is a rule. If a standard is valid it applies universally, not selectively, not based on status, not depending on who’s watching.
When I point out a double standard I’m not being difficult. I’m identifying a structural fault. Hypocrisy is a mechanical failure of the truth.
This is why dialectical materialism made immediate sense to me when I encountered it.
Not because it confirmed what I already believed. Because it gave me a framework that actually followed its own logic. It explained injustice through material conditions and power rather than vague appeals to human nature. It replaced the baffling question of why people behave the way they do with a structured analysis of how the system is weighted.
For a mind that struggles with the unspoken and the inconsistent, socialist theory functions as a decoder ring.
It doesn’t ask you to read between the lines. It puts the lines on the table.
The friction is real though.
Capitalism produces chaos, economic, social, psychological. And an autistic mind trying to find logical consistency in a system built on contradiction will burn out. The disability doesn’t come from inside. It comes from the collision between a systematic mind and a society that runs on inconsistency and calls it normal.
That collision is exhausting. I know that from forty years of trying to adapt to it.
What I’m arguing for isn’t a world that accommodates autistic people as a minority group with special needs.
I’m arguing for a world built on consistent principles. Where the rules mean what they say. Where resources are distributed according to logic rather than power. Where the architecture of society actually follows its own blueprints.
That’s not a neurodivergent fantasy. That’s socialism.
The arrow is still pointing in the same direction it always was.
I still think the diagram was right.
PABLO