My Revolution Was Never a Possibility: Notes on ADHD, Anarchism, and Accelerationism
This essay is for every leftist struggling with the tensions between democracy, freedom, and neurodiversity. I hope it helps you.
“If you’re different you always know it, and you can’t fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you’re given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.”
Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible
I have ADHD. I was diagnosed as a child and given a variety of medications for it. None of them went great. I currently take no medications for it. Things are… often difficult.
That’s not because this is a disability, per se — though, up until recently, I definitely thought of it in those terms. My life is difficult because I am forced to live in a society dominated by beings with bizarre neural architectures.
Let’s call them ‘neurotypicals’, or ‘NTs’, and me ‘neurodivergent’ or ‘ND’, for lack of better terms. However, I feel like these terms are part of the problem.
Why should I be seen as abnormal, and them normal?
I even wrote a fictional DMS-5 entry, from a universe in which the reverse of this was true — to illustrate how they could be seen as the freaks, and to aid in speculation on the specifics of their hypothetical suffering.
I’m done writing for neurotypical people. My writing will, from now on, be written from an unapologetically ADHD perspective, and unapologetically for an ADHD audience. If NT people end up being fans of me, that is fine — but I am not going to coddle them anymore. I am not going to break and twist my writing, to misrepresent my thought process as a neurotypical one.
In The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber says:
Most of us are capable of getting a superficial sense of what others are thinking or feeling just by observing their tone of voice, or body language — it’s usually not hard to get a sense of people’s immediate intentions and motives, but going beyond that superficial often takes a great deal of work. Much of the everyday business of social life, in fact, consists in trying to decipher others’ motives and perceptions. Let us call this “interpretive labor.” One might say, those relying on the fear of force are not obliged to engage in a lot of interpretative labor, and thus, generally speaking, they do not…
Most human relations — particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies — are extremely complicated, dense with history and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination, of endlessly trying to see the world from others’ points of view…
…rhetoric about the mysteries of womankind appears to be a perennial feature of… patriarchal arrangements. It is usually paired with a sense that, though illogical and inexplicable, women still have access to mysterious, almost mystical wisdom (“women’s intuition”) unavailable to men. And of course something like this happens in any relation of extreme inequality: peasants, for example, are always represented as being both oafishly simple, but somehow, also, mystically wise. Generations of women novelists — Virginia Woolf comes most immediately to mind (To the Lighthouse) — have documented the other side of such arrangements: the constant efforts women end up having to expend in managing, maintaining, and adjusting the egos of oblivious and self-important men, involving the continual work of imaginative identification, or interpretive labor. This work carries over on every level. Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence. A popular exercise among high school creative writing teachers in America, for example, is to ask students to imagine they have been transformed, for a day, into someone of the opposite sex, and describe what that day might be like. The results, apparently, are uncannily uniform. The girls all write long and detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject. Usually, a good proportion of the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have not the slightest conception what being a teenage girl might be like, and are outraged at the suggestion that they should have to think about it…
[bolding my own]
In context, he’s talking about the effect that structural violence has on our imaginations — i.e., that the powerful tend to know much less about the powerless than the powerless do about the powerful.
This is partially adaptable to the ND experience — but, crucially, partially not. Note the bolded section — that is not true for ND people interacting with NT people.
There are clear differences between how we think and how NTs think, and there are differences between how NDs and NTs express themselves emotionally and rhetorically. We learn how to pretend to be NT, and how to interpret NT people — we have to. But, it is always a sustained and difficult act of empathy — it is never easy. And, it is never perfect — the neural chasm is always ultimately unbridgeable. I have grown so used to constantly doing this difficult interpretative labor that it is difficult at times for me to understand myself on my own terms — I have been trained to construct, in my head, a NT subject that I explain my own ADHD to. I have been trained to write like an NT, to an audience of NTs. Perhaps I still do. I am working on it — writing like this, with the cascading sectionlets, is part of that attempt.
Thus, the interpretive labor placed on NDs is two-fold — first, we must perform NT-ness, and communicate as such so that we might be understood by the NT monstrosity that we find ourselves faced with — second, we must attempt to discern what this NT person could possibly want with us.
Crucially, this is not a symmetrical interaction. We spend our entire lives learning to attempt to understand the cold outsideness of neurotypicality. The NTs we are forced to deal with do no such thing — they will never and can never be as good at understanding us as we are at understanding them. Just as there is a lopsided structure of the imagination between women and men, there is a lopsided structure of the imagination between NDs and NTs.
“In a society that has destroyed all adventure, the only adventure left is to destroy that society”
Unknown
I am an anarchist. I wrote for the C4SS, and for IGD, under the name ‘Black Cat’, till I criticized the wrong activist group.
My ADHD played a massive role in my anarchism, to an extent that I never really admitted to myself before now.
My ADHD makes me better at dealing with the frenetic multiplicity and organized chaos that is anarchism at it’s best. I am at ease within the bloc like few else, as I navigate the swarm. I am quick to anger, and do not respond well to demands. I am biologically programmed to hate bureaucracy, to hate regimentation, to hate boredom — to hate the statist world.
