Skinnerians attempt to "shape" Third Circuit symbolic, manipulative behavior. This can be a futile or dangerously coercive business. Operant conditioning "works" by means of immediate and continual reinforcement. Imprinting requires no reinforcement. As the Psi-Phy Jesuit might say: let me imprint the infant and you can futilely try to condition the child; let me imprint the child and you can futilely try to condition the adolescent; let me imprint the adolescent and you can futilely try to condition the adult.

The imprint requires no repeated reward or punishment. The neural fix is permanent. Only bio-chemical shock can loosen the neuro-umbilical lines. The conditioned association, on the contrary, wanes and disappears with lack of repetition.

And neural imprints are themselves derivative structures compared with genetic templates which determine the form of the neural robot.

Neural imprints are accidental, local targets for the bio-electric forcefields laid down by DNA, which organize RNA to construct the body and the nervous system.

Humanity has evolved to the point where the knowledge of how to control the nervous system is available. Neurologic has developed rudimentary methods for suspending imprints and creating new neural imprints. Although this knowledge is uneasily suppressed, the basic concept that "reality" is created by the individual nervous system is understood by millions of persons born after 1945.

But genetic engineering is much more important than neural engineering. The research of Paul, Stein and Kleinsmith on non-histone proteins which turn-on DNA offer the key to genetic control. And the work of Bruce Niklas at Duke reminds us of the intransigence of chromosomal patterns which determine body structure.[1]

There are two groups of technocrats clamoring to change the behavior of their fellow citizens. Right-wing punitive coercers. And liberal rewarders. The attempts of both groups of bureaucrats are futile because they attempt to re-condition - rather than re-imprint.

Punitive coercion works only as long as the threat remains and thus requires a police state.

The liberal social psychologists believe that they can change behavior by democratic, supportive, egalitarian education methods. Head-start programs. Peace Corps. Behavior-modification. Bussing. Tutoring. Scholarship payments. Insight therapies. Mental health methods.

These liberal approaches fail to effect change and serve only to support the "humanist" welfare bureaucracy.

The experimental psychologists, for whom B. F. Skinner is spokesman, are more intelligent. They believe that they can impose behavior change by means of involuntary operant conditioning. This, however, requires total and continual control of reinforcements-rewards and punishments. The problem is that psychological methods work only when the conditioners are continually present to reinforce. The liberals have to be there constantly doling out welfare payments, scholarships, grants, interpersonal strokes.

The Skinnerian manipulators must be there constantly controlling environmental response.

As soon as the "subjects" are left alone to their own devices they immediately drift back to the magnetism of the imprint (and the structure of the genetic template).

This creates no problem with domesticated middle-class people who have imprinted the docility and fear which provide internal controls for the Second Circuit, the repetitious symbol manipulation of the Third Circuit and the "shame" of the Fourth Circuit. Society's schools carefully imprint children to be stupid so that it is a simple, rote matter to inhibit questioning intelligence. Symbol-stupidity is so pervasive in every larval society that there is almost no chance for a child to be exposed to an open, fast, mobile, factually truthful, electrically circuited mind. The inefficiency of psychological conditioning and the immovable solidity of imprints is seen most clearly in the Fourth Circuit. It is almost impossible to recondition a sexual imprint, to "cure" a homosexual with Social-symbolic rewards or by physical punishment, electric shocks and aversion drugs. Let us inquire of the psychological conditioners how much success they have had in removing sexual fetishes, specialized imprinted lusts. When the Fourth Circuit sexual machinery is wired to a particular external lust stimulus even menopause cannot alter what biochemistry has etched, engraved, stamped into the synaptic linkdge.