You Need To Function Like An Executive

The EF Papers #2: on the disorganized body and the new spirit of capitalism

You’re reading the second installment of The Executive Function Papers, a serialized exploration of EF’s history, politics, and culture, through the fog of my own dysfunction. Read #1 on DOOM piles here. 

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This doesn’t feel done; nothing ever does. I haven’t found the right way to present these points, this information, this idea that’s been so important to me for so long. How to fit all the pieces together for you to understand what’s in my head?

The whole thing is up there, all at once, and to pull it out for you to read left to right, it’s like squeezing a supergiant star through a spaghetti maker. It gives me anxiety. It reminds me that I’m going to die.

I got a smartwatch to be my external prefrontal cortex, programmed it to tell me when to sit down and write everyday. But after a couple weeks, I start to ignore it.

The haptics shake my wrist, but I dismiss my own commands. I don’t want to, I’m not interested right now. It’s okay, I can come back to it. I’ll come back around to it. The work can only become what it wants to be. I have to stop fearing the limits of my own control.

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I always want to start in the middle, but I know I should start at the boring beginning, so: what is executive function?

For most of us, it’s a useful shorthand for a collection of cognitive processes that include planning, organizing, time management, working memory, and inhibition. For scientists, it depends whose definition you use — Goldstein et al estimate:

“..at least 30 or more constructs have been included under the umbrella term, EF, making the concept hard to operationally define.”

It’s a term used across diagnostic categories, from autism to dementia to chronic fatigue, and it emerged in the literature during the 1970’s, although the idea of a hierarchical structure of inhibition in the human brain can be traced to European scientists in the late 19th century, when attention became a modern problem.¹

Inspired in part by case studies of patients who had experienced damage to their frontal lobes,² scientists thought there had to be some ‘central executive’ in the brain that was regulating these cognitive processes, and that it must be in the prefrontal cortex.

The neuropsychologist Russell Barkley’s 2012 book Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved was an attempt to solve EF’s conceptual clusterfuck. While his is one of many interpretations, Barkley’s devotion to publishing trade books for parents and eventually, adult ADHDers has made it the most popular.

Here he is explaining his idea of EF on the Youtube channel he started as a fun retirement project:

from the video: What Is An Executive Function?

In short, he defines an executive function as an effort you make to regulate your own behavior in the service of a long-term goal. For Barkley, ADHD is an ‘executive function deficit disorder.’ We lack the cognitive ability to inhibit, so his theory goes, which causes all kinds of downstream problems.

We can’t keep our thoughts to ourselves, so we talk too much, interrupt and overshare. Because we struggle to internalize our thought processes, we also struggle with “looking back to look ahead,” as he says — learning from the past to plan for the future. We can’t keep clock time. We can’t filter out thoughts, feelings, and stimulation, so we end up distracted and overwhelmed and ineffective.

These problems — which Barkley locates in our brains — become big, economic problems, too.

“The organized body is a sign that we are organized psychologically and that we understand and accept the organization of the world around us,” the cultural critic Lewis Hyde wrote. If we can’t organize our bodies as our nation requires — linear, timely, focused on goals — we become debt burdens.

ADHDers are regularly discussed in terms of cost and risk: ADHD costs society $122.8 billion per year. ADHD puts our health and the safety of others at risk. ADHD threatens gross domestic product³ (and thus, ADHD commits capitalist heresy).

But how can we understand executive functioning outside of the economy that rewards it?

I’m not the first neurodivergent to turn a side-eye toward the concept — my friend and colleague Marta Rose has called it ‘a set of late capitalist values masquerading as skills’, the philosopher of neurodiversity Robert Chapman has referred to it as ‘a general list of skills required for getting a job as an office manager’, and the neuroethics scholar Andrew Ivan Brown has written that it’s ‘an example of how psychology establishes ‘inner truths’ about what it means to be naturally human.’

