Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Hackett Classics)

In beyond freedom and dignity Skinner sets the tone in the most rigurous scientific discourse for providing solutions to the global and individual issues that confront us today: overpoulation, violence, war, rebellious youth, among others. He reviews and then attacks the traditional search for answers of the so called literature of freedom and dignity, mainly by calling it unscientific. Is the microbe free to act according to the biologist? Is the heart dignify in pumping blood according to the physiologist? Why then pretend to include such terms in a serious scientific endevour to understand, predict and control behavior? He rules out of the equation feelings and ideas as mere byproducts of observable phenomena that condition us to act (biological endowment and personal history of reinforcement) . If science is to help, first we must create the intellectual environment for it to grow. First by combating the so called soft science terminology of inner, free man, or spontaneous initiative and understand them as a fiction when an assessment of the history of behavior is not possible.Regarding the redaction itself I found it a little tedious to follow... too much information sometimes hazardously presented without the use of subsections make for a hard time figuring some of his ideas out. Nevertheless, the practical implications are obvious and it would be foolish to judge the book by the prose alone.

No matter what I think I know about BF Skinner's theories, each of his works never ceases to amaze me, and I learn more about his thought processes. I find his work more enlightening, more in-depth, intriguing and similar to my way of thinking than his counterparts, Freud or Nietzsche. So, I was engrossed to purchase this work for understanding beyond freedom and dignity in my personal plight of social justice. This book is magnificent and a dynamic buy.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "The people on planet Earth are the only ones who think they have free will". Like other reviewers I am amazed that we live in a cause and effect world yet people still think we are exempt. The only logical explanation is that people are conditioned to acccept these irrational beliefs, yet nobody accepts conditioning as an explanation(Catch-22). Because of this misunderstanding and the fact that many of us are not even exposed to scientific evidence this book is the most important book of our time. To solve problems we have to understand human behavior. This book provides the tools to gain this understanding. Unfortunately it is not a page turner, but everyone needs to read this book to allow humanity the chance to prosper. I know most people want to think the earth is flat, the sun revolves around the earth, and people have free will, but that is only because we have experienced a chaotic illogical education, if we are going to learn by experience why not learn based on evidence.

