Behaviorism said human consciousness did not exist, only human behaviors. (Appendix 1) Neoliberal economics says people do not have non-economic life goals, they only make purchases to maximize "utility". In economics, there are no motivations, only money and "consumer sentiment". Even people's mouse clicks and "personal" Facebook pages are nothing more than behaviorist data to be sold to marketers and advertisers, who use it to fuel their vision of the internet as a "global vending machine".
We find ourselves confronting the ludicrous mindset that people are machines; but corporations have personalities. According to Behaviorist Economics (BE) ordinary people are merely driven by stimulus-response. But corporations are not mere "order takers", as classical economic theory has it. They have strategic planning, branding, and celebrity CEOs with mega-personalities. They are more human than people, certainly in the corporate media. This is hardly surprising, since the anti-human resonance of behaviorism and economics has been on public display for fifty years.
B.F. Skinner’s (the most famous and influential behaviorist) framework was ripe for use by the neoclassical economists and their utility analysis. The neoclassicals largely subscribed to Skinner’s pigeon-brained view of Man as a creature that fell almost completely in line with incentives and had no real freedom to choose. They too saw Man as an animal with a series of fixed preferences which provided them with pleasure (utility) and that all our psychologist or economist had to do was understand these incentives to unlock the secrets of Man himself.
And so behaviourism was a perfect accompaniment to the neoclassical research program in which it was adopted under various subheadings. Their utility analyses had proved largely worthless under experimental conditions, so they took over the behaviourist pseudo-empiricist method and began their so-called research. This research – all based on silly behaviourist nonsense in one guise or another – was then adopted in a variety of different ways into the research program as a whole.
Philip Pilkington, Falling for Behaviorism - The Neoclassicals Join a New Cult
There are many examples of BE's destructive presence in our society. On-call scheduling is a demeaning and life-disrupting fraternity prank played on minimum wage workers by sadistic management. Colleges degrees are now rated for "return on investment" (guess which profession wins? Wall St.) Coming soon, direct from China: [https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/10/in-china-your-credit-score-is-now-affected-by-your-political-opinions-and-your-friends-political-opinions/ In China, Your Credit Score Is Now Affected By Your Political Opinions – And Your Friends’ Political Opinions]
Another aspect of BE is the rehabilitation, on computerized steroids, of the management practice known as Taylorism. You find it in the soulless brutality of Amazon warehouses, the monitoring of every keystroke and utterance in corporate service centers.
The working class were divided by nature into groups of weak mules, ordinary drays, and super-strong work horses...Co-operation, Taylor explained, meant that future workers "do what they are told to do promptly and without asking questions or making any suggestions."
- From Appendix 2, Taylorism
Economists mention efficiency as often as a preacher mentions Jesus. To an economist, there is no downside to efficiency. But that is complete bunk, because you have to ask to whom the benefits of efficiency accrue. Over the last forty years, wages have stagnated while efficiency has increased. The benefits have gone to the top 1%. So, to praise efficiency in today's climate is to praise the "speed up", sweatshops, Taylorism, and the organized destruction of middle class society.
And, who better to personify this organized effort than Margaret Thatcher, she of "There is no such thing as society (TINSTAS). There are only individuals and families." If there is a more succinct expression of Taylorism, I have not heard it. Ms. Thatcher is one of the most repulsive ideologues and true believers in the redemptive powers of capitalism in the forty year campaign by the 1% to destroy democracy and replace it with corporate rule. But, TINSTAS rises above the level of mere verbiage. It was, at the time, a contra-factual statement; but it was really a prophecy that has largely been fulfilled today.
Businessmen do not usually pose as prophets and they do not constantly demonstrate the correctness of their predictions…
- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Ms. Arendt never met Ms. Thatcher; but she sure prophesized what Thatcher would say:
Stalin, in a speech in 1930 in which he prepared the physical liquidation of (various dissenters), described them as representatives of "a dying class". This definition…announced, in totalitarian style, the physical destruction of those whose "dying out" had just been prophesied…the liquidation is fitted into a historical process in which man only does or suffers what, according to immutable laws, is bound to happened anyway.
Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
TINSTAS is the true legacy of Ms. Thatcher. She stated a goal of destroying a caring, democratic, middle-class society, and she started the ball rolling. She is such a sociological criminal that even her death was occasion for people to vent their anger at her. Here are three quotes from the Guardian on that occasion:
What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful.
- Russell Brand, "If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't"
Thatcherism failed to destroy the welfare state...But the sense of community evaporated. There turned out to be no such thing as society, at least in the sense we used to understand it. Whether pushing each other off the road, barging past social rivals, beating up rival soccer fans, or idolising wealth as the only measure of virtue, Brits became more unpleasant to be with.
- Hugo Young, "Margaret Thatcher left a dark legacy that has still not disappeared"
She said "there is no such thing as society", and set out to prove it by promoting individual greed and competition for everything. Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. It destroyed the public's power to determine via parliament the services and prices of gas, electricity, telephone. The relative wealth of the UK 1% had been falling steadily for 50 years when Thatcher took power in 1979; since then it has climbed steeply and is almost back to 1918 levels. How dare her apologists and beneficiaries of her legacy refer to trade unions like the NUM as "corrupt" in the face of their bonuses and tax cuts!
