February 20 , 2016

February 20 , 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971, p. 207) Skinner writes “It is only autonomous man who has reached a dead end. Man himself may be controlled by his environment, but it is an environment which is almost wholly of his own making.” I disagree with this statement. The autonomous man hasn’t reached a dead end yet. After all, he sets the stage for Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), which can be heard everywhere.  Autonomous man seems to be winning as very little is heard from those who set the stage for Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). 

The reason we don’t hear much at all from those who set the stage for SVB is that our listening behavior was primarily conditioned by NVB. As we are, we are basically incapable of listening to SVB.  This doesn’t mean, however, that we have a hearing defect; it simply means that we keep re-creating the environments in which we can’t listen to each other, since as individual speakers, we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak. We keep creating environments in which we argue, fight and compete as we don’t really know how to create the environments which will reliably give rise to the conversations in which we all feel validated, understood, respected and listened to. 

As long as we are unaware and uneducated about the SVB/NVB distinction we remain incapable of maintaining the environment in which SVB can continue. By default, we create environments that can only produce NVB. Skinner writes “When a person changes his physical or social environment “intentionally” – that is, in order to change human behavior, including his own – he plays two roles: one as a controller, as the designer of a controlling culture, and another as the controlled, as the product of a culture (p. 207).”  It is because of NVB, which always separates the speaker from the listener, that we have a problem distinguishing our role as a controller and as the controlled, which gets confused in the conflict between ‘a self’ and the other (self). We come to terms with this identity problem in SVB.