There’s a passage in Control, John A. Mills history of behavioralism in America, that strikes me as a key to American capitalism as it goes through the autoimmune disorder that is so rapidly destroying the middle class.
Because behavioralism did not have a place for the mind, it was very dependent on experiments on animals, where one could supposedly see everything – such as the rats in the maze work that was so popular in American universities from the 30s until the 70s. It is from work with chimpanzees, according to Mills, that token economics developed into the ultimate control:
“Lindsley also conducted a study with Azrin on the effects of reinforcement on cooperation between children.47 They reported that cooperative behavior could be conditioned and extinguished without any verbal instruction regarding the tasks from the experimenters. Thus their study suggested that cooperation could be learned for the sake of reward, without recourse to
more complex explanat
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads