As a consequence of this individualization of behaviours, we use chemistry to compel our children's attention (as well as our own), at all costs, to bend to the--unprecedented, completely artificial and terribly invasive--needs of a Janus-faced capitalism, which simultaneously advocates relentless productive discipline and limitless consumerist hedonism. So, it is in the broad framework of a vast (in)attention economy that ADHDs must be situated--rather than in the overly narrow framework of the subject-object relation or family dynamic. If we are our children are suffering from something, it is firstly from the very specific socio-economic illness that is 'mental capitalism'. [...]

[...] The 'Great Society' dreamed up by Friedrich Hayek is admirably 'liberal' in that it endeavours to provide as many means of happiness as possible to the individuals that make it up, while leaving everyone free to provide their own definition of happiness [...] But attention cannot be reduced to a simple question of means. You cannot claim to be holding an axiologically neutral discourse (separated from any subjective value) on attention, for the good reason that attentional processes are inextricably linked to our processes of valorization. [...] attention is individuating between it is rooted in a circular dynamic--in a circle that may be vicious or virtuous: I valorize what I pay attention to and I pay attention to what I valorize. As soon as the means-resource conditions the end aimed at through it, it is no longer possible to claim--as does our economic ideology--that it is maximizing the means while leaving everyone free to choose their own ends. Making do with an economic vocabulary in the study of attentional dynamics therefore prevents us from posing the essential question: how--which is to say, inevitably, in which direction, to what ends--are we to direct the attention which gives direction to what we become?