Donald Trump and his supporters

In the throes of the Presidential primary races, there is a great deal to discuss with respect to Donald Trump's behavior and that of his followers. Needless to say, there is much by which to be disturbed. Many others have noted the relevant issues that thoughtful individuals ought to have regarding Trump, his popularity, and what the whole circus means for the country, and so I do not have to really get into it here.

However, I was reading Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis (1969) early this morning and came across a wonderful passage that strikes me as relevant. In Chapter 2, "Utopia as an experimental culture," Skinner writes:

The man who insists upon judging a culture in terms of whether or not he likes it is the true immoralist. Just as he refuses to follow rules designed to maximize his own net gain because they conflict with immediate gratification, so he rejects contingencies designed to strengthen the group because they conflict with his "rights as an individual." He sets himself up as a standard of human nature, implying or insisting that the culture which produced him is the only good or natural culture. He wants the world he wants and is unwilling to ask why he wants it. He is so completely the product of his own culture that he fears the influence of any other. He is like the child who said: "I'm glad I don't like broccoli because if I liked it, I'd eat a lot of it, and I hate it."

The connections to many current political hot-button topics are clear. Those that currently stand in the way of social and political progress are as petulant and myopic as the child described above.

Fred Fridays

Beginning today, I will be posting interesting quotations from B.F. Skinner (casually known as Fred) once a week on Fridays. Sometimes these quotes will just be quirky passages from a man who is not recognized for being as funny as he really was. Most of the time, though, I will strive to post poignant, prescient quotes that reflect on our current problems in either psychological science or in society as a whole.

The latest news from NASA indicates that we have yet again broken a global temperature record (January 2016 being the hottest first month of the year in recorded history). The indication continues to be that we humans will do almost nothing about it. This is, of course, related to the explicit denial of any such problem by a huge swath of the population and the politicians it supports. This portion of the population identifies overwhelmingly as politically conservative, a group that often proudly elevates the so-called rights of the individual as being paramount, perhaps even near-sacred. Such a focus may prove disastrous for the globe, as the Anthropocene geological era continues apace.

To wit: Skinner (1979) writes in "The Steep and Thorny Way to a Science of Behavior,"

In the long run, the aggrandizement of the individual jeopardizes the future of the species and the culture. In effect, it infringes the so-called rights of billions of people still to be born, in whose interests only the weakest of sanctions are now maintained. We are beginning to realize the magnitude of the problem of bringing human behavior under the control of a projected future, and we are already suffering from the fact that we have come very late to recognize that mankind will have a future only if it designs a viable way of life.