May 3, 2014

May 3, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

If we want to increase our Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), we will have to be able to decrease our Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) first. These mutually exclusive, but alternating ways of communicating are caused by contingencies, which are phylogenetic, ontogenetic and cultural. This means that the transition from NVB to SVB involves changes in the way we talk about our biology, our inherited, innate biological processes, which are know as classical or respondent conditioning. The more instances of SVB we achieve, the more the content of our conversations will be about what we are able to learn, why we should learn it and how we can learn it. 

SVB distills the best from each culture, but it discards any elements which prevent it. Normally this function of what is right or wrong is determined by the culture itself, but with SVB we find that ongoing conversation is the determining factor. Obviously, there never really was any significant ongoing conversation between cultures although many have imagined and fantasized about it. There couldn’t be any ongoing conversation as long as there was no understanding of SVB. 

It is important to understand that what we have proudly called the multi-cultural dialogue, was not a dialogue, but a uni-directional monologue. We yet haven’t started a culture-inclusive conversation, because we don’t know how to have that conversation. We know very well and have been conditioned to exclude from our conversation what doesn’t belong to our culture, but we haven’t gotten much practice analyzing, understanding and deliberately, skillfully and reliably excluding from our conversation the cultural aspects that undermine our human relationship. As long as our outdated survival skills still do the trick, nothing stimulates us to have SVB. We will only be motivated to learn about SVB by realizing the great threat of NVB.