October 4, 2014

October 4, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

The verbal conditioning of past generations is completely irrelevant to our modern scientific findings. Animism, the ancient belief that natural objects, natural phenomena, and the universe itself possess souls, continues in a modified form in our language today. Thus, most people still believe that the human body has a soul, which exists apart from it. This becomes apparent when someone dies, because only then are we confronted with this fiction. However, even those who understand and acknowledge that nothing survives death go about their lives as if they are the doers of their own actions.  

Presumably, the difference between active and passive voice indicates that we are becoming more scientific. A sentence in which a subject performs an action, such as: “I wrecked your car”, is said to be less objective, because it was written in active voice. Such sentences are usually shorter and easier to read than when we describe the matter in passive voice. Then, we might say: “your car has been wrecked.” In the former, there is an agent, but in the latter, the agent is left out of the picture.  People generally don’t like to read passive voice, because sentences written in passive voice usually become too long and too wordy and omit agential doers. In other words, passive voice doesn’t “speak” to people as well as active voice does. As the example of active versus passive voice makes clear, attempts to rid language of pre-scientific linguistic fictions has been focused on written, but not on spoken language. 

Fact is, there is neither passive nor active voice in our written language. And, silently reading and writing involves no vocal response. Only in our spoken language do we use our voice. Moreover, by becoming aware of our voice, while we speak, we can become more scientific in our spoken communication. It was not the length or the wordiness of our sentences, which prevented us from becoming scientific. It was the replacement and the neglect of our spoken communication by written words, which perpetuated our unscientific ways of talking. During SVB we find, the longer time we spend talking, the more scientific we will become.