I do not believe he is autistic. He is not Rainman-like and that's the only genuine use of the word.
What he suffers from is not a "medical condition" or some "antisocial" character trait or a lack of "social skills".
What he suffers from is societal malfunction, like almost all the rest of us. Our society has evolved in such a way that, for a great many people, it is simply no longer able to offer a functioning mode of engagement. A normally functioning society is like a hub with many interfaces, and there will be a functioning interface available for every kind of people. In our decaying society, many of the old interfaces have stopped working and there are therefore whole swathes of the population for whom there simply isn't any way to interact anymore.
My great-grand-father (on the French side) was born to a lower middle class family. His father was a blacksmith in a village. At 15, he got apprenticed to another blacksmith and then he went on to tour North-Eastern France for a few years, as was the custom for apprentices, working on construction sites, at repair shops and small factories. Then he went back to the town near his village and got a job as a skilled worker in a steel mill. About that time, he got married, to the daughter of a grocer. Both were from the same lower middle class, small business-owning, social environment and so it worked fine. My great-grand-father was not particularly handsome. He and his wife were roughly looksmatched. They had a son, my grand-father, and then my great-grand-father continued to climb the ladder in his company. When he was about 40, he became a foreman. Before that, he wore a cap to work. Now, he took to wearing a hat, because it was appropriate for a foreman to wear a hat. His hobby was actually doing the same thing he was doing for work. He had set-up a fully tooled-up metalworking shop in his basement (including a forge) and he made stuff, including all the toys my grand-father ever used (toy trains, cars, cranes, etc). The family went through WWII and moved away from the combat zone when the Germans invaded in 1940. When they came back a few weeks later, there was a big shell hole in the wall of their living room. They lived in an area that was annexed to Germany during the war and my grand-father nearly had to join the Hitler Youth because he was a teen at the time. My great grand mother managed to pull him out of that by saying he had asthma (which was sort of half true). After the war, they were all doing well, had their own house just across the street from the steel mill, and my grand-father was good at school, which made his parents proud. He went on to studymaxx and earn a PhD in linguistics.
What I mean with this story is that there was an interface in society for my great-grand-father. Every step of the way, he knew what to do and society responded as he expected. All in all, despite the hardships (like the war), he was moving ahead in life and he had his place in society. People respected him. And yet, he did not talk much. What he enjoyed the most was working in his basement, making stuff. Was he "autistic". No. He just had this kind of character yet society had a place for him. Many of us would have lived like that in those days and would never have had any metaphysical problems.
@JayGoptri
