There have been many suggestions about what makes homo sapiens superior to the other animals cohabiting the planet. I submit that it is our ability to learn many varied and useful behaviors. More than that, it is our ability to learn new behaviors when they are needed that has given us the advantage over all the other animals. While the higher mammals can be trained to do tricks, these new behaviors are not complex, nor are they adaptive the way that human behavior and learning are.

When I use the words learn, train, and even understand, I am talking about aspects of conditioning. A baby human begins life with only a few reflex behaviors beyond breathing. Reflex behaviors include suckling, kicking, reach and grasp, and several others to do with where attention is focused and such. The natural suckling behavior is necessary for the babies survival almost as much as the breathing reflex, but that simple reflex is eventually conditioned to produce language. The reach and grasp reflex gets refined to picking up and holding objects, and with more refinement becomes all the other detailed behaviors we do with our hands, from simply waving to playing the piano. In the same fashion the kick reflex gets refined into standing, walking and running, and eventually into all the various activities we can do with our feet and legs.

But after the basic functionality of a human is achieved the social environment continues to condition our behavior and even our thoughts into those thoughts and behaviors that are required of us by the social structures we live within. Pavlov discovered this conditioning behavior in dogs, and B. F. Skinner refined the concepts of conditioning with reward and punishment, determining in detail how this conditioning is amplified and weakened by different techniques. The societies we live in are from one point of view, simply large complex Skinner Boxes (a Skinner Box is a conditioning machine) with many feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative. But, we don’t just go to school to learn a bunch of facts and get socialized, we also get our thought processes conditioned by the same learning process that sticks the kings and queens of England into our heads as facts. Those simple facts convey more than is apparent in the simple list of names. We are shown the names in a specific and special context, giving them more power than the name of our classmates. Our thinking in the terms of society condition us to think about social things within narrowly confined channels. Deviating from these programmed channels makes an individual a criminal, or a vagabond, or a traitor, or some other form of Other who is not quite human.

Now, most conditioning is useful and positive. Things like walking and talking and using hands to feed the self and others are all good skills, but society conditions us to other behaviors and beliefs that may have some use to the social structure itself, but are detrimental to the individuals who populate that society. One of the major tasks before the Society of Phred is the determination of just which of these concepts and ideas are damaging to the individual and need to be neutralized.