How Authoritarianism Leadership & Economic Chaos Affects ADHDers
Should ADHDers beware of the overfocused Farmers who want to set the rules & define the game!
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
— Thoreau, Walden
Historically, whenever there has been social or economic chaos, it’s been accompanied by the rise of authoritarian leadership and institutions.
Hitler rose in Germany out of the ashes of that nation’s defeat in World War I and the Great Depression. Mao Tze Tsung came to power in China after decades of weak government and the near-defeat of the Chinese by the Japanese war machine. Stalin responded to the uncertainty of the Russian people after the Russian Civil War and the flu pandemic, and his message struck a responsive chord.
As Iran stumbled back from the cultural upheavals and violent repression of the ’60s under the CIA-installed and supported Shah, a demand for religious fundamentalism brought a theocratic government to power, as has happened in many other countries.
Even here in the United States, we can see how times of uncertainty bring to the fore the shrill voices of those who would offer simple—and extreme—solutions to complex social, political, and economic problems.
So, too, the proliferation of the ADHD diagnosis may reflect this trend on two levels: the search for simple answers to the complexities of human nature, and the desire of increasingly authoritarian institutions to modify “out of the norm” behavior.
Dr. Timothy Engelmann, who directs the Adult ADHD clinic at Philhaven Behavioral Healthcare Services in Pennsylvania, recently emailed these observations to me:
“Part of the problem consists on a social-cultural level. Our society, as you point out in your Hunter’s book, is becoming more rigidly rooted in the structuring of experience. Problems arise from rigid structuring. People vary in their ability to conform to this way of life, especially the ADHD person, who in repeated failures to respond to such structuring becomes labeled as ‘disordered.’
“More disturbing, however, is that such structuring can be used as forms of social influence, which I believe limits the very nature of who we are as people.”
Here we have in ADHD a very complex set of behaviors and perceptions, encompassing a wide range of human experience. ADHD is felt and expressed in dramatically different fashions from individual to individual.
Yet, like the call for flat taxes or balanced budgets or family values or organic food (all simplistic “solutions” to complex issues), the ADHD diagnosis is viewed by many individuals and professionals as a sort of all-encompassing, cast-in-concrete certainty.
“People with ADHD are more likely to...” is a phrase I’ve heard come from the mouths of dozens of professionals in the ADHD industry, usually from a lectern. The sentence is finished with a wide variety of things, from “be in trouble with the law” to “have more car accidents” to “be promiscuous” to “fail in school.” Rarely is it: “Be more creative,” “be more interesting,” “have more friends,” “experience life in an uniquely rich way,” or any other positive.
By having a nice, predictable box we can put people into, we seem to have resolved something. Labeling, in our society, often seems the same as fixing: but it’s not, of course.
Dr. Englemann points out:
“As social control becomes more pressing, the ADHD way of life actually becomes not only an asset, but an antidote to such limiting of experience.”
But still, as society becomes more rigid, the search for nice little explain-all categories will continue and intensify. From the political arena, where a person can be dismissed with the wave of a hand and an, “Oh, he’s a liberal,” or “She’s a conservative,” to the social “I’m a Gen-X-er,” to the technical “It’s an M1 machine,” one-word labels seem to be the order of the day.
Similarly, as institutions come under attack from those who respond to the complex problems of society with simple answers, those institutions will become more rigid themselves, and therefore more prone to quick labeling and instant dismissal of individuals.
When “permissive” schools, for example, are attacked by politicians as the cause of a host of social ills, the schools react by becoming less “permissive.” They’ll reactively categorize, label, and cram into consistent little slots as many children as they can. The end result will be (and is) an epidemic of diagnoses of ADHD, oppositional-defiant disorder, etc.
As our institutions and culture become increasingly pressured and fractured, many will respond by trying to find simple, one-word, quick-fix, easy-label answers. ADHD is none of those, of course, but in the wrong hands it often has become exactly what such zealots would want.
Beware the overfocused Farmers who want to set the rules and define the game!
Psychotherapist William J. Ronan of Minneapolis shared with me his “Farmer’s Traits as a Disorder” paper:
The salient aspects of Farmers:
1. Unable to think tangentially. Tunnel vision. Miss subtle tangential environmental clues. Sees things as they have been told. Vigilant as in “vigilante.”
2. Unable to remove nose from the grind stone, ending up with a smaller nose while having missed much of life’s potential tangential inputs and experiences. Person is left singing, “Is That All There Is?”
3. Militaristic, rigid, inflexible. Possess no innate moral code. All morality is taught by and determined by external force. Does what s/he is told.
4. Loves monotony. Is able to take pride in marching in fours to the strains of a band.
5. Process oriented: results are secondary. Believes in doing tasks the proper way, even if the “proper way” does not produce optimal results.
6. Can he easily led by illusionary goals. Believes in what they are told, regarding religious, political doctrine, repressed memories (false memory syndrome), etc., even when there is no objective support for the position. Calls gullibility and delusions “faith.” Thinks of learning as memorization, and reasoning as “the devil’s workshop.”
7. Conformist, obedient to authority (see experiments performed by Stanley Milgram in 1963 when students were ordered to give shocks to other students). This is the group that Hitler aimed his political persuasion at in order to win his elections. Perfect choice for mob psychology.
8. Able to attend to small details while the larger picture is left unattended. May take pride in “getting the gas to Auschwitz on time, ” while either unwilling or unable to understand the larger implications. As a young male can easily be led to go halfway around the world and to kill people he doesn’t know, for reasons he doesn’t understand, philosophies he has never read, and economic theories of which nobody is certain. He will do this with extreme certainty because he was told to do so by “a person in authority. ”
9. Self-centered, within the context of group acceptance. Unable to take social risks. Will not say no to a social movement if it is perceived that this is what everybody else thinks. The Farmer is a person easily manipulated by society, and therefore valued by those elements in control of society.
10. Will easily adopt group ideology and abandon his/her own. Easily taken in by witch burning, McCarthyism, “Dittoheadism, ” and other similar social, political, and religious movements.
I wouldn’t go so far as to demonize Farmers, but the contrasts he provides — or the diagnostic criteria, were society to consider “overfocusing syndrome” to be a pathology — is fascinating food for thought.