Abu Cortex (AuDHD) 🇸🇱

Autists & psychopaths are opposites on empathy. There's cognitive empathy & there's affective empathy. Cognitive empathy (understanding & reading mental states & cues): autists struggle, psychopaths do not. Psychopaths can even have better cognitive empathy than normies! Affective empathy (feeling others' emotions & pain): psychopaths struggle, autists do not. Some autists even experience hyper-empathy on this one! In other words, psychopaths can read others quite well; they just won't empathize with them. This can lead to extremely manipulative behavior because they don't care when they hurt other people. They don't feel what others are feeling, so it doesn't pain them to harm someone the way it would most of us. Autists? We can't read social cues well, but once we know someone else is hurt, we feel it & we care! So instead of manipulative behavior, you get someone who frequently *accidentally* offends people, but isn't *trying* to be harmful. That's why psychopaths are feared & autists are either disliked or pitied. Cuz what sounds scarier: the person who can't read the room but cares, or the person who CAN read the room & work it without feeling guilt if they hurt anyone? Incidentally, this is why one of my fave shows is Hannibal. Hannibal is a psychopath; Will Graham says he's more on the autistic spectrum. Hannibal is pure manipulative evil; Will has such hyper-empathy he can empathize even with psychopaths. But it's obviously easier to use great room-reading abilities & zero fucks given to your advantage than the polar opposite, for obvious reasons. And I simply don't agree that psychopaths & autists share the same pathology. Like I said, they're actually kinda polar opposite!