October
28, 2015
Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S.
Verbal Engineer
Dear Reader,
Now that I
am addressing you individually, my writing has changed. It is under control of
a different, more positive set of circumstances. I like to write in this way
much more than when was trying to address a broader audience than just you.
That was a whole different set of circumstances which somehow excluded you. Not
that there was anything wrong with that kind of writing, but it was not
personal. I feel more involved in this kind of writing and I am curious where
it is going to take me. I led it take me wherever it wants to go. It reminds me
of times that I was making audio-recordings of myself. I would start the
tape-recorder and just began talking about anything that came to my ‘mind.’ I
do the same now while writing to you. In those days I was trying to speak with
you on an audio-tape, but now I am speaking with you with written words.
Looking back
on the experience of making audio-recordings of myself, it now seems that I
wasn’t really talking with you. I was primarily talking with myself. I needed to
talk with myself as I was still trying to find you. This writing is different as
I have now found you. Since it is more personal, it is less about me and more
about you. Yes, you read that correctly: the more personal we get, the less we
will be concerned with ourselves and the more we will be concerned with each other.
The opposite is also true: the less personal we get, the less concerned we are
with each other. We are not concerned with each other as we are so impersonal. This
goes together with my attempts to be scientific.
I was
determined to find scientific proof for what I call Sound Verbal Behavior
(SVB). I have found this proof in Radical Behaviorism, which explains behavior
as a function of the environment. I direct these words to you as I am teaching
you that how you talk is determined by your environment. If you feel safe,
accepted, validated and supported, you will engage in SVB, because it is
possible, but if you feel threatened, on guard, defensive and stressed, you can
only have NVB, because only SVB is impossible. Your efforts of ‘trying to be
the better person’ are based on the false notion that you can cause your own
behavior. That is why you always fail, even though, like a politician you make it
seem to others as if you have succeeded. When you learn about the natural
science of human behavior, you will come to terms with the scientific fact that
you don’t and can’t cause your own behavior. Language is the clearest example
of what should have been, but what until now hasn’t and couldn’t be the focal
interest of behaviorism. We all accept that a child is born nonverbal and that
the verbal community in which it is born is his or her environment from which
he or she learns his or her language. This goes for every other behavior. What
we do is not caused by some imaginary inner agent, by a self, but by our parents,
our family and our community members.
Our environment equals other people with
their specific cultural ways. These other people are stimuli who set the stage
for how, when and how much we will behave. Others punish and decrease or
reinforce and increase our behavior. What many of us don’t know and can’t seem
to acknowledge is that behaviors which are punished cannot and will not be
increased, while only behaviors which are reinforced will increase. Such is the
lawfulness of human behavior. When we notice an increase in our own or someone
else’s behavior, we must assume that something, most likely a person, is
causing it. We don’t
have much SVB as we don’t know how to have it. We have it only for a little bit
as we only know how to have it for a little bit.
To have SVB more often requires
us to get better at stopping Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), that is, we must
learn to create and maintain the environments in which SVB can and will reliably
occur. We will only have SVB once our NVB has come to an end. Every time NVB
comes to an end we will have SVB. You already had SVB and your NVB already came
to an end, but it didn’t last long enough for you to be able to continue with
SVB. You cannot continue with SVB as long as you don’t recognize why it stops
again. However, it didn’t stop because of you. It stopped because of others,
who didn’t allow you to have SVB. You were conditioned by others to have mostly
NVB and only a little bit of SVB. Even if others allowed you to have SVB, they
did so in spite of their misunderstanding about the causation of behavior. They
may believe that their behavior was caused by ‘a higher power’ or by trust in
an ‘inner self’, but their ability to reinforce your behavior or the behavior
of others depended on the extent to which they themselves were reinforced by
others.
Since I am
more reinforced for my SVB these days than when I was making these
audio-recordings, I am better capable of reinforcing you with this writing. SVB
is really the science of spoken communication. In SVB, the speaker and the
listener take turns and because of that they co-regulate each other. In NVB, by
contrast, we are always dealing with a biased speaker, who forces his or her
listeners to listen. In NVB there is no turn-taking; only the speaker is
allowed to speak and the listener remains the listener. In NVB there is a
hierarchical difference between the speaker and the listener, which ignores turn-taking.
In the absence of turn-taking, NVB is uni-directional. The speaker and the
listener will dysregulate each other in NVB as there is no real connection.
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