In fact, the list is endless. Even worse, it shifts constantly with time and place. It is possible to cross a room and at the same time to change dramatically what is socially-acceptable and what is not. For most people, the vagueness, complexity, and mutability of social rules is no particular challenge, even if it is occasionally a cause of discomfort. For people who find themselves somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum, even the most ordinary social encounter can be like walking into a darkened room cluttered with fine crystal waiting to be broken with a single misstep or careless swipe of the arm.
Even though I have practically begged to be diagnosed somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum, no one who is familiar either with the actual symptoms or the diagnostic criteria will agree that such a diagnosis would be justified. I don't even get off with the excuse that I am socially inept. I can be very engaging. Smooth, even. Sometimes, I even seem to understand a little too well what's going on, and at the same time seem to be either defiant or devious.
I seem always to be sizing people up, and, in fact, I am. I'm trying use conscious cognitive strategies to compensate for my lack of reliable social instincts. In the best of times, I get away with it. In times that are less than best, I can seem like varying degrees of a bad actor. When my social facade fails catastrophically, really bad things can happen. Since I can do well, even very well, sometimes, people will assume that when I don't do well, it's either because I don't want to or because I can't be bothered. In any case, I am deemed an appropriate candidate for the harshest of social sanctions, including complete ostracism. I don't do things that would land me in jail. There are others whom I take to be a lot like me who are not so fortunate.
Most people aren't really up to the task of ostracizing group members. That task is generally left to social bullies. Some social bullies can act on their own, but most require the support of an even more specialized group: the social judges.
I feel a great deal of compassion for some social bullies. Some have been on the wrong side of the social judges and don't want to repeat the experience. They look to the social judges for cues and act so as to secure the continuing approval of the social judges, who may not like the social bullies but who need someone to do their dirty work for them. Like most bullies, social bullies are really weaklings.
Social judges, who are anything but weak, are usually self-appointed, sometimes with the advice and consent of the social group, but often on the strength of nothing more than the self-certainty of the self-appointed social judges.
Eldest children will think it unfair, but, in my experience, self-appointed social judges are most often an eldest child. These are the ones who are most likely to inherit the mantle of self-certainty that most parents affect, and that parents who are narcissists almost invariably have. If the self-appointed social judge is not an eldest child, then some other circumstance in life has led to the mental distortions that are necessary to believe that one's own perceptions are always accurate, no matter what degree of destruction those perceptions may bring upon others.
I have found no correlation between mental acuity and self-appointment as a social judge. Social rules tend to confer higher status on individuals with qualities that are deemed desirable, whether it is intelligence, or appearance, or wealth, but I have found the correlation between social status and being a social judge to be weak or non-existent. The principal qualification of social judges is that they are certain of their own judgment, whether that certainty is supported by external evidence or not.
Social judges are the bane of my existence.
To make matters far worse, I can rarely conceal the contempt I feel for social judges. Now, anyone with a scrap of social sense will realize how dangerous and even self-destructive that failing is, but I don't seem to be able to help myself. In my ordering of the circles of hell, there is none lower than where social judges belong.
It takes very little to set me off. Someone who is just a little too quick or too insistent in offering unsolicited criticism. Someone whose manner suggests there is so much they would say if only their superior social instincts didn't restrain them. Someone who too often rudely changes the topic of conversation, leaves too many comments hanging in the air, or who simply turns and walks away when something meets with their disapproval.
Far from being the superior human beings that self-appointed social judges imagine themselves to be, the only real category in which social judges are superior is self-delusion, usually manifested as narcissism. Or is it narcissism manifested as self-delusion? Who knows. In any case, they are people I want to avoid at all costs.
