American Awakening by John Kingston

Author:John Kingston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2020-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

SHARE YOUR HIGHS AND LOWS

Behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner believed that everything in life—science, child-rearing, drug addiction—is about control. Free will, he said, is an illusion. Dim the lights just right, spray the perfect perfume, give a well-timed treat, and you can make anyone do anything you want.

It’s a creepy idea, but it made a big splash in the 1960s. In a world where the president could be killed by an unknown gunman, where the most powerful nation on earth could lose major battles to ragtag guerrilla fighters, and where young women were throwing their bras into bonfires in front of the White House, there was something oddly comforting to Skinner’s message. Nothing is random. Nothing is unpredictable.

Soon enough, Skinner was famous for his “operant conditioning chambers,” which were metal boxes he built himself. Every detail was finely tuned: the humidity, the noise level, the air pressure, the temperature. He put pigeons, rats, and, it is rumored, children in them and slowly, meticulously taught them to do things no one thought possible. His rats communicated about food and did tricks on demand. He claimed he could control when babies cried. During World War II, he even successfully demonstrated that his pigeons could guide ballistic missiles.

The US military didn’t trust his pigeon soldiers, and rightfully so, but there was a reason his experiments were so successful. If you control every detail of a creature’s environment, you can make them learn anything you want—as long as you change only one thing at a time.

Imagine you put four hundred healthy rats in four hundred identical chambers and gave them the exact same food at the exact same time in the exact same way, then turned the humidity up to 100 percent. If most of them lost their hair, stopped eating, or stopped exercising in their new muggy homes, you would know their state was most likely due to humidity. It was the only thing that changed. In other words, if you keep everything in the environment the same except for one factor, then all other factors in the environment are meaningless. Unless, of course, if the one factor you change alters the other factors in the environment in ways you didn’t expect.

President Nixon’s “war on drugs” treated America as one of Skinner’s boxes. His administration looked at the statistics—skyrocketing drug-related homicides and hospitalizations—and treated everything as a symptom of only one problem: drug possession. The theory was that if we could take care of the drug problem, the other problems of society would follow suit.

But America isn’t one of Skinner’s boxes. By declaring a war on just one thing, Nixon created an environment that caused circumstances from which we still have not recovered. Nixon’s war on drugs included greatly expanding the size and power of federal drug control agencies and pushing through mandatory sentencing and no-knock drug raids. The number of people incarcerated for drug offenses rose immediately, and this trend has continued for several decades, from 40,900 in 1980 to 452,964 in 2017.

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