Adderall and Virtue
The Crisis of Western Education
by
In the not too distant past, I was diagnosed with the adult version of Attention Deficit Disorder. The symptoms had certainly been there for a while: an inability to focus on mundane, routine tasks; an extreme propensity for procrastination; severe bouts of absentmindness, inattentiveness, and forgetfulness.
So when I received my diagnosis (determined through the most asinine and simplistic questionnaire imaginable), I experienced a sense of relief. Not only was I now equipped with a medical explanation for, even a justification of, my many inadequacies; I also had access to a solution.
The solution came in the form of some little blue pills. I was prescribed a generic version of Adderall, the wunder-drug that overactive children are force-fed and the 1 percent willingly gobble like candy, all for the promise of enhanced concentration and mental performance. Perhaps best of all, it was a chemical fix that required that I take no real responsibility for my habits and behaviors, instead allowing me to write them off as unmalleable and inherited flaws of my own faulty wiring. I couldn’t change anything, is what I told myself. The Adderall would have to do it for me.
We live in an age defined by technology. The proliferation of every sort of gizmo and gadget is evidence of this, as is the exponential development of new types of technology. But more demonstrable of this truth is the way that our society thinks about technology itself.
Steve Jobs, the technological innovator par excellence, is the ultimate figure that we revere and seek to emulate, not our politicians, religious leaders, or even our celebrities. To this end, the “STEM” fields are increasingly the object of our educational affections (and dollars). And humanity’s confidence in technology’s potential to not only cure the most daunting challenges, but to even generate culture, is akin to blind faith in a benevolent deity (According to Pew, “fully eight in ten (81%) expect that within the next 50 years people needing new organs will have them custom grown in a lab, and half (51%) expect that computers will be able to create art that is indistinguishable from that produced by humans.”). In fact, we would not be incorrect to note that the contemporary cult of technology is in many ways a ghastly sort of religion, with its own prophets, religious artifacts, and path to salvation.
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Read more: ethikapolitika.org
So when I received my diagnosis (determined through the most asinine and simplistic questionnaire imaginable), I experienced a sense of relief. Not only was I now equipped with a medical explanation for, even a justification of, my many inadequacies; I also had access to a solution.
The solution came in the form of some little blue pills. I was prescribed a generic version of Adderall, the wunder-drug that overactive children are force-fed and the 1 percent willingly gobble like candy, all for the promise of enhanced concentration and mental performance. Perhaps best of all, it was a chemical fix that required that I take no real responsibility for my habits and behaviors, instead allowing me to write them off as unmalleable and inherited flaws of my own faulty wiring. I couldn’t change anything, is what I told myself. The Adderall would have to do it for me.
* * *
We live in an age defined by technology. The proliferation of every sort of gizmo and gadget is evidence of this, as is the exponential development of new types of technology. But more demonstrable of this truth is the way that our society thinks about technology itself.
Steve Jobs, the technological innovator par excellence, is the ultimate figure that we revere and seek to emulate, not our politicians, religious leaders, or even our celebrities. To this end, the “STEM” fields are increasingly the object of our educational affections (and dollars). And humanity’s confidence in technology’s potential to not only cure the most daunting challenges, but to even generate culture, is akin to blind faith in a benevolent deity (According to Pew, “fully eight in ten (81%) expect that within the next 50 years people needing new organs will have them custom grown in a lab, and half (51%) expect that computers will be able to create art that is indistinguishable from that produced by humans.”). In fact, we would not be incorrect to note that the contemporary cult of technology is in many ways a ghastly sort of religion, with its own prophets, religious artifacts, and path to salvation.
.............
Read more: ethikapolitika.org
