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Part 17: More on Behavior:
July 8, 2002:
Last time, I talked about the causes of our behavior and the need
to support desirable behavior in our culture. This is important.
We cannot just punish or refuse to reward undesirable behavior.
We must create the conditions which make desirable behavior a
reenforcing activity. For democracy to work, we must arrange situations
which will encourage people to do what is in the long term best
interest of the culture. That is what we have not been doing.
We too often punish achievement and performance. We see it everywhere, in industry, government, and public education. It is imbedded in our tax structures. When people make their homes an asset to the community, we punish them with an increased tax burden. When we are creative and contribute more to the culture, we are punished with a disproportional tax burden. We are even punished for getting married and creating a two parent home. The government rewards us for living in sin.
Even when we try to arrange positive contingencies of reenforcement, as in the President's school bill, we use a bad standard of measurement and we apply it in a negative way from the wrong level. In this case, the SAT tests will be used as a standard of performance. The schools will be punished if they do not teach their students to pass this test. No one seems to notice that learning to pass tests is not education. Instead of encouraging curiosity, we apply negative pressure. Dumb, dumb, dumb!
Other examples abound. We punish high performance and desirable behavior. We reward low performance and undesirable behavior, right across the board. We eschew providing opportunity. Instead, we establish negative control. That must all be reversed! Nothing else I say is important unless we make that fundamental change in our system.
In the words of B. F. Skinner "What is needed is a restoration of social environments in which people behave in ways called moral." Now, he was not talking about bible thumper morality here. This is not about preaching or about religious control. It is about restoring reality. We need to reestablish a reality where the good people succeed. We must arrange the environment so citizens at all levels will have incentives for desirable behavior.
At the same time, we must take away the incentives for failure be refusing to reward it. The bleeding hearts have had their day. Their well meaning generosity has had a negative impact. The spiral is downward. We must treat people decently, but that does not include rewarding failure. These liberal philosophies came out of a sadly misguided perception of the human psychology. It was a nonsensical theory that people who are rewarded will feel good and behave well. That will only happen if there is a strong and easily understood connection between the behavior and the reward. We don't have that connection anywhere in our culture.
I don't want to get mean and puritanical here. Punishment of negative behavior may not always be necessary. If we do not intervene with rewards for failure, the behavior will often provide its own punishment. In the earlier years of our American democracy, this was the normal case. For those citizens, the punishments for failure were built into the environment. Those punishments were very severe, up to and including death.
In addition, our early citizens had very good role models. The people of means were firmly grounded in their own personal ethic. They set the example of desirable behavior and were active in condemning antisocial behavior. The community, as represented by its leadership, had a strong influence on the citizen. People were, in fact, morally judged when found wanting. That is in sharp contrast to our current situation where the people of means set the examples of immoral and antisocial behavior. Those earlier positive community forces were still active in my youth in the nineteen thirties and early forties, but change was underway.
Now we are at the end of a long steady decline. Our entire culture is corrupt. Many forces have acted together to accelerate that decline. One, which I have address, was the pump priming which followed the great depression. There were also the changes in family structure which came out of World War Two. The traditional roles of women and men changed forever. One other influence, which I believe is the most powerful and most evil, is the ongoing influence of the marketing industry. I will address this slime covered monstrosity in detail later.
However we got here, we are now faced with tough choices. We can either stick our heads in the sand and pretend nothing is wrong, or we can try to reverse our direction. Thinking mostly of my grandchildren, I would prefer to mount up and go after the windmill. I want to restore a government and a society which will do what is right for them. For sure, this will be a long tough process. In order to get the government to do the right thing, we have to reclaim it. We must take it away from the power mongers, bureaucrats, and political hacks.
Once we can do that, governments at all levels and organizations of all kinds can help the turnaround by arranging their activities so as to reenforce positive behavior. They can help even more be refraining from reenforcing undesirable behavior. We must examine our institutions and laws one by one. We must find what kind of behavior they reenforce. We must make sure all of our official positions are reenforcing of desirable behavior. At the same time, we must reject any rules, or procedures which reward undesirable behavior. Negative behavior and failure must never be officially rewarded.
Now, having said all of that, I must come to the fact that the citizen is still the key to success. It is I who am responsible. The fact is, the government has gone out of control because I have abdicated my power. To the extent that the individual citizen abdicates his functional responsibility, the government will absorb it. That function will be gradually passed upward until it is finally exercised right at the top. Then it will usually be exercised in ways which are detrimental to individual freedoms.
That is the situation wherein we currently find ourselves. Most of the individual citizens prerogatives have been usurped by the federal government. All decisions and prerogatives which are crucial to the individual are being exercised on Capitol Hill and in the White House. The citizen gets crap and gets shoved in it. We earned that through abdication.
Governments seek power. There is only one place where that power can come from. All power is invested in the individual citizen. The government can only acquire it from us. It can only do that to the extent that we surrender it. Nothing will make a government power monger happier that to have the citizens abdicate their responsibility.
Ideally, the government would have no prerogatives. It would have a very limited range of responsibilities. From my reading of our constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, I believe this is what the framers intended. The government was never intended to rule us. It was intended to exercise a limit range of responsibilities in response to the needs of the citizens. In this model, the prerogative always belonged to the citizens and not to the government.
This means that as citizens, we must change our behavior. We must take back our prerogatives from government at all levels. It is only the citizen who can stop the governments excesses. It is we who must interrupt the cycle of government's and citizen's cooperative dishonesty. The government will never do it. It must start somewhere, so let it start with me. It's the old time worn saw, "If not me, who? If not now, when?" I will continue to insist that I and every other citizen is responsible. It is I who have failed and I who must make the changes.
In my next essay, I will begin to examine the various structures
of family, community, and government. Only after we do that can
we begin to look at the levels of responsibility beyond the citizen.
Eventually, we can examine the separate issues and have a solid
basis for deciding where and how they can best be addressed. This
is the areas where we can take a hard look at the kinds of individual
behaviors that we are supporting and see how we can change the
contingencies of reenforcement. From that will evolve a political
platform which I would be happy to support.
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