January 29, 2016

January 29, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

George Washington reportedly said to the Constitutional Convention delegates “If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our world. Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hands of God.”  He was trying to say something about the necessity and consistency of how things had to be framed. Due to his growing up he must have had many instances of Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) which made him focus on what the Founders as well as the people agree on, but which also allowed him to acknowledge and anticipate the likelihood of discord between the government and the governed, which is, of course, is a version of Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

Washington was in his own way trying to point out the need to identify NVB and to go back to SVB, to “repair” the agreement if it got lost as that is the “wise and honest” thing to do.  However, this is not a matter of defending “our world”, but of having no need to defend, as SVB can only occur in the absence of aversive stimulation. Thus, SVB is not and “event” that “is in the hands of God”, to the contrary, it is a natural phenomenon which humans either accomplish or fail to accomplish. 

Stated differently, “the wise and honest”, which couldn't be anyone else but behavioral scientists, either are really knowledgeable about behavior and therefore “can repair” or these behavioral engineers are humble enough to accept that they don’t know and can’t repair the interactions between the government and the governed. There is no place for “God” in this picture as we are talking about what human beings do each other. 

Without SVB neither the government nor the people are capable of controlling themselves. In “The Federalist” (essays by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison) it is written “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls of government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Certainly,  “angels” and “God” have nothing to do with control of behavior, but neither has “internal” control or the causation of behavior by an inner self.