Autism, Anomaly, and the Next Paradigm

My son is autistic. That single fact has changed how I see almost everything; how I listen, how I plan, how I speak, and how I show up in rooms. It hasn’t made me more noble or enlightened. It’s made me more honest. It’s made me face how much of life runs on scripts, and how quickly those scripts fall apart for someone who doesn’t speak the same language, literally or socially.

At first, I thought I needed to teach him how to fit. Now I think he’s showing me what no longer makes sense.

Kuhn and the Cracks That Matter

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn laid out how systems change. Slowly, at first. A model gets built. It works well enough. Until it doesn’t. Anomalies show up, facts, patterns, people, that the model can’t explain or include. The system patches itself for a while. But over time, if enough anomalies pile up, something breaks. A shift happens. The old model gets replaced with one that can hold more truth.

Autism, in this context, is not a diagnosis to manage. It’s an anomaly that the current system can’t fully explain or support. It doesn’t sit comfortably inside our education model, our work model, our political model, or our social one. And because of that, it shows us what those models miss.

My son’s life is not a metaphor. But the friction he encounters is not just personal—it’s structural. When the world expects people to tolerate noise, ambiguity, double standards, and performative connection, and someone simply won’t, or can’t, that’s not dysfunction. It’s data.

Where the Mismatch Shows Up

Start with education. My son doesn’t respond well to bells, group projects, or forced participation. But what happens when more students start asking for quiet, more flexible timing, and space to focus? What looked like a special need starts to look like a design flaw in the system.

Same goes for work. We still reward people who can network, present, and socialize well. But what if deep focus, consistency, and systems thinking are actually more useful for the kind of work emerging now? Autistic workers often burn out in office culture not because they lack ability, but because they’re allergic to games. The rest of us are just better at playing along—until we aren’t.

Technology is another place where the shift is happening. AI is now all about personalization. Systems adapt to the user, not the other way around. That’s the direction my son has needed all along. Structure tailored to how he learns and lives. Tools that let him move at his own rhythm. The tools that once looked like accommodations now look like previews.

Even in politics, the pattern holds. Autistic people often get written off as rigid or blunt. But maybe it’s just that they don’t speak in euphemism. They don’t perform outrage. They notice when the logic doesn’t hold. And they don’t hide it. That’s not always convenient. But in a system overrun by surface, it’s a kind of clarity we’re short on.

What This Isn’t

This isn’t about turning autism into a model for everyone. Autism isn’t a blueprint. It’s a pressure point. A reminder that the systems we built weren’t designed for variance—and now variance is everywhere. Autism just makes it harder to ignore.

It’s also not a claim that autistic traits are always helpful. Some make life harder, for the person and the people around them. Some don’t scale. But the discomfort autism creates in rigid systems is worth studying. Because that discomfort often marks the edge of what a system can handle. And the edge is where change begins.

A New Kind of Fit

If you take Kuhn seriously, the old model won’t break because someone writes a persuasive essay. It breaks when it can’t hold its own exceptions anymore. The people who don’t fit—the ones seen as outliers—become the reason the model has to evolve.

So the real question is not whether autism is good or bad. It’s whether we’re willing to learn from what it disrupts.

What if instead of optimizing people to fit the system, we asked whether the system still makes sense?

What if we built for alignment, not standardization?

What if we stopped rewarding performance and started designing for presence, clarity, and trust?

What if the future isn’t about fixing the anomaly—but building a model that can finally hold it?

That’s what my son has pushed me to ask. Not just how to support him—but how much I’ve been tolerating systems that barely work for me either.

This isn’t about making the world autistic. It’s about making it honest.

And that might be the only real starting point for what comes next.

• Ray