Neurological Bad Faith: The Left-Brain Interpreter and the Confabulation of the Autonomic Autistic Mask.

The conceptualisation of autistic masking currently suffers from a definitional schism, often framed narrowly as a volitional, top-down compensatory strategy. This paper challenges this view by introducing the theoretical framework of "Neurological Bad Faith," reconceptualising masking as a complex neurobiological continuum. I argue that for many autistic individuals, masking is not always a choice but an autonomic, subcortical trauma response ("fawning") driven by the ambient threat of neurotypical hegemony and chronic minority stress. Using a multidisciplinary synthesis of cognitive neuroscience, the Minority Stress Model, and Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, this manuscript demonstrates how systemic allostatic load and neuroendocrine dysregulation degrade the medial prefrontal cortex. This structural collapse deprives the anterior insula of veridical interoceptive data, creating an interoceptive vacuum. In this void, the brain’s "Left-Brain Interpreter" confabulates a narrative of agency, retroactively assigning conscious intent to an unconscious survival reflex. This state of "Neurological Bad Faith"—a forced biological illusion—protects the individual from the immediate reality of their trauma but at a devastating metabolic cost. The resulting systemic exhaustion manifests as autistic burnout, which I redefine as the physiological threshold where the metabolic burden of the "mask" exceeds the organism’s capacity, violently dissolving the illusion of transcendence and forcing a return to facticity. I propose a falsifiable methodology to map this chronological trap and discuss the clinical imperative for bottom-up, somatic interventions that bypass the Interpreter to prioritise interoceptive safety over cognitive restructuring.