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Dec. 31, 2020 - Jim Fetzer
14:09
Lockdown - Global Conditioning
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A pervasive idea that has endured the centuries is that humans are nothing more than animals,
just another species.
you There's nothing that separates man from other mammals except some kind of natural privilege, and therefore he must be contained, muzzled, controlled, and reduced in order to assuage his existential guilt and find balance with nature again.
This same reductionist vision of mankind as less than human, which now presents itself as science through different dogmas, was perhaps the dark underlying feature of B.F.
Skinner's radical behaviorist theories.
He believed that man was no different than rats or pigeons, and therefore it was not necessary to study man, for you could draw all of your conclusions from testing on animals.
He believed that humans were inherently blank slates and that they possessed no free will, but were simply products of their environment and their conditioning.
Unlike his humanistic counterparts, he viewed introspective psychology and philosophy as unscientific and therefore unimportant.
For how could one measure thoughts and feelings?
He believed that psychology must restrict itself to what it can see and what can be manipulated and measured in the laboratory.
To him, behavior was shaped and controlled by environment and nothing more.
Man is just an empty shell.
He devoted his life to proving the conclusion to his thesis.
He designed a device called an operant conditioning chamber as a way to conduct experiments on his fellow mammal, the rat.
Hungry rats would be placed in Skinner's box and would eventually find and step on a lever, which when activated, would drop a pellet of food.
Once the rats had made the association between the lever and the food, they would repeat this behavior again and again.
Considering the food pellet a reward, or a positive reinforcement for the action of hitting the lever, Skinner wanted to see what would happen when he introduced a negative reinforcement into his box.
Designing and introducing an electric grid that would shock the rat in the box until it found the lever was the next part of the experiment.
He found that the rats would rush to the lever as soon as they were dropped into the box to avoid the electric shock.
He then introduced a light which would illuminate before the shock was ignited.
The rats were trained to scurry over to the lever and push it when they saw the light in order to avoid shock.
He then experimented with different schedules of reinforcement to see how the rats would react.
He was looking for the most effective means of modifying their behavior.
From this experiment, he extrapolated different theoretical means for shaping human behavior.
He's generalized from the results of these very careful laboratory studies to a wide variety of practical human situations.
His research led him to develop the teaching machine and programmed learning.
In his novel Walden 2, he describes how operant learning and the theory of behaviorism might be applied in a utopian community.
In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he discusses the need for human beings at this point in
history to develop an effective technology of behavior,
not to avoid controls, but to analyze and carefully plan the types of controls that determine our behavior.
One of the main fallacies of this type of logic is that it does not account for independent thought,
behavior, or free will.
It assumes that there is no voluntary choice involved, only conditioning.
It suggests that some kind of token economy, such as a social credit system, could shape behavior for the greater good.
The language masks the actual intention of forcing people into certain behaviors by providing better perks for those who comply and punishing those who do not.
According to Skinner, You can only train human animals to do something or not to do something.
All behavior comes down to this.
Emotions, feelings, sense of morality, and independent thought are not measurable by what he would call objective science, therefore do not exist.
Individuality does not exist.
Free choice does not exist.
Nowadays, we have a new catchphrase for this type of thinking.
The science is settled.
Skinner went on to experiment on pigeons, and then on his own daughter.
Skinner denied experimenting on his daughter in interviews, while simultaneously describing how he experimented with operant conditioning techniques on his daughter.
Did you use some principles of behavior analysis to raise your children?
What was the outcome?
Well, I welcome this.
A question, because I'd like to correct some rumors that go around.
I wish to say, that's the daughter which is not here.
I can't put her on display, but she's not suing me.
We have a very good relationship, as a matter of fact.
As to using behavior modification, it's very curious.
I look back on it now.
I never did use any kind of contrived reinforcing contingencies on my children.
And we discovered that if we gave a hungry pigeon food at just the right time, we could get the pigeon to do almost anything.
And very shortly after that, I tried it on my daughter, who was then nine months old.
I was holding her in my lap one day.
It was growing dark in the room.
I reached over and turned on the light.
Well, she smiled.
I thought, well, ah, that's a reinforcer.
I'll see if I can't use that to shape a bit of her behavior.
Just as I'd done with the pigeons, actually.
This kind of denial can be seen in all those who wish to shape humans, and by extension societies, in ways that they see fit.
Utopian ideals are always a common fantasy of those who believe that human behavior can be modified and controlled until it is just right.
Skinner was no exception.
His book Walden 2, published in 1948, describes a post-World War II utopian society where free will does not exist, the nuclear family is abolished, and children are raised by the community or state, and society is constructed and planned centrally with collectivist ideals.
The experts rule and the citizens all obey.
A social credit system ensures that the workers do their fair share with the most unpleasant jobs providing a higher number of credits as incentive.
