Is ADHD the Hidden Driver of Innovation, Keeping Humanity from Falling Into a Rut?

Without their Hunters, would our modern Farmer’s societies become stagnant and technologically primitive?

Image by Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay

“I was born with genes that drive me to get on with doing what has to be done. ”
— Richard Leakey, 60 Minutes interview

One aspect of the way ADHD plays out in a cultural context could be set in the framework of the need to reduce uncertainty in life, referenced by various psychological theorists from Adler to Jung.

For those Hunters with a highly-variable sense of time, reducing uncertainty in the environment takes the form of acting now, responding immediately to each change in the environment. For those without ADHD, however, who experience a linear sense of persisting time, reducing uncertainty takes the form of trying to stabilize things. Those people will, as surely as the tide, eventually try to get rid of or marginalize people who like to change things.

Thus, because Hunter-like people are so often the agents of change, once the change they created is adopted by the “stables” (Farmers), this latter group will — as any examination of history shows — isolate them, kill them off, eccentricate them or exile them. Britain did this with those individuals they sent to America and Australia centuries ago, and today we do this socially, often ghettoizing ADHD children in public schools.

This gives us another insight into a possibly adaptive role for ADHD in our modern society.

Certainly, most of modern culture is set up to reward Farmer¬like behavior. Our schools are based on an agricultural model, still letting out for the summer, because in times past children were needed to help bring in the crops. Stability is cherished and job-hopping and other forms of social instability are viewed as alarm flags to prospective employers or spouses.

The industrial revolution, much like the agricultural revolution, further extended the culture-shift that caused ADHD to suddenly fall “outside the template,” by introducing mechanization using repetitive (farming) techniques. This helps explain why the “factory” model of modern schools so often is anathema to ADHD children, and why experience-based school environments are so useful for ADHD kids.

At first glance, it would seem that being a Farmer in today’s society would be very desirable. The checkbook gets balanced, the grass is mowed regularly, and every day the bolt gets put on the screw at the factory, day in and day out.

But it’s often the Hunters who are the instruments of social change and leadership. Societies without Hunters among them often require cataclysmic events to stimulate change.

Japanese society, for example, which had been agricultural for thousands of years, was essentially stagnant until Admiral Perry parked his Black Ships off the coast and threatened war if the Japanese wouldn’t let him trade with them.

That signaled the end of a major era in Japanese society. The virtual destruction of Japan during World War II brought about the second great change in their society. It’s interesting to note that in the Japanese language there’s no word that cleanly translates into “leadership.” Rīdāshippu, shidōryoku, and tōsotsuryoku all describe a more collaborative, consensus-driven form of authority than is typically suggested in American culture.

The notion of standing apart from the crowd, going your own way, and challenging existing institutions is — or at least was until the past half-century — largely alien to Japanese culture. And so we see that virtually all the major changes in that very Farmer-like society were brought about by the invading barbarians (an archaic translation of the Japanese word gaijin, which also means foreigner), and happened from without, rather than from within.

This cultural preference for stability rather than change has become less central to Japanese society in the years since WWII, but still produces a contrast to American culture, which arguably embraces change more vigorously than any other society on Earth.

Thus, the leader in innovation in the world is the United States. We invented the transistor, although the careful and methodical Japanese refined it. The same applies to radio, television, VCRs, plastics, and on and on. We even invented a form of government now duplicated all around the world.

And who were we here in America during our early years, so innovative as to create an entirely new form of government and numerous inventions? We were the Hunters: the misfits of European society (and the expelled criminals of British society) daring and brave and crazy enough to undertake the crossing from that continent to America to conquer a new land.

Society needs its Hunters, no matter how much it tries to suppress them in its institutions and schools. ADHD Hunters like Edison and Franklin were responsible for massive social, cultural, and technological change, and even today we find a disproportionate number of high-stimulation-seeking persons among the creative ranks, in every discipline from the arts to politics to the sciences.

For example, Wilson Harrell, former publisher of Inc. Magazine, former CEO of the Formula 409 Corporation, and author of the book For Entrepreneurs Only was one of America’s most famous entrepreneurs. He taught companies a new management technique called Total Quality Entrepreneurship, and was a frequent speaker around the world on entrepreneurial issues. After reading the first draft of my book, Focus Your Energy, he wrote:

“For generations, we entrepreneurs have been asking ourselves: ‘Was I born this way, or was it the circumstances of my childhood that led me to the entrepreneurial life? Was it destiny or accident?’...

“[Now we know that] entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs be¬cause, down through the eons of time, we have inherited the Hunter genes of our ancestors....

“Until I read Thom’s books, I believed that entrepreneurship was inspired by an insatiable desire for freedom. It’s so wonderful to know that it’s more, much more. That we are born. That we are genetically bound together. That we can and will pass these incredible genes on to our children and their children’s children. That, in spite of politicians and Farmer bureaucracies, the entrepreneurial spirit will live on.”

Wilson Harrell views ADHD as a net positive, in that it sparks the entrepreneurialism which has made our nation great.

So yet another possible reason for why we have ADHD is that it keeps society changing. Without their Hunters, our modern Farmer’s societies would become stagnant and technologically primitive.

Wilson Harrell made significant accomplishments in his efforts to help entrepreneurs understand their own ADHD-like nature, and to work with the strengths associated with it while avoiding or overcoming the weaknesses. His book For Entrepreneurs Only is a great example of this.

Until we have a cultural paradigm shift, however, we’ll continue to often label these types of people as disordered when they’re really often only different. These differences can keep our society alive, vital, and at the front of progress throughout the world.