Society

Last week, a documentary called The Great ADHD Myth aired on British television, which took a long overdue look at attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The program has since faced a significant backlash online and a tidal wave of complaints to Ofcom (Britain’s version of the FCC). Perhaps this says more about ADHD than it does about the documentary. Because as the program revealed, many scientists now see the condition as more of a “social construct” or “identity marker” than a real illness. At the center of this row, and one of the star witnesses of the documentary, is Dr Sami Timimi, a Fellow of Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists and a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist.

America is rediscovering the work of Spectator writer Shiva Naipaul. His 1980 book about the Jonestown massacre, Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, was reissued by Outsider Editions last month. There has also been much talk recently about so-called “Third-Worldism,” a quasi-ideology that some on the right blame for the West’s ills. The Third World is a concept about which Naipaul had much to say. Below is an essay he published in The Spectator in 1985. We do not see people as they are anymore. Instead, we see – or learn to believe that we see – those ghostly entities we call “relationships.” There’s me, there’s you – and, somewhere in the middle, there’s our relationship.

Snobbery, affectation and hierarchy are supposed to be un-American. But there are signs that social class – or more strictly income levels – are starting to stratify. People have begun to hunker down with like-minded citizens who share their values, which are more often than not determined by wealth. In fact, there is a growing trend of ultra-rich individuals who, when buying a house, buy other houses around it, and then sell on those other houses only to people they know. It even has a name: polydomory. Provoked by Covid and the disturbing number of deaths it caused, people were persuaded to change their lives in major and relatively sudden ways. Many Californians moved to Texas, while similar numbers of New Yorkers and New Englanders decamped to Florida.