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1. While I appreciate what Dr. Godfrey has to say about Freud and his focus on the individual in opposition to the theories of Darwin and Marx, who focused on biological and economical movements, I’m not quite sure that I agree with his quick dismissal of B.F. Skinner who he claims wanted to turn humans into automatons.

   In his final work, “Beyond Freedom and Dignity,” Skinner promotes the idea that humans are flawed in the ways that they are due to environmental and developmental reasons, i.e. poor upbringing to due dis-functional families and loose moral behaviors and that the “freedom” of the individual “self” and human “dignity” that allows people to determine who and what they are sit at the root of contemporary culture’s ills. While Skinner may have gone a bit too far in suggesting that people can only be made to develop in a manner that benefits society as a whole if they are confined and raised in a regimented environment where a child’s each and every action may be controlled through reward and punishment training, what is it that we have nowadays where each and every thought of a child is allowed and encouraged to emerge according to some post-modern socio-cultural idea of “self” that may determine his/her sexual orientation, race, class, etc. based on what he/she “feels” his/her/they “true self” actually is? Perhaps if Skinner and his ideas would have been given more thoughtful consideration several decades ago we might all be facing a better future. Of course, come to think about it, his ideas along those lines never stood a chance in the face of the growing concept of “you can’t tell me what to do!” during the 60’s and beyond. And the Lord knows I’ve run into plenty of that kind of thinking over the past few decades.

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