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.