The colonization of land is made easier and more efficient by the colonization of minds. The outlawing of language and religious and ceremonial practices and the indoctrination of children in the language and religion of the occupying powers was a fundamental feature of British capitalism’s colonial expansion. [..]
This was an attempt to eradicate ways of thinking that prevent people from participating in the brutalization of each other and of the living world. [..]

Capitalism depends on commodification, the process of turning parts of the world into objects which can be traded in the marketplace.   But you can’t commodify a forest or a mountain if people call it by a name which recognizes it as alive.  Patriarchy depends on the enforcement of gender roles.  But you can’t enforce patriarchal gender roles within a culture that has no words that denote gender, such as the Tlingit, unless you rob people of their language. So the process of colonization requires either a process of forced conversion and inculturation — the liberal alternative — or a process of eradication.   In both Ireland and North America, British capitalism, engaged in both. [..]

In its commodification of all things, capitalism views bodies and minds as instruments of production and reproduction, and values them accordingly.Psychology, psychiatry, and neurology, like all forms of medicine under capitalism,  serve primarily to maximize worker productivity.  They give rise to pathologizing discourses of “neurotypicality,” [..]

My friend jim mcdonald recently suggested that we should replace the word “neurotypical” with the word “neurodomesticated,” which conveys the reality that discourses of neurotypicality are really all about enforcing compliance with social and cultural norms. [..] The ways of thinking that emerge from unbound Autsitic minds tend to be subversive. Autistic systems-oriented thinking, developed to its fullest potentials, means insight into the rich depths of underlying patterns and structures, this spells trouble for capitalism, which needs to keep bodies and minds compliant in order to maintain production, and needs to maintain.