The six fingered man

Society requires conformity. It enforces this conformity from early childhood. Anyone who falls outside the norm is snuffed out and beat down. Thus humans are trained to be able to sniff out weakness, imperfections, and harmful elements from society and eliminate them. But how do we distinguish between harmful imperfections and beneficial evolutionary mutations?

Society seems certain that particular differences are bad, e.g. autism and personality disorders. As the autistics and aspies argue effectively, wouldn't a world filled with auties function just as well if not better than a world of neurotypicals? People argue whether "special accomodations" are warranted for certain disabilities, but "special" is defined based on individual perspective. As one autie argued, if you were blind you might think that street lamps are an unnecessarily expensive "special accomodation" for the sighted.

When confronted with difference, the neurotypical automatically thinks flaw and/or threat. While double jointed, webbed flipper feet might be fine on Michael Phelps, as a general rule parents want "normal" children. But what is so good about "normal" anyway? Take for instance their precious empathy. As Adam Smith pointed out in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, humans can "feel for each other," but those feelings may be inaccurate or incomplete, and in any case emotions shouldn't be relied on to make decisions. As summarized by wikipedia:

If we sympathize with the feelings of another we judge that their feelings are just, and if we do not sympathize we judge that their feelings are unjust.

[Smith acknowledges that] it is not possible to sympathize with bodily states or "appetites which take their origin in the body."

Passions which "take their origins from a particular turn or habit of the imagination" are "little sympathized with". These include love.

In response to expressions of anger, hatred, or resentment, it is likely that the impartial spectator will not feel anger in sympathy with the offended but instead anger toward the offended for expressing such an aversive.

Of grief and joy, Smith notes that small joys and great grief are assured to be returned with sympathy from the impartial spectator, but not other degrees of these emotions. Great joy is likely to be met with envy, so modesty is prudent for someone who has come upon great fortune or else suffer the consequences of envy and disapprobation.

Smith makes clear that we should take very good care to not act on the passions of anger, hatred, resentment, for purely social reasons, and instead imagine what the impartial spectator would deem appropriate, and base our action solely on a cold calculation.

And Smith's observations regarding conformity:

Each "class" of things has a "peculiar conformation which is approved of" and the beauty of each member of a class is determined by the extent to which it has the most "usual" manifestation of that "conformation": "Thus, in the human form, the beauty of each feature lies in a certain middle, equally removed from a variety of other forms that are ugly."

If being social means to hate difference and to hate the different, then I am proud to be antisocial.