[-empyre-] AOL All Organisms Living and “Life goes on without me”

[Adam Zaretsky]

Margaretha

Its funny you should ask about my ethics as I call myself out on that
question often. I’ve come to the conclusions that I am torn and lacking,
situational at times and even aetherially amnesic. But, I’m also often over
thinking and I’ve recently been caught making fewer transgenic human babies
than I could… perhaps they put that microchip in my brain while they were
queer bashing me at CMU? I think I will only make 1000 GMO posthuman kin
this life, so I am somewhat of a controlled experiment.

I was raised by a Skinnerian behaviorist father. He did practice a lot of
operant conditioning on me in early childhood. Although I was taught tricks
(mostly for rewards of m&ms or kisses, and I did spend my first 5+ years in
a Skinner box or ‘air crib’, I also learned the radical side of
behaviorism. My father touted two Behavioral Mantras: 1) ‘90% or more of
our behavior is learned, you could have learned to react just the opposite
with similar stimuli” 2) “The range of human behavior is infinite”.

He left out the synthesis part, 1) since the experiments are all devised
with locked doors, we have no information on what it would be like to study
the behavior of animals that are not in jail (Natalie Jerimijenko did try
this in her project Milgram’s Mice
https://itp.nyu.edu/classes/germline-spring2013/files/2013/01/MilgramMiceJerimijenko.pdf
), 2) This philosophy open’s us up to exploring the range of human behavior
beyond our training without bias but also beyond standard social,
legalistic or moral-ethical tropes.

As a critique, I think it is important that Behaviorism in the late 60s
early 70s in NYC was both associated with the conceptual origins of the Me
Generation, self help ego-gratification cults, i.e. Charles Manson styled,
‘selfish’ sciFi ‘help’, for instance EST and Dianetics turning into The
Forum and Scientology. The retraining of self obsession as even more
narcissistic obsession is still very much anthropocentrically alive in the
auto-actualizing ego psychology of US styled, client based surface mind
glossing, talk based counseling. Jonny Lacan and Sid Cixous are not
included. But unless you are a Scientologist, serotonin uptake inhibitors
are de rigueur.

The secret life of behaviorism’s deeper hippy influenced intention was also
to dissuade racists of their inborn superiority. By focusing on the
non-innate and considering nationalist fervor a paltry, cocky,
land-and-soil myth of heroism, there was a tendency to consider the option
of equalizing the global people and societies of earth. Foolish subjects of
propaganda are more changeable than automated inbred hate. Even Skinner
proposed a hate. Behaviorism was meant to be a Cassandra warning science
that did not cut their animals but just studied their movement dance action
for interpreting environmental controls and their nastiest effects.
Although many people were initially drawn to the utopian ideas of
behavioral retraining away from war and ignorance, the studies on
aggression were not just used for constraining the Death Drive.  Military
use of behavior modification spread insecurity against the populace, I mean
the enemy. Sorry, slipped.

Yes, the usual control of riotous revolution is often couched in language
about improving efficiency on the assembly line or the fantastic false
reward economies of excess in lack – see our current proliferation of
skinner boxes as small interactive touch sensitive screens that go boop –
upgrading your status with a boop – boopenizers to keep you in the
conditioned reward state for whatever you happened to have been doing right
- boop - just now. Whatever it is its working… if the wifi is working, then
everything is working.

Adam
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