[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Will:
The way I'm understanding the current definition of it, someone who has ADD will be focused/energetic in some situations, and distracted/tired in others. To me, it seems it could be better explained by: mood swings, personal interest or disinterest in a subject, different sleeping habits (think of a programmer), or any of many other explanations. Differences in interests and aptitudes are not a mental abnormality, and cannot (should not!)be "fixed" by popping some pills.

Ding! Ding! You win the prize for this round of "Truth and Consequences"...

The 'problem' with the vast majority of kids OR adults diagnosed with 'ADD' is that they don't deal well with the regimentation of modern industrial slave society. Year after year the 'employers' have obsessively struggled to squeeze more and more performance out of the proles so they can rack up more 'points' in the bank/stock market and claim to be 'better businessmen' than their rival 'employers'.

In Ye Olde Dayes you just had to go plant the stuff you were told to plant in Spring and bring in the hay/wheat/turnips or whatever when it was ready. Not very intensely demanding of 'attention' since you had to go marching out into the fields and do it manually. When the weather or other conditions interfered you didn't do anything at all that day, so there was plenty of 'lag time' to chat and otherwise have a LIFE outside of your work even if life in general was quite a bit more difficult due to low availability of food and other goods. The percentage of the population doing anything other than basic agriculture was pretty low, but even those who were manufacturing tools (blacksmiths) or doing what little 'information work' was available (scribes and then printers) didn't have to work anything like the hours that a typical factory or office worker does today.

Since the so-called 'Industrial Revolution' though, more has changed than just the availability of food and those other 'goods'. Yes, some things have gotten better, and new things that didn't exist at all in the past are now available. But other things have gotten drastically worse, and the one thing that has gotten completely intolerable is control of your own TIME. The so-called 'free market' has been fine-tuned to require everyone to work 60+ hours a week to maintain their automobiles (required for their job) along with whatever tiny patch of private space they are allowed to rent (have you seen any recent 'deeds' for property? You don't OWN property anymore. Only the Government does, and allows you to pretend to own it for a while...), and the 'employers' have now honed 'personnel management' techniques to the point where they can order people shuffled around as easily as the machines they work for. You dare not look up from your desk/terminal/assembly station for an instant for fear some scanning supervisor might write you up.

Unfortunately for a certain portion of the population, they don't concentrate on one thing very well for hours at a time. They have this terrible habit of spontanaeity. Horrors! Think of how much lost work those spare seconds of looking around or cracking a joke are costing! So the 'employers' have figured out how to bLast them with drugs to make them 'concentrate' better and produce like everyone else. That's what gets you the ADD diagnosis, low productivity. You can be as hyper as you want as long as the 'work' flows fast enough. Only a fraction of the so-called 'sufferers' of ADD would really have any problems functioning if we weren't a culture obsessed with regimented performance.

[ July 20, 2003, 23:51: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]