Neurodiversity, Jiwasa, and the Circulation of Leadership

Protecting difference without turning protection into a shield for harm

Let us imagine two situations.

In the first, an autistic person asks for meeting agendas in advance, direct language, scheduled breaks, and the possibility of responding in writing. Without these accommodations, sensory overload and the speed of conversation reduce their ability to participate. The support does not create an unfair advantage. It removes barriers so that their perception can become part of the group.

In the second situation, a leader humiliates employees, punishes disagreement, lies about environmental impacts, and justifies everything by saying:

“This is simply how I function. You must respect my difference.”

These situations are not equivalent.

The first person is asking for conditions that make participation possible.

The second is attempting to transform an explanation—whether genuine or fabricated—into permission to cause harm.

We therefore arrive at a dilemma that we need to think through together:

How can we fully protect neurodivergent people without allowing the language of inclusion to be appropriated by those who use wealth, authority, or ideology to escape the consequences of the harm they cause?

Neurodivergence is not the absence of humanity

For many years, autism was simplistically associated with a lack of empathy. More recent research presents a far more complex picture.

Empathy is not a single capacity. We can distinguish, for example, between recognizing another person’s emotional state, affectively resonating with their suffering, and feeling a moral commitment to care.

Research on the double empathy problem also suggests that misunderstanding may be reciprocal. Non-autistic people can likewise have difficulty accurately interpreting the experiences and emotional expressions of autistic people.

Therefore, differences in communication, eye contact, facial expression, or response time do not demonstrate an absence of affection, moral concern, or commitment to the collective.

An autistic person may fail to recognize irony immediately and still suffer deeply after learning that someone was hurt.

Another person may recognize emotions with great precision and use that knowledge to manipulate.

Research on the so-called Dark Triad—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy as research constructs, not automatic clinical diagnoses—shows that cognitive empathy may coexist with manipulation. Understanding what another person feels does not guarantee concern for their well-being.

We must not confuse difficulty translating social signals with the deliberate use of people as instruments for profit, power, or ideological victory.

The “mercenary of monetization” is not a neurotype

The expression mercenary of monetization should be understood as an ethical and political critique, not as a psychiatric category.

It describes a person or institution educated to convert almost everything into measurable returns:

territory into an asset;
forest into cash flow;
attention into engagement;
workers into costs;
children into consumers;
suffering into an externality.

This way of acting does not arise from neurodivergence. It can be taught by systems of reward, punishment, status, and competition.

A person learns that:

“Listening slows us down.”

“Care increases costs.”

“Doubt weakens the negotiation.”

“Sharing reduces control.”

“Recognizing suffering threatens profit.”

“Giving up leadership means losing importance.”

Within such a system, empathy does not necessarily disappear. It may be silenced whenever it interferes with the target.

Research on unethical pro-organizational behavior helps us understand this process. People may violate ethical principles while believing they are protecting the company, the leader, the nation, the religion, or the cause.

The language changes the moral meaning of the action:

“I am not harming workers. I am reducing costs.”

“I am not destroying a territory. I am increasing productivity.”

“I am not lying. I am protecting the institution.”

“I am not killing innocent people. I am completing a mission against evil.”

The problem, therefore, is not simply that someone “does not feel empathy.”

The deeper problem is a system that teaches people to stop listening to empathy whenever another person’s life becomes an obstacle to money, status, or ideological purity.

We do not need to diagnose authoritarianism in order to contain it

When politicians, executives, military figures, or religious leaders display cruelty, we may be tempted to explain their behavior through a psychiatric diagnosis.

That response is often late—and potentially dangerous.

First, people should not be publicly diagnosed without an appropriate clinical assessment.

Second, reducing authoritarianism to individual pathology can hide its institutional dimension.

We do not need a psychiatric label to recognize that a leader:

• dehumanizes opponents;

• threatens institutions;

• destroys mechanisms of contestation;

• uses systematic deception;

• encourages violence;

• captures public resources;

• punishes whistleblowers;

• turns entire populations into enemies.

These are observable actions, structures, and consequences. They can and should be evaluated politically, legally, and ethically before any clinical explanation is considered.

Diagnosis belongs to clinical care. Accountability belongs to actions, damage, and relationships of power.

When we confuse these dimensions, we risk stigmatizing neurodivergent people while leaving authoritarian institutions untouched.

A wealthy person may be called eccentric while others are diagnosed

Money does not cure a psychiatric condition. But it can absorb, conceal, or transfer its consequences.

