The larval societies now controlling the planet can only maintain themselves by the increasing use of coercive and manipulative conditioning methods to shape, direct and control behavior.

B. F. Skinner, the Harvard behaviorist, in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, has presented the case for the Political Conditioners. It can be paraphrased simply "Since human beings, allowed to behave freely, will not act responsibly, they must be psychologically coerced, conditioned to be dutiful, virtuous, reliable, prompt, efficient, happy, law-abiding. Humans must be continually manipulated by rewards and punishments to do the right thing."

There are two aspects of this social conditioning regime which are not stressed by Skinner. To make it work, the government psychologists must have total control over the citizenry and there must be total secrecy and censorship.

In 1961 there came to the Center for Personality Research at Harvard University an enthusiastic Skinnerian who reported on the applications of operant conditioning to patients in a mental hospital. One of the behaviors to be inhibited was hallucinatory talk. Now there are many among us who believe that hallucinations have a functional role in the psyche and would consider the automatic extinguishing of hallucinations a violent restriction of some message that has importance in the emitter reality, even if it is not understood or considered useful to the psychologist's reality. Using the technique of immediate reinforcement, the Skinnerians would instantly produce a cigarette every time the patient made a non-hallucinatory comment and would take the cigarette away every time the patient would hallucinate. The researcher gleefully announced that the rate of hallucinatory comments dropped by a significant level. Even more impressive changes in behavior accompanied the giving or deprivation of food. The Skinnerian glumly complained that hospital rules prevented them from carrying out this experiment to the useful point of starvation. "If we had total control over food intake, we could really shape behavior," said the operant conditioner, who may or may not have heard the soft comment by one staff member that this technique had been used by most of the dictators in world history.

In order to condition human behavior it is necessary to get control of stimulus early in childhood and to maintain this control throughout life. In the psychological utopia, conditioning would be accompanied by continual psychological testing so that special aptitudes and potential trouble-makers are identified early in the game and special conditioning programs set up, tailored to eliminate individual eccentricity.

Political conditioning requires not only control of reward and punishment, but also secrecy.

One dissident, freedom oriented psychologist can totally disrupt a psychological fascism by public exposure. If parents and even children are warned about the method of conditioning they can consciously decide whether to cooperate or to resist, passively or actively. Psychological tests are, for the most part, ineffective, if the subject has been warned about the purpose and construction of the tests. Even the use of drugs in brainwashing can be counteracted by the person who learns about the specific effects of neuro-chemicals.

Psychological conditioning techniques cannot be employed in a democracy where minority groups can campaign against and publicly discuss the techniques being used, and publish the answers to screening tests, where citizens have the right to avoid the conditioners.

Thus the proposals of B. F. Skinner cannot be implemented except in a state where the government has total control of communication.

Without these controls continually reinforcing, continually reminding (e.g., the omnipresent slogans of the police state, the omnipresent advertising directives of the consumer state), people just plain forget what they are trained to do and drift back to their imprints. And to their genetic-robot styles.

Consider the dog who rolls over to get his bone. Will the dog toll over in the absence of the master? This is the nightmare that haunts the aging Mao.

Human behavior is determined by:

When the child gets to school it is too late to teach Hir. If SHe has imprinted, from hir home or peer-group, a dexterous symbolic mind, SHe will learn in spite of the teachers.[1]

A very thin veneer of operant-conditioned behavior creates the flimsy facade of domesticated civilization.

Larval humanity now faces a genetic cross-roads. Some will choose to solidify social conditioning by manipulating the child's environment and thus domesticating the imprint. Maoism.

Others will choose to mutate to a higher level where each person is taught to manage and control Hir own imprinting and conditioning. We can expect that many different social groups will emerge along both of these directions.

We have just considered the genetic, neural and social limitations of conditioning. We shall now consider the liberating and limiting implications of serial re-imprinting.