This is something mainstream psychology does a lot, actually — especially the kind that comes from WEIRD⁴ countries, according to a paper by Adams et al. They identify four ‘neoliberal selfways’ embedded in popular psych discourse:

“…radical abstraction of self from context, an entrepreneurial understanding of self as an ongoing development project, an imperative for personal growth and fulfillment, and an emphasis on affect management for self-regulation..”

A good entrepreneurial self has to make choices and take risks, which is stressful and scary. Plus, in a consumerist society, there are so many things to choose between! Being able to calmly walk this tightrope of personal responsibility, to prioritize and plan and save, all become imperative for success in life. You need to function like an executive. Interdependence, the authors note, becomes a liability.

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Remind me to flip the laundry.

Remind me to let the dogs out.

Remind me to go to the grocery store.

Remind me to eat.

Remind me in an hour.

Remind me tomorrow.

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In 2005, the sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello published a tome called The New Spirit of Capitalism. The title plays on Weber’s famous book about the Protestant Work Ethic, which argued that Americans are good capitalists because Protestantism teaches us to work hard now for our future rewards in heaven.

Boltanski and Chiapello were also interested in how people are motivated to capitalize. They define capitalism as the ‘imperative to unlimited accumulation of capital by formally peaceful means’. You have to amass a net worth, but like, don’t directly kill anyone about it (just indirectly, like with a healthcare denial AI program or something).

It’s an absurd system, they argue, where workers toil everyday of their entire lives to benefit the business owner, and where business owners are trapped in a never-ending drive to accumulate for accumulation’s sake.⁵

Both are pushing a boulder up a hill all day every day until they die, with no ultimate satisfaction in sight. How do you get a person to do such a thing? There has to be some way to engage people to spend their one small and precious life on this absurdity, some justification for it.

Weber said it was Protestantism. The German economist Albert Hirschman said it was contributing to the common good. Liberal economists justified it with efficiency — capitalism was the quickest way to increase the wealth of the nation overall, and a rising tide lifts all boats, Reaganomics, etc, etc.

Besides the fact that this trickle-down theory is clearly a ruling class mythos, increasing the GDP is not really convincing enough for the average person. Boltanski and Chiapello write:

“To make commitment to it worthwhile, to be attractive, capitalism must be capable of being presented to them in the form of activities which, by comparison with alternative opportunities, can be characterized as ‘stimulating’ — that is to say, very generally, and albeit in different ways in different periods, as containing possibilities for self-realization and room for freedom of action.”⁶

Boltanski and Chiapello decided it might be illuminating to study how the managerial class was stimulating their workforce. They gathered a ream of French HR texts from the 1960’s and the 1990’s so they could compare and contrast, and what they found is that the ‘the spirit of capitalism’ — the ideology that justifies our engagement — had changed, and it had done so in an interesting way.

The 1960’s was characterized by huge, clunky firms organized around top-down bureaucratic control, and it’s clear in managerial texts from this time that the professional class was growing antsy for some more autonomy. In 1968, a massive general strike broke out in Paris, and two critiques of capitalism emerged — a social critique that said Capitalism Causes Suffering, and an artistic critique that said Capitalism Limits Self-Expression.⁷

Fernand Deligny, who I wrote about in the last installment, can be seen as part of this critical wave. His focus on the network as a non-hierarchical alternative to top-down control was radical at the time, and became the basis for Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the rhizome that inspired many anti-capitalist activists and thinkers.

But Boltanski and Chiapello argue that critique, far from weakening capitalism, actually reveals weaknesses that can be strengthened. They write:

“..evading a certain type of critique often occurs at the cost of satisfying criticisms of a different kind, so that opponents find themselves disorientated, even making common cause with a capitalism they earlier claimed to be contesting.”

You can’t have all these workers and professionals mad about capitalism; something’s gotta give! Capitalism Limits Self-Expression was an easier compromise than addressing Captialism Causes Suffering, so by the 1990’s, the business world had embraced the artistic critique of hierarchy.

