No…autistic people don’t struggle with complexity.

We struggle with complex bullshit. Complexity that doesn’t stay in contact with reality. Complexity built to preserve delusion…systems of thought that multiply explanation instead of reduce error. It’s not the number of layers…it’s whether the layers track the thing they claim to represent.

I’m fine with complexity when it emerges from feedback, remains falsifiable, stays anchored in pattern, can be broken open and examined, and responds when something stops working.

I’m not fine with just-so stories, self-reinforcing abstractions, theories immune to contradiction, semantic inflation (changing definitions to preserve belief), or socially protected bullshit that silences doubt.

I’m just fine with structure…it’s insulation I have a problem with.

Bullshit = complexity that survives by outmaneuvering feedback.

And yet………in the early stages of understanding something, I do feel averse to complexity.

Like why the people around me seem fine when just about nothing in the world is fine. How did they get like this? Surely their disposition isn’t life’s baseline, or the earth wouldn’t have lasted as long as it has.

I don’t like lists of reasons. I don’t look for explanations as much as singularities. Something that collapses the list. Something that makes that fork I’ve been writing about…the one where some groups of people stayed connected to reality and others adopt fictions that ultimately lead to genocide / ecological plunder / extinction…inevitable, traceable, and unambiguous (without resorting to mysticism, virtue, or accident).

I’m allergic to narrative sprawl (I know, I know) masquerading as theory. I don’t want an ecosystem of causes…I want a keystone fracture.

If the starting conditions are the same, why does one group protect an erroneous model of reality, and another let it break?

I can’t help but feel that the first real difference is what the group is optimizing for, and whether that goal is visible to them or not. I think one group is optimizing for predictive accuracy, and the other is unconsciously optimizing for social coherence. There. I said it.

I don’t claim they know they’re doing it. But every signal, every decision, every reaction is weighed (subconsciously) against one of those metrics. When the model breaks, that internal orientation determines the response. If the priority is accuracy? “The model must adapt.” If the priority is coherence? “The contradiction must be contained.”

So not values or beliefs, but a deep system preference for truth-tracking versus conflict-minimization. And based on everything I’ve encountered…that really feels true. It clicks.

And it begins long before it’s visible…it shows up in how children are corrected, how dissent is handled, how stories are told, whether doubt is sacred or dangerous, and whether speech is relational or investigative. One group sharpens awareness and the other flattens tension.

Because social coherence “works,” doesn’t it? It feels good. It stabilizes something.

So the first difference, the root divergence, the fork, is not belief, structure, or insight. It’s which pain the group is more willing to feel: the pain of being wrong, or the pain of disagreement. When error appears, will we change the story…or suppress the signal?