B. F. Skinner (1909-1990) was a prominent professor of psychology at Harvard (1958-1974) and a founder of Operant and Behavioral Psychology. I revisited his work while researching my paper, "Violence, mental illness and the brain -- A brief history of psychosurgery" for Surgical Neurology International (SNI). Although more than 40 years have elapsed since publication of his book and my study of the subject in college, it deserves a reappraisal since history seems to repeat itself because man forgets, insisting on reinventing the wheel for his fellowman's edification or his own vanity.Besides, Skinner's 1957 book, Verbal Behavior, was reprinted in 1992 and in the last decade has been resurgent in psychological research and applications. And even more revealing, in a 2002 survey Skinner was listed as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century.In his book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), Skinner waged war against the cherished Western concept of individual freedom and the dignity of man. Again and again, he assailed and derided "the literature of freedom and dignity" and the concept of "autonomous man," as enemies of progress. And yet his book was well received and became a best seller, presumably because the subtle use of behavioral controls and regimentation of society appealed to academics, as well as to authoritarian collectivists on the left and law and order "conservatives" on the right, in the wake of the upheaval and disruptive turbulence of the 1960s and the fads for novelty that followed in the 1970s.According to Skinner, operant conditioning plays a larger role in the survival of organisms and evolution than the supposedly innate "fight or flight" reactions of animal or man. Over the centuries, contended Skinner, man has modified his behavior to escape or avoid aversive stimuli, such as pain or injury, which act as negative reinforcements, and in the way man has developed patterns of social organization, but there is no innate, aggressive instinct, as such, leading to fight or flight responses. In operant conditioning, a reward is positive reinforcement, while punishment is the negative reinforcement. Man can be made to behave as society (government) wishes with the proper formulation of social contingencies of reinforcement; thus "it should be possible to design a world in which behavior likely to be punished seldom or never occurs."The environment is all. Juvenile delinquency and alcoholism do not improve by raising the level of responsibility affirmed Skinner, "it is the environment which is responsible for the objectionable behavior, and it is the environment, not some attribute of the individual which must be changed." Moreover, in aggressive or sexual behavior, "what must be changed is not responsibility of autonomous man, but the conditions, environmentally or genetically, of which a person's behavior is a function."Freedom defenders, according to Skinner, should realize that citizens are already under strong societal "controls," and people, including children, get along with others because they are forced to do so, not because of inner goodness, but because they are under the control of social contingencies of reinforcement, "and in many ways [citizens in democratic societies] are more effectively controlled than those in a police state."Freedom then, in Skinner's world of operant psychology, is a deceptive and dangerous illusion. And for him a supposedly permissive government, said to govern least (e.g., laissez faire and the invisible hand of the free market) is a government that "leaves control to other sources." Skinner thus expounded, "a free economy does not mean the absence of economic controls because no economy is free as long as goods and money remain reinforcing." If an unplanned economy and the invisible hand of the free market have produced economic prosperity, political freedom, and advances in science and technology, intimated Skinner, "there is no virtue in an accident as such. The unplanned also goes wrong."As can be deduced by his opinions and logic, Skinner made no quantitative or qualitative distinctions between compulsory, authoritarian government controls and the voluntary interactions of the free market, as if there was social, economic, political, and moral neutrality between the two systems!People are not compassionate because of autonomous man but because of the contingencies of reinforcement from the environment that generate benevolent behavior and "makes [controlled people] wise and compassionate."What is needed is not more religious teachings or invocations to civic duties and responsibilities, but "more 'intentional' control, not less, and this is an important [social] engineering problem." Moreover, "adventitious" contingencies from accidental (non-intentional) reinforcement can support existing behaviors and bring in "superstition" with disastrous consequences for unplanned cultures. Suffice to say, Skinner was terrified by the literature of freedom and dignity and the free, autonomous individual in an unplanned society. And so Skinner was compelled to condemn such literature that threatened the evolution of culture towards a truly utopian society to be created by the new controllers in his own image.Skinner mentioned a few little utopias that were created over the centuries and admitted they invariably failed, but only because the contingencies of reinforcement were not properly planned. And he is careful not to mention the mendacious socialist workers' paradises, the horrendous planned collectivist societies of his own time, the failed totalitarian experiments of Nazi Germany, the gulags of the Soviet Union, the laogai slave labor camps of China, the re-education facilities of Cuba and North Korea, etc., where the new socialist man failed to materialize, but in his stead millions of his fellow citizens perished -- in the killing fields of their own governments.I am not implying Skinner had conscious totalitarian designs, but I am asserting that ideas have consequences and that history is a better guide than good intentions. As C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), who Skinner cited in a different context as a defender of the literature of freedom and dignity, once wrote: "The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice." We can more apropos substitute Skinner's well-equipped operant laboratories for the "well-lighted offices" for the same effect.Skinner's book was a sensation. It had come out at the right time, in an impressionable country, in a receptive academic world. As time passed, the novelty and shock of his ideas abated. Ronald Reagan presided during the 1980s bringing about a new optimism to America. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989. And the world rejoiced. But despite the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991 and the consequent, incredible amount of freedom gained and exercised since then in large parts of the world, Americans, ironically, have lost a considerable amount of freedom. This has been the case, in part, because of the 9-11 tragedy and "the war on terror," but also because of the insatiable growth of government at the expense of political liberty and economic freedom. And many Americans have not only given up liberty for security but also a considerable amount of dignity, succumbing to the positive social reinforcements and allure of government dependency, wasted idleness, entitlements, becoming the new unintended automatons of the 21st century.This review is extracted for Amazon from a much longer illustrated, fully referenced, and scholarly essay published and posted at haciendapublishingdotcom.Dr. Miguel A. Faria is the author of Cuba in Revolution -- Escape from a Lost Paradise (2002) and of numerous articles on political history and neuroscience, including "Stalin's Mysterious Death" (2011), "Stalin, Communists and Fatal Statistics" (2011), the Political Spectrum, Violence, mental illness, and the brain -- A brief history of psychosurgery

Some may find the concepts that Skinner presents in this book to be disturbing or offensive. However, those concepts are correct and scientifically verifiable. The science of behavior is a true natural science based on scientific laws and empirical evidence. It is humorous, although sad, that the criticisms of the book in these reviews commit the very errors he describes in the book—unscientific, mystical ideas long proven to be totally erroneous—which have led to the misunderstanding of behavior and the crises we faced then and still face now.Behavior science has made many advances since this book was written, but I highly recommend it as an introduction to the type of covert verbal behavior repertoire needed to approach behavior from a scientific perspective.