A person with little money who repeatedly misses appointments, interrupts others, makes impulsive decisions, or breaks relationships may lose employment, housing, and social support. Their behavior quickly becomes visible as dysfunction.

A very wealthy person may hire professionals to organize their schedule, repair their mistakes, protect their reputation, remove those who disagree, and transform their personal way of functioning into the operating rule of an entire company.

One person is described as incapable.

The other is described as eccentric, intense, disruptive, or visionary.

The difference may not be the severity of the behavior. It may be who is forced to live with its consequences.

Wealth can purchase distance from correction.

It can also create a separation between the moral image of the individual and the actions of their organizations.

The wealthy individual—the CPF, in Brazilian terms—may speak gently about peace, family, sustainability, and compassion.

At the same time, their companies, funds, holdings, and investment structures—their CNPJs—may finance deforestation, pollution, labor exploitation, or the destruction of communities.

The fragmentation protects the self-image:

The individual speaks of peace.
The corporation maximizes return.
The fund distances the source of profit.
The legal structure distributes responsibility.
And no one appears to have touched the wound directly.

But the damage always reaches someone’s Body-Territory.

It reaches the lungs that breathe polluted air.
The family that loses its water.
The community expelled from its land.
The workers who absorb the pressure.
The people who will care for the illnesses produced by the investment.

It is not enough to ask whether the individual is kind. We must also ask what their companies and investments do when they are not looking.

Reasonable accommodation is not impunity

The Brazilian Inclusion Law and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities defend equal opportunity, protection from discrimination, autonomy, and reasonable accommodation.

These rights are essential.

But they also allow us to formulate a crucial distinction:

An accommodation changes a barrier. It does not erase harm caused to another person.

A person may need direct communication. That does not give them the right to humiliate.

They may need predictability. That does not grant them absolute control over everyone else.

They may need sensory isolation. That does not authorize punishment of those who disagree.

They may communicate in an unusual manner. That does not transform corruption, coercion, or violence into protected characteristics.

A person may simultaneously need support and remain responsible for repairing harm.

Both statements may be true:

“I need an accommodation.”

“My action hurt someone, and I need to answer for it.”

Protecting dignity does not mean infantilizing the person.

Recognizing responsibility does not mean removing their rights.

Protection must follow the person; oversight must follow power

We must be careful not to create a system so suspicious that every neurodivergent person must repeatedly prove their condition before receiving basic support. That would reproduce exclusion under the language of protection.

Everyday accommodations should be accessible, individualized, and based on real barriers.

The exercise of power, however, requires another principle:

Protection must follow the person. Oversight must follow power.

The greater a person’s capacity to affect workers, communities, public resources, ecosystems, and institutions, the stronger the requirements for:

• transparency;

• independent auditing;

• traceable decisions;

• whistleblower protection;

• human and environmental impact assessment;

• limits on mandates;

• meaningful contestation;

• repair of damage;

• separation between personal authority and institutional survival.

These safeguards are not needed because a leader is neurodivergent or neurotypical.

They are needed because no Weichö—regardless of neurotype—should possess enough unchecked power to transform their perceptual limits into the collective destiny of everyone else.

The law must protect difference without protecting domination

This is the heart of the dilemma.

Rights designed to protect neurodivergent people cannot become rhetorical shelter for leaders who demand freedom from correction.

At the same time, fear of abuse cannot become an excuse to weaken disability rights or treat neurodivergent people as permanent suspects.

The distinction cannot depend merely on personality impressions.

It must depend on questions about power and effects:

Is the person requesting access or exemption from accountability?

Does the accommodation allow participation, or does it concentrate control?

Can others disagree safely?

Who absorbs the consequences of the leader’s behavior?

Is the explanation being used to understand the person or to silence those who were harmed?

Can the institution replace the leader before the damage becomes irreversible?

This moves us away from the dangerous question:

“Is this person normal or abnormal?”

And toward a more democratic one:

“What support permits this person to participate, and what institutional limits prevent anyone from converting difference, money, or ideology into uncorrectable power?”

Jiwasa is not unlimited tolerance

In the BrainLatam formulation, Jiwasa is a genuine “we” in which no person must disappear in order to belong.

But Jiwasa is not a group that tolerates everything in order to appear inclusive.

It must also include the humanity of the person who was harmed.

The neurodivergent person belongs.

The worker belongs.

The person who reports abuse belongs.

The community affected by pollution belongs.

The person who disagrees with the leader belongs.

A collective ceases to be Jiwasa when only the most powerful person’s pain, identity, or mission is considered real.

This is why an institution oriented toward Jiwasa must ask:

Was participation expanded or was power concentrated?