There are a few things about the hegemonic vulgar mainstream of American anarchism that never sat right with me. One of these is the universalist insistence that all people are essentially the same — because, of course, that isn’t really true. It’s fundamentally unfair to expect the same behavior from ND and NT people, at minimum.
Within the collectivist and majoritarian democracy-fetishism of much of what passes for “anarchism” in American circles, one gets the feeling that all of this horizontalism and localism, all this universalism and humanism, can only result in the oppression of minority (of any sort) voices beneath the benevolently-intentioned boot of the white middle-class progressive.
Any sort of collectivist process is going to end up centering whoever gets to maneuver themselves best within the process of it, even if they insist otherwise. This could look like a group with a white majority paying attention largely to white issues — even as they loudly insist that they are good anti-racists, and keep around a token PoC or two to agree with whatever they want. It could look like a group in which old wealthy white dudes still retain significant and outsized social capital, and so treat accusations of bigotry against each other as tools in political games — and any actually oppressed people around as mere props to be exploited. It could look like other things, as well.
ND people are not, naturally, going to be a majority within groups that we find ourselves inside. Further, we are not going to accumulate social capital well within groups — the expectations and norms aren’t built for us, they are built for NT people.
I have no interest in being a prop for NT people to feel good about themselves. Nor do I wish to attempt to constantly expose my neurodivergence — with the shame I have been made to feel over it, and the trauma I have experienced due to my treatment from NT people — in an attempt to get “accommodations” for my “disability”. I have no desire for my existence and my experiences to be pathologized, to be treated as a disease. I don’t want to struggle with NTs, who will never understand me, who have no incentive to understand me, who wish only to use me for social capital, or who are going to find my “weirdness” unnerving or “creepy”.
I am an anarchist, but anarchist organizing has frequently treated me as something less than a comrade. I don’t think that this has to be inevitable, and I’ve even written about how left-wing market anarchism could be seen as extremely friendly towards neurodivergence, but American-style pro-democracy anarcho-communism seems to be intent on — at best — tolerating me.
“ You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Accelerationism is… complicated. I wrote a primer on it.
One way to explain it is that it is the belief that the system itself is the revolutionary subject, not the proletariat. Another way would be to say that it is about maximizing the possibilities for Exit. A third way would be to say that it is “a certain jangling of the nerves”.
Reading accelerationist texts, in many cases, makes me feel at home. There is this nearly mystical focus within them, on their concept of ‘outsideness’. Of things that cannot be understood, under any circumstances. I feel that. I feel like I am an outsideness within society, or that society is an outsideness to me.
The rub is, I’m not wrong. I have a neural architecture shared by less than 1/10th of the planet. We have no physical markers — Attention Difference Divergence is coded white in popular culture, but we can look like anything. It’s what inside that counts, and it’s what inside that’s different. People like us are always perpetual minorities. There is no ADHD nation. If such a thing were going to exist, it would have to be intentionally built, and would always be proudly artificial.
There’s this accelerationist concept called ‘Patchwork’ — it’s a proposal to fragment states and societies into as tiny of pieces as possible, and then allow all of them to go off in their own directions. Accelerationists want to smash society to pieces, and then live in the shards. It’s the geopolitical manifestation of outsideness, really — the possibility of infinite exit.
As I explained in my Primer, a Patch is really just a group of people — it is the people that matter, not whatever land they may or may not claim. A Patch could certainly claim no land at all. What is important about a Patch is that it is a social infrastructure that it’s members agree — through their participation — to all create and use together.
Certainly, people with ADHD could create their own Patches, as social relations between them — new ways of treating each other, new ways of organizing necessary activities. The NT world is incapable of understanding us well enough to meaningfully care about us — we are an outsideness to them. So, let’s seek an Outside of it.
I can’t say what these societies would look like — I’m merely inviting you to speculate. DM me about it, if you like. And, more than that, I’m calling on you to transgress the bounds of the NT world. They will never love you — but it’s not because you are unlovable. Seek out something better — you deserve it.
“God is dead. God remains dead… What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?”
Friedrich Nietzsche
No one has ever hated me for my ADHD. They hated me for being too loud, or too impulsive, or too emotional.
They hated me for being weird, for being unsettling, for giving off a predatory vibe, the sensation of a wild thing, a thing from just outside their comprehension. If you’d asked them if they hated my ADHD, they’d have said no. They weren’t prejudiced — dear god no, they were good people, they believed in a more disability-friendly society.
They certainly believed in my disability rights. It’s just that most people with ADHD just so happened to be freaks that they had to get out of their way. I certainly was. It’s all a coincidence to them.
That bureaucracies have offered me things that I largely didn’t need, on the condition that I navigate processes set up for NTs by NTs, and then regarded me as a lazy contrarian failure when I protested in any way is — to NTs — unfortunate, but also neither solvable nor their concern.
You see what I’m talking about, here?
There is no democratic solution for us. There is no top-down solution for us. All that we could possibly have is each other — NTs cannot and will not help us, understand us, care about us, or love us. We need to find each other, and only from that can even begin to ask questions about what we should build.