The scientists conduct social engineering experiments and control breeding of plants, animals, and children.
And everyone lives happily ever after.
There is a divide between those who believe that man has a soul and possesses free will And those who believe that man is a tool which should be shaped into whatever form necessary to benefit the greater good of society.
This is the existential debate of every era.
The flames of authoritarian control and tyrannical ideologies which were smothered in the West when the Berlin Wall fell, left embers that have now been rekindled by those who wish to deny the rights, volition, and sovereignty of the individual once again.
Anti-humanistic ideas that propose the same authoritarian methods as Skinner's theories never cease to exist.
They thrive in the shadows where those who see humans as rodents seek new ways to control them
until the opportune moment occurs to represent these ideologies with new names.
You've talked about the need for a technology of behavior.
Yes, well, we certainly do need one.
All the great problems today need a behavioral solution.
How are we going to get people to stop breeding so much, to cut down on the consumption of goods that are running, we're running out of supplies and so on, stop polluting the environment, stop beating each other up personally or internationally and so on.
These are all behavioral problems and they have to be solved by something like a behavioral technology, it seems to me.
Do we have examples of that technology working now?
The upside to the pandemic is in the air.
It's cleaner, there's less pollution because we're flying less, driving less, and industry has slowed to almost a halt.
Greenhouse gas emissions plunged in April by about 17% overall.
In some countries, the drop was more like 40%.
That is great news, and it feels like nature is rebalancing a bit.
There's a bit of a silver lining to the pandemic.
New calculations show the world's greenhouse gas emissions dropped substantially in 2020.
Scientists say the reduction is mainly because people are staying home, traveling less by car and plane.
Emissions are expected to jump back up after the pandemic.
There's no vaccine to protect the world from pollution.
That's why the Canadian government is unveiling new measures aimed at reducing our country's greenhouse gas emissions.
They now wish to lock us down, contain us, Reshape us and reset us.
While they are left in charge of redesigning our world in their image without interruption.
Like cattle, they want to muzzle, brand and neuter us.
They have created a Skinner's box for us, which they intend to keep us trapped in while they conduct their endless experiments.
Lockdowns are the ultimate operant conditioning chamber.
Political will to push drastic change can be hard to come by in normal times.
But this is anything but.
The pandemic has seen millions heed the advice of experts to protect against an invisible threat.
The Canadian public has listened.
We've stayed home.
We physically distance.
We are listening to medical experts and their advice to keep us safe.
Now we need to do the same thing when it comes to climate change.
Since we are already in the box, they proclaim that the same lockdowns used to stop the spread of the virus can be used to flatten the curve on the so-called climate emergency.
All of the ideas put forth for a green recovery by central planners involve utopian fantasies where socially engineered societies continue on this path of restricted behavior.
Scientific advances will allow us, collectively, as humanity...
If you do not believe in science, I hope you believe in observed evidence.
a declaration of a climate emergency.
Mr. Speaker, I think the first and most important point to make
is that this is a declaration based on science.
That's right.
If you do not believe in science, I hope you believe in observed evidence.
We're in the midst of a climate emergency.
So consumption is a fundamental part of the economic system that we now live in.
70% of the American economy is based on consumption.
Not anybody knows that endless growth is the creed of cancer cells.
And the global middle class has the greatest aggregate impact on the planet
in terms of ecological drawdown and in terms of pollution, garbage and greenhouse gases.
And so it becomes very evident that lowering our numbers is a really important way to lower the impact on the Earth's system.
Behind the crisis of a global pandemic, another danger is waiting in the wings.
The climate emergency.
Can anybody still deny that we are facing a dramatic emergency?
That is why today I call on all leaders worldwide to declare a state of climate emergency in their countries until carbon neutrality is reached.
The science is pretty clear that between 3 and 4 degrees centigrade of global heating above pre-industrial levels We go into massive net food deficit, structural famine.
We are very close to a famine disaster in the United States because of the things that air pollution is doing to change the weather.
We have entrained a series of weather changes which now look like we may have a very serious, very large weather change in the United States which of course will hurt our agriculture tremendously.
So we're close to famine in the United States too.
Mountains and rivers green are mountains of silver and gold.
The pandemic was the way into the box.
And if you push the experiment to its logical conclusion, a state of social control and intermittent reinforcement to shape human behavior is the utopian future, which will, of course, be green.
We will put even more money in the pockets of Canadians by increasing the price on pollution by $15 a tonne per year.
Increasing the carbon tax, a key building block of the Liberals' new $15 billion plan to fight climate change.
The ambitious plan would change the way Canadians live and do business.
There is a fatal flaw in the collectivist ideology of those who would like to be the architects of society.
We are not blank slates who operate without consciousness.
We are not mindless pigeons who can be trained to do whatever we are coerced to do.
We are individuals who possess free will and will not be contained in their boxes forever.
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