With the global neoliberal turn in policy, the increase in computing power, and the rise of the internet, businesses were morphing into decentralized networks, striving to be ‘lean’ and outsource much of their operations. They had reorganized their workforces into smaller, more autonomous ‘teams’ focused on ‘projects’ and led by ‘vision’.

The emphasis in managerial texts of this time was on creating meaning for workers — to be ‘self-organized, creative beings’ operating in a flexible network. A problem Boltanski and Chiapello identified in the 1990's texts was how to control these networks of small teams working autonomously on their visionary projects:

“..the only solution is for people to control themselves, which involves transferring constraints from external organizational mechanisms to people’s internal dispositions, and for the powers of control they exercise to be consistent with the firm’s general project…”

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I sit across from the psychiatrist at her desk. The walls are screaming white, and I am hoping for a medicine that will stop me from thinking so often of death.

She asks me to describe the thoughts that run through my head when I feel depressed, but I say that I don’t know if I can. She gives me a pencil and a piece of paper.

“Write them down,” she says.

I write:

failure, failure, failure.

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The same year that Boltanski and Chiapello published The New Spirit of Capitalism, Barkley put out a book called ADHD and the Nature of Self-Control. In it, he argued that self-control is mostly a genetic trait, and ADHD is a condition of lack in the self-regulatory gene department.⁸

Barkley has said that his interest in ADHD comes from a desire to understand self-control in general — he told CHADD in 2022:

"The disorder fascinates me as a window onto how typical human self-regulation may develop by studying when it goes awry.”

He wants to understand human nature by learning about my human dysfunction. But what does he already think about that nature in the first place?

A clue comes from another interview he gave to Routledge to promote the fourth edition of his book, Taking Charge of ADHD. When asked his greatest influences, he listed right-wing libertarians like Ayn Rand, who saw the world as divided between noble producers and evil parasites, Murray Rothbard, the father of anarcho-capitalism, and an economist I had never heard of before:

“..while developing my theory of self-regulation and executive functioning the book that most influenced me was Ludwig von Mises Human Action, which while it is a book on economics is also just as much a psychology textbook. That book and his theory tell us why we are having and will continue to have severe economic problems because of government involvement in our markets and financial system and hence the daily interactions of people.”

In the next edition of The EF Papers: who the fuck is Ludwig von Mises, and what does he know about executive function?

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For more right now, I did a two-part deep dive on ADHD and the Nature of Self-Control for paid subscribers last year:

Where Does Self-Control Come From?

Is Clock Time the Boss of Me?

1. See: Suspensions of Perception by Jonathan Crary

2. Phineas Gage being the most famous one

3. From The ADHD Explosion by Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler: “..we ask whether accurate diagnosis of ADHD and appropriate treatment of those diagnosed could boost our nation’s productivity and thereby reduce the huge indirect costs of ADHD: $100 billion annually for youth and $200 billion for adults.” Treatment for the nation!!!

4. Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic

5. Boltanski and Chiapello emphasize that this isn’t some shadowy conspiracy — the owning class use justifications, too: “…we may indeed speak of a dominant ideology, so long as we stop regarding it as a mere subterfuge by the dominant to ensure the consent of the dominated, and acknowledge that a majority of those involved – the strong as well as the weak – rely on these schemas in order to represent to themselves the operation, benefits and constraints of the order in which they find themselves immersed.”

6. emphasis mine

7. This is a 600-page book so I’m generalizing a lot here!!!! This review gets more specific if you’re interested in more deets.

8. Barkley’s words, exactly: “That is not to say that socialization has no part to play in the development of children's self-control...But it is to say that the basic capacities that permit humans to engage in self-regulation are neurogenetic in origin.”

also: “humans do not so much acquire self-control through formal social indoctrination or education but develop it largely as a result of the unfolding maturation of the neural structures of the prefrontal cortex that subserve it. The social stimulation and encouragement provided by a self-controlling culture to the executive functions arising from this maturational process is sufficient to see to their development." (233)