Arbitrary made up rules governing speech

And now back to the Autistic Asylum portion of this blog. Earlier this week, while complaining about a right winger using violent terms, a left winger insulted my paticular mental illness. I like Caelum Et Terra- Heaven and Earth- because while I am a horrid social conservative, in fine Catholic fashion I am a fiscal liberal- and the counterculture magazine this blog is a revival of was a staple of midwest distributism in the 1980s and 1990s. I also wasn't offended by the insult. if anything, it shows the great strides we've made as autistics to at least be noticed by society rather than locked away in asylums. But it does bring up an interesting point that people like me, with Asperger's, are extremely bad at.

There are a lot of unwritten, arbitrary rules governing what neurotypicals think is civilized behavior. I say think- because some of these rules actively destroy civilization. Not talking about sex in the 1950s, led to the sexual revolution of the 1960s (well, in part, I'm working on a post for the other part, a new theory about the cold war, economics and the sexual revolution that will likely appear sometime next week). And the violence of the protest in the 1960s, clearly led to the unwritten rule Daniel was talking about to not use violent analogies. As the use of asylums has led to the unwritten rule not to insult the mentally ill.

Both of these are completely arbitrary and ahistorical- so why worry about one and not the other?