Was the explanation used to understand or to avoid repair?

Was the harmed person heard?

Can the leader be corrected?

Does the person who challenges authority continue to belong?

Can leadership change before the institution is destroyed?

Dialogical Multiplication: leadership must remain transformable

Danilo Silva Guimarães warns against methodolatry: the moment when a method becomes an authority that decides in advance which experiences deserve recognition.

His proposal for an Indigenous Psychology suggests that encounters with Indigenous and interethnic communities should transform not only the participants, but also the concepts, questions, and methods of those who conduct the research.

We can bring this principle into leadership.

A neurodivergent person must not be silenced by the dominant norm.

But no leader should use their singularity to silence the collective.

A dialogical leader does not merely ask:

“How can I make the group understand my proposal?”

They must also ask:

“How can the group reveal the limits of my proposal and transform what I intended to do?”

Leadership remains human only while it remains capable of being changed by the people who will live with its consequences.

Other political arrangements have existed

The archaeology of precolonial Central Mexico shows that complex societies combined personal authority, councils, corporate groups, collective action, taxation, and public goods in different ways.

This does not offer us a perfect Indigenous model to copy. Pre-Columbian societies also experienced hierarchy, war, coercion, and inequality.

But archaeology helps us reject one dangerous idea:

Permanent concentration of power in a single personality is not a universal requirement of human organization.

Different institutional arrangements have existed.

This expands our political imagination. The choice is not merely between a strong individual leader and social chaos.

Institutions can distribute authority, preserve collective memory, limit mandates, create councils, protect dissent, and survive the departure of those who once occupied the center.

Protecting Weichö without sacrificing Jiwasa

We can now construct the central thesis together:

Protecting neurodiversity requires rejecting the false association between cognitive difference and lack of empathy. Protecting Jiwasa requires recognizing that instrumental cruelty can be taught, rewarded, and organized by corporations, ideologies, religions, political movements, and States. Inclusion cannot become impunity, and accountability cannot become persecution of difference.

The solution is not to identify in advance who is “good” or “evil.”

It is to construct institutions in which:

every person receives the support they need;
every person affected by harm can speak;
every leader can be corrected;
every concentration of power is supervised;
no diagnosis erases responsibility;
no wealth purchases silence;
no ideology transforms victims into acceptable costs.

Perhaps the distinction arrives too late when we wait for an authoritarian leader to reveal the full extent of the damage.

Education must begin earlier.

It must teach that empathy is not weakness, that disagreement is not betrayal, that leadership is temporary, and that no mission—financial, political, military, or religious—becomes moral merely because it calls its victims “necessary sacrifices.”

How can we protect every Weichö in their difference while preventing anyone from using the language of difference, wealth, or mission to dominate, dehumanize, and destroy the Jiwasa?

Commented references

Milton, D.; Gurbuz, E.; Lopez, B. (2022). The Double Empathy Problem: Ten Years On.
The article challenges the assumption that failures of empathy reside exclusively in autistic people and emphasizes the reciprocal character of misunderstanding.

Fletcher-Watson, S. et al. (2024). Do You Feel Me? Autism, Empathic Accuracy and the Double Empathy Problem.
The study shows that non-autistic people may interpret emotional accounts by autistic people with reduced accuracy.

Duradoni, M. et al. (2023). Cognitive Empathy and the Dark Triad: A Literature Review.
The review discusses how understanding another person’s emotions can coexist with manipulation when it is not accompanied by affective concern and moral responsibility.

Luan, Y. et al. (2022). Exploring the Antecedents of Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior: A Meta-Analysis.
The study indicates that moral disengagement and uncritical identification with organizations or leaders may encourage unethical conduct performed in the group’s name.

Landry, A.; Druckman, J.; Willer, R. (2024). Need for Chaos and Dehumanization Are Robustly Associated with Support for Partisan Violence.
The research connects dehumanization of political opponents with increased support for partisan violence.

Guimarães, D. S. (2022). Indigenous Psychology as a General Science for Escaping the Snares of Psychological Methodolatry.
The Brazilian psychologist argues for a science whose methods and categories can be transformed through ethical encounters with other cultural worlds.

Carballo, D. M. (2022). Governance Strategies in Precolonial Central Mexico.
The archaeological study presents diverse combinations of centralized authority, shared governance, collective action, and political institutions in precolonial Mesoamerica.

Brazilian Inclusion Law and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
These frameworks establish equality, reasonable accommodation, autonomy, participation, and proportionate safeguards against abuse and undue influence.