Dear John,

One of the great advantages of being autistic is that you’re immune from some of the psychological bugs that plague “normal” people.

One of them is around charisma. Charisma is like a superpower, where someone is really convincing to those around them, not because of good argument but because of lots of non-verbal signals. It’s really powerful, but also really dangerous and gives lots of potential for people with charisma to abuse others.

Because it relies on non-verbal communication, you’re mostly immune to charisma. Here are some examples.

Tony Blair (I think in your time he is Leader of the Opposition) was seen as being enormously charismatic. He used to say things like “I can apologise for X” or “I’m sorry that you feel like that” and people would act as if he’d apologised. He hadn’t, of course, and you saw through it immediately. To be fair to him, I do recall him actually apologising once, which is more than I can say for some other politicians.

Several times I’ve met people who make a point of complimenting everyone they meet. Apparently that’s a charisma thing. Your response of course is to listen to the compliments they give to others and rapidly conclude that they are insincere and just doing for the effect it has on others. They are therefore not to be trusted either in their compliments or in general. That’s how you take it anyway – I now try to give them a little more leeway in case they have been (wrongly) raised to think that’s polite.

Another psychological bug you’re mostly immune to is peer pressure. You’re so used to being different (and to other people being wrong or stupid) and so ignorant of the social bonding effects of conformity that you feel peer pressure far less strongly than others. If everyone else is buying some new tech gizmo, you’ll still want to do your own cost / benefit analysis rather than going with the crowd.

If there’s a choice between being right but on your own or in a crowd and wrong, you might feel lonely, but you wouldn’t even notice it had been a choice. And I know this will surprise you, but that’s actually really unusual.

You’d also be sorely tempted to look down on everyone in the other group, but that’s more normal.

And in the right contexts that gives you some massive advantages in life – both that you are more willing to give honest feedback and that you are more willing to receive it and to build a team with people who disagree with you.

Other people might say that’s superpowers. It kind of is, but it’s really just having your weaknesses in different places from most other people.

All the best,

Future John