December 23, 2015

December 23, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Students,

This is my seventh response to “The Personal Life of the Behavioral Analyst” by D. Bostow (2011). “Years ago, the public school curriculum contained manual arts, such as home economics, wood, metal, and general shop classes. The college preparatory curriculum replaced these ‘‘blue collar’’ classes with courses that establish verbal behavior that is often distantly related to practical matters.” Indeed, we no longer know very much about basic mechanical processes and how things generally work and we rely on others to fix things. The verbal behavior we acquire doesn’t even allow us to have any normal conversation anymore. 

Healthy, happy, productive relationships cannot be sustained without Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). Besides the fact that Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) creates unhealthy, negative, problematic relationships, it should also be noted that NVB is impractical. In NVB, communicators are insensitive to themselves and each other. This bluntness prevents any kind of experimentation. SVB, on the other hand, stimulates exploration and tinkering, but NVB kills all creativity and playfulness. It is sad that we no longer know how to fix things, but even more urgent is that NVB destroys our relationships.

We can increase our rates of SVB by making verbal and written commitments. That this hasn’t happened yet is because nobody has suggested it. I am the first one to suggest it. All these other objectives, such as saving the environment or protesting policies we don't agree with obfuscate our need to improve our interactions with each other. If we had more public commitments towards increasing our SVB and decreasing our NVB, we would revolutionize our culture quickly. 

Not energy conservation, but SVB needs to be the topic we talk about with our neighbors. SVB is required for our face-to-face relationship. No matter how much we talk about saving the environment, as long as we don’t achieve SVB, we only engage in-your-face, that is, in negative relationship. And, yes, we can get involved in arts, literature, music or sports, but each of these activities are only reinforcing to the extent that environments are created in which SVB is possible. Everything depends on and is be enhanced by SVB as SVB generalizes to many other behaviors. As long as we don’t know SVB “We remain prisoners of our past and present contingencies without help.”