- Selma James and Nina López, "Thatcherism has infected and discredited all mainstream parties, depriving us of a chance to turn it down"
As of this writing, bad BE things are speeding up. We are individually and collectively heading to corporate hell in a Chinese-made handbasket. Every plausible human interaction is being computerized, monetized, commodified, and centralized under some "we don't need your steenkeen' regulations" internet corporation like Uber, or AirBnb. It has gotten as far as meals custom-prepared by some underpaid serf:
Sprig sells on speed: From selection to delivery, it’s twenty minutes. The experience is identical to an order from Seamless or GrubHub. A harried courier extracts your meal from a fat insulated bag; you say “thank you,” close the door, and feel bad for a moment about the differences between your lives…
But there’s more to any cafeteria than the serving line, and Sprig’s app offers no photograph of that other part. This is the Amazon move: absolute obfuscation of labor and logistics behind a friendly buy button. The experience for a Sprig customer is super convenient, almost magical; the experience for a chef or courier…? We don’t know. We don’t get to know. We’re just here to press the button.
I feel bad, truly, for Amazon and Sprig and their many peers—SpoonRocket, Postmates, Munchery, and the rest. They build these complicated systems and then they have to hide them, because the way they treat humans is at best mildly depressing and at worst burn-it-down dystopian.
Sprig-type operations drain agency and expertise out of the world. They centralize, aiming to build huge hubs with small spokes; their innermost mechanisms are hidden. They depend on humans behaving as interchangeable units of labor.
Why I stopped ordering from Uber-for-Food Startups
BE and its political proponents have deliberately confused political freedom with economic freedom. What they don't want people to notice is that to destroy government in the name of economic freedom is to destroy political freedom. In the post-war era, there was a real threat to political (but not economic) freedom. The freedoms that were most important to Americans were political. But, beginning with the death of FDR, the forces of economic reaction began their Long March (from much more comfortable surroundings and circumstances than Chairman Mao did) by red-baiting FDRs economic appointees. At one of the HUAC witch-hunt hearings, Harry Dexter White clearly stated what freedoms we are fighting for.
I believe in freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of though, freedom of the press, freedom of criticism, and freedom of movement…I believe in the right and duty of every citizen to work for, to expect, and to obtain an increasing measure of political, economic, and emotional security for all…
I believe in the freedom of choice of one's representatives in government, untrammeled by machine guns, secret police, or a police state. I am opposed to arbitrary and unwarranted use of power or authority from whatever source or against any individual or group. I believe in the government of law, not of men…
- Harry Dexter White, "The American Creed", testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, August 13, 1948.
I hear none of those true freedoms in the propaganda of BE. BE is another evil ideology, every bit as awful as Communism. In fact, BE is nothing but [http://www.zompist.com/libertos.html Communism with oppressed CEOs taking the place of oppressed workers.]
Conclusion
BE is definitely the ideology of the GOP and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Third Way Democrats. Anyone who thinks "business as usual" for the next four will save our democracy - I have a bridge to sell you. To those who think otherwise, speak up now before your voice is commodified and sold.
Appendix 1: Behaviorism
The behaviorists wish to explain all human behavior without recourse to any use of terms referring to mind, consciousness, or their contents or functions….Whether or not there are subjective experiences that are best described in terms such as love and hate, anxiety and intention, such terms should not be necessary in a description of the causal sequences of a person's behavior. No terms referring to anything unobservable to an external observer are to be used…The world, including the experimental subject, is to be treated as a set of sensory objects.
In the early forms of behaviorism, all human behavior, including verbal behavior, is to be explained as being a summation of learned responses to environmental stimuli.
There are obvious problems with behaviorism that fill one with wonder and awe that an entire generation could have come under its spell…(It altogether denies) reference to mental events at all, and then tries to run their own and other people's lives as if their mental events, their pains, pleasures, and even their consciousness are irrelevant because "subjective". However much one may be suspicious of one's mental states, to deny one has mental states at all - to deny the authenticity of one's own experience…is surely not likely to result in an adequate understanding of the full scope of human life and mind.
One particular gap that behaviorism was unable to deal with that can be pinpointed specifically is the inability to explain intentional, anticipatory behavior such as deciding, hoping fearing. If a boy stays away from home one night because he believes, mistaken;y, that he was responsible for an accident for which he in fact was not responsible, and fears punishment, how can we possibly explain this on behaviorist grounds? Neither the mistaken belief nor the fear has any basis in the environment.
- Jeremy Hayward, [http://www.abebooks.com/9780877733683/Shifting-Worlds-Changing-Minds-Where-0877733686/plp Shifting Worlds, Changing Minds]
Appendix 2: Taylorism
Management, (Taylor) argued, had to aim at destroying the solidarity of all functional work groups, skilled or unskilled.
First the most militant workers - the organic leadership - were fired or severely fined for the slightest infraction of the new rules...Finally, differential piece or time rates were introduced to promote competition and to sponsor the emergence of a new pseudo-aristocracy of "first-rate men" working from 200% to 400% above the new norms.[6] And so, out of the old mixture of skilled and unskilled labor, Taylorism helped precipitate the archetypal worker of the future: the machine tender, the semi-skilled operative with the discipline of a robot. Taylor loved to argue that workers should be selected on the same "sensible" basis on which draft animals were discriminatingly chosen for separate tasks. The working class were divided by nature into groups of weak mules, ordinary drays, and super-strong work horses.
Co-operation, Taylor explained, meant that future workers "do what they are told to do promptly and without asking questions or making any suggestions."[8] The inter-dependency of workers - previously expressed through their teamwork of conscious co-operation - would be replaced by a set of detailed task instructions prepared by management to orchestrate the workforce without requiring any initiative from the bottom up. Taylor also advised bosses to reduce the on-the-job socializing of workers through vigilant supervision and frequent rotation. In principle, the only tolerable relationships within a Taylorized plant would be the chains of command subordinating the workers to the will of the management.
https://libcom.org/history/stopwatch-wooden-shoe-scientific-management-industrial-workers-world