January 7, 2014

January 7, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

 

The author chooses the letter type called agency to address an issue, which, according to him, is widely misunderstood. From a behaviorist perspective, agency refers to participation. As already explained in his earlier writings, there are environmental reasons why there are more readers than writers and more listeners than speakers. When the narrative of the reader is created and therefore determined by the writer, readers are, supposedly, no longer needing to speak for themselves and have been made to believe that their involvement in communication is not necessary, Readers who only read and do not write are like listeners who only listen but do not speak. Their participation in communication is reduced to that of an audience. As such, they have become disengaged, passive and dull, but, above all, completely dependent on others. 

The fact that someone else is usually doing all the talking and all the writing for us is based on the notion that others are better at it, that we ourselves are not good or not educated enough, that we are incapable or unwilling or that we are ashamed. The reasons for not speaking and not writing are so immense, that even those who do speak and write only do so in a fashion, which, according to this author, for the most part, is to be considered as Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). What this author is trying to make clear is that most speech isn’t speech and that most writing hasn’t got anything to do with human interaction. In real communication, in what this author calls Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), speakers and listeners, writers and readers always take turns. One moment speakers are speakers, but another moment they are again listeners, Likewise, listeners at one moment may be listeners, but at another moment they are speakers again. It is because of this turn-taking that listeners never merely see themselves as listeners, but also view themselves as speakers and speakers don’t only see themselves as speakers, but also experience and understand themselves as listeners. 

In SVB the speaker is the listener and the listener is the speaker, but in NVB speakers speak without being listeners and listeners listen without becoming being speakers. In SVB the person who speaks simultaneously hears him or herself. In SVB we listen to ourselves while we speak. In SVB speakers don’t act like speakers and listeners don’t act like listeners. There is a great difference between acting like a speaker and being a speaker and acting like a listener and being a listener. In NVB speakers act like speakers and listeners act like listeners, but in NVB speakers don’t really communicate and listeners don’t really listen. Only in SVB can speakers completely become speakers, because only in SVB are they being listened to. Similarly, only in SVB listeners are truly listening, because they can always speak with the speaker. Indeed, in SVB there no need for speakers to act like speakers, because they can really be speakers; in SVB there is no need for listeners to act like listeners, because they can really be listeners; in SVB we really communicate.  

A colleague was wondering what the saying “if these walls had ears” has to do with the issue this author is addressing. This writer decided to use this question as an exercise to explore what would happen if he brought his verbal behavior under control of the exploration of this statement. He thought about circumstances in which he would have used that saying. The author thought of a visit a long time ago to a castle somewhere in the Ardennes in Belgium. He was in a dungeon where prisoners had been tortured. While looking at the machines that were used in that process, he imagined what it must have been like to undergo such treatment. As he looked at the walls of this dark chamber, he was terrified by the thought of suffering and the painful death imposed on poor individuals. The statement “if these walls had ears” makes sense in the situation in which people have become deaf to what it is like to be human. Prisoners were brutally treated and were forced to say things because they were tortured. Nobody heard their despair and their agony, all that mattered to their captors was their ability to coerce another human being into saying something they wanted to hear. 

This saying raises the question: how far have we really come with our human interaction? Walls don’t have ears, humans do, but do we use them? Walls don’t speak, but because we fail to speak, we imagine in our despair that they do. And, because we go insane if no one listens, we also imagine walls having ears. A related saying is “one might as well talk to a wall.” In both sayings the wall represents the lack of listening, the absence of reciprocation. Nothing comes back from a wall. Perhaps it is safer to talk to walls than to people? People talk back and if they do, they often do so in an aggressive and vicious manner. Is that why so many people barricade themselves, why most people are so thick that you can’t get through to them,  why they have walled off what is left of their real self? The schizophrenic supposedly is “talking to unseen others” but if we aren’t really talking with each other, aren’t we too merely “talking to unseen others?” Isn’t insanity the breakdown of human interaction? And, isn’t the cover up of this breakdown driving everybody more insane? 

Although we may be inclined to think in terms of the coercer and the coerced, the torturer and the tortured, in NVB everyone is coerced and everyone is tortured because something is fundamentally wrong with us. This author believes that our need for metaphors signifies our need for improved, more accurate communication. However, our metaphors only created the impression that we have improved, in reality communication only became worse. It is easy to see that our time-worn metaphors have enormous influence on us, but it is only when we look at how they came about, that we begin to wonder how useful these outdated sayings actually are. In NVB we keep saying the same things over and over again. The question is not “if these walls have ears” but “if these humans have ears.” Of course, humans have ears and this is a stupid question. The question might better be changed into “are we using our ears?" or "Why aren't we using our ears?" When it comes to hearing only what we want to hear, we are not really using our ears. In essence, we are deaf to what we don’t want to hear. We don’t want to hear suffering, pain, anxiety, sadness, despair and frustration. 

The saying “if these walls had ears” basically expresses what we don’t want to hear. To justify that we are not listening, we fabricate walls with ears. Oddly, this fabrication can be of great help in getting us back into shape. When we catch ourselves saying that walls have human qualities, it is only a small step to admitting that humans have wall-like qualities. This is what needs to happen. Translated to NVB this means that we begin to acknowledge and recognize that it is not a pleasant experience to listen to how we usually sound. We don’t want to hear ourselves sound terrible and so we rather pretend that we are sounding wonderful. The fact remains, however, that those who try to sound nice always sound horrible. Those who really sound nice don’t try to sound nice, they don’t need to try to sound nice. Those who think they need to try to sound nice, who want others to sound nice, are not the ones due to which we are going to sound nice. It is not going to happen! It can’t happen that way! They will always elicit, with their aversive sounds, the fight-flight-freeze response.  

Any kind of statement that is meant to improve human interaction that has the word “if” in it prevents us from acknowledging what is going on. Ask yourself  “If we were friendly and peaceful with one another, if we sounded good, if we would listen to each other, would we have better communication?” If you still answered “yes”, you must realize now that that didn’t and couldn't help. If you answered “no” then you know that imagination and creative writing didn’t and couldn’t improve our communication. We need an approach that allows us to see what really happens. This has to be an environmental approach. Once that approach is taken, we find that SVB is not an approach. It is real human interaction, nothing more and nothing less. SVB is not a method. It is just a name for a process which we haven’t yet fully understood. 

How can there be communication in which we don’t understand each other? If we misunderstand each other, it is not communication. Neither the speaker nor the listener is to be blamed. We need to find out which stimuli are missing. Once we call it NVB, instead of misunderstanding, things will be discovered, why there couldn’t be any understanding. These things are usually people, who have become props, means to someone else’s ends. Students, employees, children, voters, believers, buyers, patients and citizens are conditioned to be spoken at , not spoken with. They are trained not to speak, but to do as they are told. and to obediently listen. They are trained to follow the communication rules which were determined for them by others and to buy and read all their books that are sold by the millions. They are told not to speak when spoken to. They live by the letter, which they perceive as their holy law. SVB questions all of this, not because it wants to or because it has to, but because it can. NVB can’t raise any questions about how we interact. Rather than admitting that we have failed to interact, NVB justifies mankind’s atrocities. We are so embarrassed to listen to our NVB that we have fabricated the nonsensical belief that we are incapable of hearing ourselves. We use real and imagined trauma to justify our own forcefulness. SVB heralds the end of our coercive and punitive behavior, which has always undermined human relationship. We have ears and we must use them to engage in spoken communication.