You hear all sorts of things about autistic people that are conflicting and only sometimes true. Autistic people can't tell when they're being lied to. Autistic people have a strong moral compass. Autistic people are good at or obsessed with categorization. Autistic people need rules explicitly spelled out. Autistic people think social rules are stupid. Autistic people are good at navigating bureaucracy. Autistic people are predisposed to noncompliance. Autistic people hate unfairness and rulebreaking.
Sometimes the answer is that different autistic people are different people, but in this particular set of half-truths, I think it's a part of the ongoing process of describing autism (and other stigmatized neurotypes) primarily by what it looks like from the outside rather than what it actually feels like to experience it. Speaking for myself, these things are all related. The part of me that will not let rules be applied inconsistently when I sit on bullshit university committees, even if I think the rules themselves are bad, is the same part of me that tells all my queer friends that the categories are made up and the points don't matter and they should just be a bisexual lesbian boydyke if they want is the same part of me that was deeply 100% bought into evangelical protestantism until the day I wasn't.
It's pattern-extrapolation that's resistant to having rules with unknowable, unpredictable exceptions. It's fearful compliance to rules that were enforced upon you and a half-jealous half-worried push for fairness. It's ignorant noncompliance with rules you don't understand. It's morally-compelled compliance with rules we think will make the world better. It's morally-compelled noncompliance with rules we've come to understand enough to realize they're harmful or stupid.
It's an almost unlivable discomfort with an unanswered "why" or, worse, a dismissed "why".
If I had to speculate on the cognitive difference leading to this, I think it's that autistic folks tend to find intuitive thinking harder and deliberative reasoning easier, relative to allistic folks (or at least that our intuitive thinking doesn't lead us to the same conclusions allistic folks reach with it). If you're used to intuiting social cues, rules, and so on intuitively, non-linguistically, you're going to find the person failing to intuit the rules or asking you to spell it out logically, then poking holes in your explanation to be annoying, demanding, or even impetuous. If you struggle with the intuitive reasoning that everyone else is using and the kinds of rules or norms propogated by intuition resist full, sensible explanations that can make sense to you, of course everyone is going to seem capricious, unexamined, and illogical.
Compliance and noncompliance are external manifestations of the same tendency to apply considered reasoning to things others allocate to intuitive reasoning, because our intuition does not take us where it takes neurotypicals. Intuiting rules is rarely an option for us. Whether we end up deciding that we don't owe arbitrary rules anything, that everyone has to follow the rules that were used to punish us, or that for now it's safer to go along with rules we don't understand or agree with depends entirely on the specifics of the situation--who the authority is and how they enact that, what explanations we do manage to glean, past experiences and traumas, our other beliefs and morals, and all those other messy parts of being an individual person.
I don't know how much sense this will make to people outside of my own head, especially if you're not familiar with the idea that some things considered "autistic behaviors" may be trauma responses shared by many people who have been mistreated for being different, or with the double empathy gap. But I want to bring together these set of honestly-contradictory stereotypes[1] to talk about the differences between autistic and allistic relationships to rules. It's one of many differences that I don't think will ever make sense if you try to categorize the externally-visible parts first and work backwards from there.
Any time an autistic person has to learn a new category or a new rule, they are holding it up to their magnifying glass and weighing it against their own internal values and understanding of the world. I think some of the other interpretations, like autistic people as hyper-competent always-objective activists or as heartless unempathetic assholes with no respect for social norms, are all wrong because they attempt to universalize the values that autistic people are using for their yardstick[2]. They'll always describe some subset of autistic folks, incompletely.
Stereotypes that are, often, proud self-identifiers! Lots of autistic people will speak proudly of how they can cut through the bullshit and won't follow dumb rules. It was exactly that which first inspired me to write this piece. ↩︎
I, for example, am a big believer in the social importance of chatting about the weather, that thing which unites us with the people in our physical community no matter how hard we try to avoid it, and this often puts me vehemently at odds with the no-smalltalk folks (autistic or otherwise) who see it as an unimportant and uninteresting bother. And I don't actually think either of us is wrong. ↩︎