November 21, 2015

November 21, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

As already stated, in Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) the speaker often prevents the listener, that is, the other person, from becoming a speaker. The ubiquity of NVB is based on the fact that only a few speakers do all the talking. In NVB the speaker is not listening to him or herself. He or she cannot do this as  nothing in his or her environment is stimulating him or her to do this. Therefore, NVB happens in the absence of stimuli which would make SVB possible. If such stimuli were present or made available, instances of SVB would occur. Obviously, producing such stimuli can only occur due to a behavioral history of SVB. Most people, however, have very little SVB in their history.

There couldn’t be much history of instances of SVB because the distinction between SVB and NVB has never been made. Although people have tried to get along and succeeded to some extent, this has not led to a learning process in which SVB was taught. Modern people, who rely on medications to cure diseases, are no longer involved in the fictional explanations, which were once believed to cause the disease. Their way of talking has changed because of scientific explanations. NVB is a pre-scientific way, but SVB is a scientific way of communicating. The separation between the listener and the speaker is absolutely false and the fact that so much of our spoken communication is based on this just shows how problematic most of our spoken communication is.

Low rates of SVB are caused by a lack of speakers. When speakers compete with other speakers they will produce NVB. SVB didn’t and couldn’t be increased in that way. During SVB speakers are no longer competing with other speakers. To the contrary, they mutually reinforce each other. In NVB speaking is basically kept to a minimum. In SVB, on the other hand, there is a tremendous increase in speaking because we are listening to ourselves and therefore to each other. In NVB we don’t listen to ourselves and therefore we can’t listen to each other. Self-listening includes other-listening, but other-listening excludes self-listening. To stimulate more self-listening, more speaking is necessary, but not the kind of speaking we are used to. NVB couldn’t stimulate us to listen to ourselves, because we were not allowed to speak; our private speech, that is, what we could only say and think to ourselves, was no longer considered to be part of public speech.