No More Gold Stars: Regenerating Capacity to Think for Ourselves

Behaviorism presents a double impediment to this development. It substitutes conditioning for genuine self-management, and it uses an array of rewards and punishments to elicit the desired behavior, most of which have as their subtext the implied threat of nonbelonging. The need to belong to coherent social groups is a core driver of human behavior

The guiding principle for all of this was the activation, development, and nourishment of personal agency, informed by deep caring about and commitment to the effects this agency would have on the lives of other people.

I realized that providing expertise is antithetical to cultivating agency, and I began seeking new ways to engage my client organizations. For example, I stopped offering organizational models and started emphasizing the use of living systems frameworks, which provide the structure for thinking but require participants to supply the content and do

Why did so many people accept (or reject) the things I said without subjecting them to rigorous examination? I was beginning to be seen as a source of solutions and best practices, and this disturbed me deeply. I was contributing to the collective illness, whereby we never learn to think for ourselves, and I knew that something had to change.

My insights about the degenerative effects that a dependency on expertise produces in society have been hard won.

This behaviorist ascendancy launched a process by which we in the United States changed nearly every aspect of how we manage human affairs and, as a result, we became modern. We transformed ourselves from producers to consumers, from citizens to taxpayers, and from self-reliance to a dependence on external, verifiable authority.

Key to the progress of the nation, behaviorists believed, was the conversion of public education from a means for individual self-fulfillment to a system for channeling the energies of children toward societal goals. Rather than adapting the environment to the needs of individuals, behaviorist education would change human nature to better fit its e

Over time, when people are not allowed to make meaningful choices or are given meaningless choices to make, their ability to choose well atrophies, along with their ability to think for themselves and to discern what is best to do in a situation. They may even lose the ability to distinguish for themselves what is true or false.

Unfortunately, aliveness gets lost in the machine metaphor, and life suffers the consequences. If we are to thrive and flourish as a species, and if the planet is to thrive and flourish along with us, we will need a life-affirming, life-generating philosophy that works from the infinite and evolving complexity of a vibrant world.