July 22, 2014

July 22, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

When we are not told by other people in our environment how to be happy, we will not be happy and we will have nothing to be happy with or about. When those surrounding us while growing up have no clue  who they are or why they do the things they do, we don’t and can’t grow up to be responsible for knowing who we are or why we do the things we do. If what we were taught was based on make-belief, we didn't learn anything about who we are and why we do what we do. We only manage to acquire such behavior once we leave our community of origins and are affected by the different discriminative contingencies, which can bring this self-knowledge about. Fact is, that we never voluntarily leave our  community of origin and only do so when we were pushed out. Over time, different behaviors were shaped, which created an attraction to contingencies that are different from the one with which we grew up. This inevitably created a separation and resulted in the rejection from our verbal community in response to our different behaviors.  

We may believe that we go on some kind of spiritual journey, but the reality is that we become part of a different verbal community than the one in which we grew up. Regardless of whether we immerse ourselves in different books, religions, music, sciences or cultures, we are attracted to and affected by people who behave verbally differently, who offer us new and increased opportunities for reinforcement. We therefore don’t search for ourselves, but we experience our different environments in which we are affected in novel ways. 


When the environment in which we find ourselves is causing the stabilization of our behavioral repertoires, there is less of an opportunity for reinforcement. Environments in which the same behaviors occur again don’t and can’t stimulate us do something else, something new. Environments in which novel behaviors are shaped are not the environments in which we can keep imagining that we are able to choose, that we decide how we behave. We think that we individually choose, but our freedom or choice is as much dependent on our environment as is our sense of imprisonment or our feelings of oppression. Although we grow up with the belief that only our belief is the right belief and that beliefs of others are wrong, we are nevertheless dependent on our environment for our beliefs.